Experience: I travelled the world delivering letters to strangers
I have always loved travelling, and have spent most of my adult life either on the move or planning my next adventure. In 2014, I was living in London when my dad, Eric, was diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND). I immediately moved back to my home town of New Plymouth in New Zealand, to help and spend time with him.
When he passed away in October 2022, I wanted to find a way to process my grief, and I was desperate to get back out into the world.
In early 2023, I took off to the Galápagos Islands for a much-needed break. While there, I visited Post Office Bay, on Floreana Island. There's an old whisky barrel there that is used as a postbox. It was first used by sailors in 1793 to send mail back home: they would leave a letter and take any that were addressed to their next port of call to deliver them by hand. It's still used by tourists. People will leave a letter and take one that they are able to hand-deliver to their next destination.
The barrel was full to the brim with postcards waiting for delivery. I took a couple home with me and delivered them with glee: one to a teacher from their pupil, and another from a girl to her boyfriend. The recipients were incredibly grateful, and it felt wonderful to have brought such joy.
Weeks later, I couldn't stop thinking about the letters. I'd already planned to do some more travelling, but then I thought: what if I spent a year delivering more letters from that postbox? I realised I could keep my remote job, and at the same time travel the world delivering post, using air miles and working along the way.
I decided to document my journey on social media, partly to keep a record of my adventures, but also to help raise awareness of MND. I had watched Dad lose his ability to travel and physically communicate, which was devastating, so I wanted to remember him by making meaningful human contact.
In March 2024, I set off for Galápagos. I picked out 55 letters and postcards that covered a large geographic area. I aimed to deliver one a week, covering at least 52 countries and spanning all seven continents, starting in Central America and finishing in Europe.
I avoided using social media to get in touch with people, going purely by address. If they weren't there, I'd ask around locally, then use social media, doing my best to hand-deliver the letter. Sometimes, friends who had joined me for part of the trip could help translate, but I had to rely on Google Translate a lot. Usually, people were initially confused, but that would turn to complete joy as they read their letter.
I was extremely nervous about the first few deliveries. I didn't know how people would react to me knocking on their door unannounced. I'm 52 and very outgoing, but I'm aware that nowadays people are wary of speaking to one other.
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Usually, once they understood what I was doing, they were really warm and welcoming, but there were a few exceptions.
Delivering letter number 50, in Bergen, Norway, I almost got arrested. The lady who answered the door didn't believe my story and mistook my selfie stick for a weapon, so she called the police. I had to show the officers my Instagram journey to prove what I was doing, and we all ended up laughing together.
In Belize, I delivered a love letter to a man, only to find he had broken up with his partner. Weeks later, I got a message to say they were back together.
My favourite delivery was letter eight, in Mexico City, from a daughter to her mother, thanking her for letting her follow her dreams. The mother had been very ill, and her daughter wanted to come home from her travels to look after her, but she insisted her daughter continued with her trip. I'm still in touch with both of them.
When I finished my challenge in March this year, I held a party in London and invited everyone I'd met along the way. People came from all over the world – I was so touched and humbled. I've made friends for life.
Now my challenge is over, I've decided to write a book and help develop a film about my travels, but I'm already starting to get itchy feet. The only problem is finding a way to top my last adventure.
