Memorial to Tanya Burr, killed 15 September 2002

Back Home Safely: Thursday, 12 September 2002

This awful 'candid' photo - wearing my jersey as she'd forgotten to allow for NZ temperatures -  is the last taken of Tanya before her death. I took it on the evening of Thursday, 12 September 2002. She'd have hated it and she certainly didn't volunteer to be its subject! It was taken by me during tea time at her maternal auntie's (Pam) home at Lower Hutt, about four hours after she flew back into New Zealand. 

By this time she had achieved that most essential shower and had also slept a little - having being in transit from Heathrow to Wellington for about 30 hours. Unlike the journey to Europe, she told me she slept all but the first and last 90 minutes of the tedious 12-hour Heathrow-Bangkok leg, and nothing else was evidently memorable about her flight that included 'September 11', 2002-style. Except, of course, for having to declare and hand over the 'restricted item' (despite its having come from a souvenir shop and having the word 'Amsterdam' written on it!!!!) that Customs said she could not bring into the country. She was, needless to say, rather brassed off about that.

After tea we drove home to Palmerston North, and collected Kieran from where he had been staying for the previous several days while I was at a training workshop in Wellington. Everything seemed really good. We were safely home and theoretically all our troubles and anxieties were over. 'Nothing' had gone wrong!

Tanya had had a wonderful time on her trip. She said she had really enjoyed the company of the people she had met on the bus - and that these people had included, she exclaimed with amazement, even "doctors and lawyers!" She showed me her photo of all the passengers on her Contiki trip and the various souvenirs and other bits and pieces she had bought for herself and as gifts for others. She gave me a little ornament of a cow (!), which I put on the top of our gas heater with our other overseas ornaments. They are still there, along with the stacked name cards from our place settings at the wedding. Tanya's was always the one at the top of the three.

She told me about some of the really memorable moments on the trip - stories which she probably intended to write about in her diary, but didn't get the chance. She recalled that by the time they were loading the bus in London before heading for Europe, that they had realised that she was the only Kiwi on the bus besides the driver, who is nicknamed Toothpick. He had packed her suitcase into the luggage compartment and then turned to some Australians who were next in line, and with amusement had remarked something like, this bus was for Kiwis. There would be "no Aussies allowed on this bus!" Tanya had delighted in this.

She mentioned how on the day the others went to see the Vatican (if they had wished as it was optional) she had instead gone shopping in Rome by herself. She caught a train (an underground train?) and thought she had remembered which station she had boarded at - in order to remember where to head back to later. However, this bright idea went astray when she climbed back up the steps from the train - and it was the wrong place! And so she retraced her steps and before long she was safely back where she should have been. She felt very proud of herself for being able to do these things in a foreign city in a country that spoke a foreign (to her) language. I quietly freaked out about the risk involved.

Sights she had seen had intrigued her, and many of these show up in her photos. She had made good use of books from the Rotorua library before the trip, to research where she was going. The places she spoke of included amazement at the underwater steps to a big sinking church in Venice, Napoleon's coffin in Paris and the gargoyles on the Notre Dame Cathedral. She spoke of (and often photographed) the endless old castles they had passed, the names of which she had by then lost track of. She took a photo from the bus of some brown cows grazing in a paddock in the vicinity of Switzerland, and when these were developed, she had been so disappointed that the speed of the bus had blurred the photo. I think the cows might have been wearing bells.

She proudly showed me a calendar she had bought herself in Rome. As I tried to use the computer (after four days away from my emails), she stood beside me delighting in tormenting me by peeling over page after flaming page of