As told to Heather Main
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The Guardian
7 hours ago
- The Guardian
My best friend of 50 years knew me better than anyone. But when she died, no one seemed to take my grief seriously
I don't remember a time in my life when Chrissy wasn't in it. We were born 11 days apart and were both one when our families moved on to the same street in Geelong, a port city an hour south-west of Melbourne. We had a very Australian childhood; summers spent in our bathers, running through sprinklers; swimming in back yard pools; eating sausages in bread on New Year's Eve, when we were allowed to stay up late while our parents drank cask riesling with the neighbours, and we'd lie on the cool evening grass listening to crickets. During those blisteringly hot summer days of our childhood, we lived at the beach, where shark alarms were constant and the waves dangerous. Occasionally, Chrissy would paddle out on her inflatable red and blue raft to the big waves out the back where the serious surfers were. Sometimes, I'd panic when I'd lose sight of her, only to see her come rolling in on a massive wave, perched on top, laughing her head off. She was fearless. But I did lose her, five decades later. When Chrissy died at 51, I discovered a new and terrifying grief: that for a best friend. It was shocking, painful and incredibly lonely. Friends know you differently from family, but where do you sit in the pecking order? Below immediate family, ahead of a cousin, behind a current workmate? Our lives began together and the sheer amount of time spent with each other – the years of conversations and experiences, silly and serious – gave our friendship depth and meaning. Chrissy knew me in a way nobody else ever will. She saw me through experiences no one else ever knew about, not even my family. So why is it so hard to talk about the specific pain of losing a friend? Though we'd spent most of our childhood and early 20s together, Chrissy and I diverged in our mid-20s when I moved cities and, eventually, countries, to America. But despite the distance, our friendship remained strong, rooted in a shared history. We were like branches on an old tree that had grown in and around each other. 'I've got a damned brain lesion,' Chrissy had messaged from Melbourne while I was on the runway at LAX in Los Angeles, about to fly home to New York after a raucous weekend celebrating a friend's birthday. 'It's happened so fast. I have to go straight into hospital to get it removed, so I don't know if it's straightforward and they just get it or if I need follow-up treatment,' she'd written. 'I just wanted to let you know the bad news rollercoaster is still taking rides,' she'd added, referring to my wife, Mika, who'd been successfully treated for breast cancer a few years before. 'But they said it's in a good spot and they can access it, so I'm feeling OK.' I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me as the plane began taxiing down the runway. 'Sorry this is a message,' she'd ended, betraying a deeper anxiety. 'I reckon I'd cry too much if I called you.' Chrissy's initial surgery didn't go well; the surgeons couldn't get to all of the tumour and a leak on her brain left her in intensive care for weeks, with a drain in her skull. Friends sent voice messages and songs that reminded us of her. (Mine were Friday I'm in Love by the Cure, Modern Love by David Bowie and Eye of the Tiger by Survivor – she loved the Rocky movies.) Chrissy was diagnosed with stage 4 glioblastoma, which has a survival time of 12-18 months. When she was discharged from hospital after five horrific brain surgeries, she was given a brief respite before going straight into radiation and chemotherapy. Talking was hard, so we would message and she'd put on a brave face and say she was 'doing as best as I can be'. She made jokes about her 'crazy hair', half-shaved because of the drain in her head. She refused to cut it purely to annoy the people who kept asking why she didn't. The tumour ('the fucking toomer,' she called it, using a Schwarzenegger-Terminator accent, which made us laugh) was aggressive, but she remained optimistic. I flew to Australia to see her, catching a train from our home town to Melbourne where Chrissy lived with her British husband, Kev, and two teenage children. I looked out at the steel-grey skies and low winter sun reflecting off the paddocks, making them a deep golden as troops of kangaroos sat on their hind legs, affronted by the train speeding past. I held my overnight bag to my chest and thought about what I would say to her. Kev met me on the platform while Chrissy waited in the car. When she saw me, she got out slowly, laughing, before the tears came and I held her close to my chest. She felt so fragile, I had to swallow a sob. We went out for Vietnamese food and talked with Chrissy's kids about TikTok videos, the aerial silks classes her daughter was taking, and part-time jobs. I looked round the packed restaurant and wondered how people could sit there, eating, drinking and laughing, enjoying their lives, while my friend was dying. Chrissy is that friend who is embedded in every important memory in your life: she was there through primary school, high school and university – where we did the same degree and lived in each other's pockets. After graduation, when I did what every other wide-eyed Australian has done for generations before me and moved to London on a working holiday (and, yes, I did land in Earl's Court), Chrissy and Kev called in to see me while they backpacked around Europe. When I returned to Australia, Chrissy often took up residence on my old brown velvet couch, and when I moved to New York she made the trip across the Pacific a few times, most memorably for my wedding, where she commandeered the dancefloor until the early hours. But the most vivid memories I have are of early childhood. The slumber parties where we'd stay up watching The Empire Strikes Back in my parents' wood-panelled, brown-carpeted rumpus room, when we would cocoon ourselves in piles of blankets and pillows, waking up to morning cartoons and my mum cooking us bacon on toast with Worcestershire sauce. She was a natural at sport and every game we played felt like it had a grand slam title at stake. Her strength and agility, always so apparent, made it difficult to see her so depleted now. The endless cycles of radiation and chemotherapy she had undertaken in the hope they would extend her life were brutal. The steroids she was given to mitigate the side-effects of the 'chemo bombs' made her ravenous, but she found it hard to eat, and the keto diet the doctors put her on to slow the growth of the tumour made her excruciating headaches worse. She apologised for 'being a burden'. 'I don't want to die,' she said. We'd had intense conversations before – in the early 90s, she was among the few people I had told I was gay – but this one threw me. 'I know,' I said, adding hopefully but pitifully that the treatments 'could still shrink the tumour' and give her more time. We'd go for short walks on Williamstown Beach in Melbourne, where she had liked to swim and take her rescue dog, Polly, for a run. She took me to her favourite bakery – in a former textile factory – where I ordered the sausage roll and custard doughnut. She had the Reuben pastrami sandwich and key lime pie. 'I know you can probably get better ones in New York,' she'd said. 'But I love them.' She tired quickly and needed to lie down. I walked her home the few blocks from where we had eaten lunch; the unsaid hanging in the air between us that she couldn't go anywhere alone because her balance was affected by the tumour and she could fall or, worse, have a seizure. She hated being dependent on anyone. 'This fucking toomer,' she said, trying to smile as we walked slowly along her street in the bright winter sun. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion I never had to question the strength of our bond or what it meant to my life. But when Chrissy became ill, people seemed to either interrogate me about how deep our friendship really was or avoid the situation – I even felt a vibe from some of, 'Why are you making such a meal of this?' Some friendships were damaged. When I told one friend of 20-plus years I was flying home to Australia to see Chrissy as she was dying, he said, 'Jesus, I'm so sorry,' before moving on to tell me about some dramas he was having at work. He never asked me about it again. A colleague spoke about the death of a friend's father. 'He's had to fly home – it's your worst nightmare,' she said after I'd returned to New York from seeing Chrissy for the last time. When I got back to work, my boss never mentioned it and we just carried on as normal, as if my month off had been a jolly holiday. Some people asked about Chrissy once, and you could almost hear the sigh of relief vibrating through subsequent conversations when they could go back to talking about holidays, parties, work. Some friends, at least, were honest. 'I'm sorry. I've wanted to message,' a good friend who'd known Chrissy in our early 20s texted. 'But I didn't know what to say.' I rang a close friend of 15 years to let her know that there was a possibility I might have to fly back to Australia and not be in New York to help her through a medical procedure, suggesting she put a Plan B in place, in case I had to leave quickly. 'Of course you're backing out,' she said, clearly annoyed, which left me speechless. 'Why aren't you there already? She's still alive,' she said, which felt very much like an accusation. 'Why would you wait for the funeral?' When I said goodbye to Chrissy in Melbourne (we'd cried and said we'd 'see each other soon'), I had known I likely wouldn't see her again, but I'd made peace with that decision. I also knew I would go back for her funeral – not just to celebrate her, but for myself as well, and to be among friends and family. But my friend's comments made me doubt myself. What is the appropriate course of action to take when your oldest friend is dying in another country? Is one trip enough? Should I have gone five times? Should I have moved back to Australia? Even if I'd wanted to go and sit by her bedside for a month, there were barriers that stopped me from doing what I wanted to do because when you work on contract as a journalist, a dying friend doesn't merit the involvement of HR. There was also the crushing sense brought on by some of those around me that a dying friend didn't warrant the grief I felt. 'We have socially constructed templates for losing a parent, a child or a life partner, but the lack of social templates in the death of a friend plays a big role in isolating people in their grief,' says Rebecca Sokoll, a New York-based relationship therapist. 'If I tell someone my mother has died, they immediately reflect back their own understanding over a type of suffering that is established. The response to the loss of a friend is not established, and that requires people to listen and to understand, and few people are going to truly know they need to do that.' In hindsight, I think I craved some kind of acknowledgment over what I was losing; that I shouldn't need to explain or justify my grief around a 50-year friendship and how devastating that was. Two days before Chrissy died, I spoke to her on FaceTime. By then, she was mostly asleep but, in a kind and moving gesture, Kev put headphones on her so I could speak to her in private. I told her I loved her; what she and our friendship had meant to me. She frowned slightly and moved her mouth as if to speak, before exhaling deeply and going further into sleep. The memories of our friendship had been ours and now they were mine. I promised her I would remember all the stories for her kids. Kev kissed her hands for me – hands I would know anywhere – and I said goodbye, almost a year to the day since she had been diagnosed. Mika, a teacher, asked for bereavement leave to fly with me to Melbourne, which was denied because Chrissy did not qualify as a direct family member. The New York City Department of Education gives its employees four days off for deaths in the immediate family, plus an extra travel day if the funeral is outside New York. Mika, who had her own special relationship to Chrissy over the 15 years she'd known her, watched online as I gave a eulogy. I still talk to Chrissy (God, she loved a chat!) but the loneliness I've felt since her death has been painful. Her absence has made me question other relationships in my life. Some I once considered strong have fallen by the wayside. Others have been reignited and some have flourished unexpectedly. None of us will escape the devastation of losing a close friend. I can only say, cherish those relationships, nurture them and protect them. I thought Chrissy and I would know each other when we were 80, still talking about music and still eating strawberry doughnuts, but she wasn't afforded the privilege of growing old. A couple of weeks after her funeral, I went for a swim at Ocean Grove, a rugged beach on the Victorian coastline near my parents' house, a haven for surfers, seals and, occasionally, great whites. It was an uncommonly hot November day but the ocean still had a chill, the waves were enormous and the current was strong. I inched in deeper and deeper, sucking in air from the chill, hopping from one foot to the other as the cold of the ocean rode its way up my back. Beside me, a group of teenage girls had run full throttle into the water, screaming and laughing at the shock of the cold. Without fear, they had dived straight under the waves, emerging still laughing and clinging to each other. When did I get so timid? Once – like those girls – I would've gone straight under, brazen and unafraid. On the horizon, a monster set of waves started to rise, rolling in so quickly that I had a second to decide – go over or go under. There was only one course of action. I breathed deeply and went down into the water as low as I could go, fighting against the washing machine-like cycle of the ocean, which thrashed me around for what felt like an eternity. I knew I couldn't resurface because there'd be another wave right behind it before the swell could reset and calm itself ahead of the next rising onslaught. I held on until my lungs felt as if they were about to burst when, finally, the endless churn started to subside, and I could come up for air.
Daily Mail
11 hours ago
- Daily Mail
EXCLUSIVE I'm a female solo traveller and have visited 70 countries - there's one I'll never go back to as it was so unsafe
Solo travel is having a moment - with nearly half of all Brits planning to go it alone in the next year. If you're one of those wanting to step out on your own for your next holiday, we've got you covered, as MailOnline caught up with experienced solo traveller Liz Parry, 50, to get her top tips for first-timers. Liz, who runs PR company Liz Parry PR, has travelled to 70 countries, and explains that she considers herself a 'late starter in terms of solo travel'. She says: 'The first time I really went on my own was a six month trip to South America when I was 30. 'I started with a month in a homestay in Cusco in Peru which was great and really threw me into the culture. Then I did the Inca trail and was meant to continue with a tour group but I quickly realised I didn't like the formula. 'I didn't like being told where to go and how long we had there so I ended up doing it myself. And after that trip, the passion just continued. 'I loved South America, so I started going back every year to a different country and then after about a decade I'd seen all the countries in Central and South America.' Read on to discover where Liz's favourite countries are, where she wouldn't go back to, and her top tips for first-time travellers... The best countries As a huge fan of the continent, it's no surprise that one of Liz's two favourite destinations is Colombia in South America. 'It's really misunderstood and it has this reputation for being dangerous,' she says. 'But it's this really fabulous country with amazing culture.' The solo traveller, who previously lived in Marrakech, also ranks Morocco as one of her favourite destinations. 'It's amazing,' says Liz. 'If you take the time to understand the local culture, then you can have such a rewarding experience.' The countries to avoid Although Liz is no stranger to going off-the-beaten track, and even once spent her birthday sleeping in the 'super creepy' prison on Devil's Island in French Guiana, there's one destination that left her feeling extremely unsafe. She reveals she wouldn't return to Venezuela. 'I think the most memorable place where I felt really fearful was in Caracas in Venezuela. The energy was just very foreboding,' explains Liz. 'I literally got into my hotel room and didn't leave. 'I called in food and ate it in the room. I just did not want to go and explore at all, I was really keen to get out of there. I think I stayed one night and then left.' And there's another country where Liz wouldn't want to get behind the wheel. She says: 'I certainly wouldn't drive again in Lithuania. 'I did a road trip from Estonia and by the time I got to Lithuania, the driving was so insane. It would be pouring with rain and you'd have three cars all overtaking on a blind bend with a bus and a lorry. 'I just turned the car around and went back. I felt emotionally drained by the situation.' The most underrated destinations While Mexico is a popular holiday destination, Liz urges travellers to explore the rest of Central America. 'Below Mexico, you've got Guatemala which is amazing and Panama which has the most fantastic islands. 'It's a joy to take an overland bus there. You can go through all the villages and see everything unfold.' Liz's top tips for first-time travellers Stay in hostels 'If you don't know somewhere very well, it's quite a useful experience to be able to speak to some people staying at a hostel. 'A lot of people that stay in hostels have been there an awfully long time and their recommendations are better than any guidebook.' Opt for a female-only dorm 'Female-only dorms are great for solo women travellers.' Liz likes to stay in Generator Hostels where available. Avoid flights that arrive at awkward times 'Don't take a really cheap flight that arrives at 2am in the morning. 'You'll have to find your way across the city in the darkness. Always pay close attention to the timing of flights.' Don't flash the cash 'Don't walk around with your phone in your hand looking at it constantly.' Do some research She loves Colombia which she describes as really misunderstood. Pictured above is the Rock of Guatape 'Gem up a little bit before you go, have a flick through the guidebooks and get to know a little about the culture and some key phrases.' Avoid tourist hotspots 'Try and stay away from the really touristic hotspots because you're going to pay an awful lot more money there. 'You're not going to have a particularly enriching experience.'
BreakingNews.ie
a day ago
- BreakingNews.ie
Sharlene Mawdsley 'devestated' following sudden death of her dad
Olympic athlete Sharlene Mawdsley has announced the death of her 67-year-old father, Thomas (Tucker) Mawdsley. Mr Mawdsley of Newport in Co Tipperary passed away on Tuesday. Ms Mawdsley (26) posted on social media that she was 'devastated' at the loss of her father. Advertisement 'I have no words right now to truly capture how I feel. I will forever love and miss him so much. £I would like to thank everyone who has been so kind and supportive at this time, from the emergency services to our great neighbours and wider community, and so many friends.' Ms Mawdsley has asked for privacy at this difficult time. Mr Mawdley was predeceased by his father, Tom and his 'adored' brother Billy. A notice on reads that he is survived by his partner Louise, mother Sally, his sons, daughters, grandchildren, sibling, extended family and a wide circle of friends. Mr Mawdsley will lie in repose at Meehan's Funeral Home in Newport today, Friday, from 5.30pm until 7.30pm with removal to the Church of the Most Holy Redeemer, Newport. His requiem mass will take place on Saturday at 11.30am with burial following at Rockvale cemetery in Newport. Mourners are asked to donate to the Irish Heart Foundation in lieu of flowers.
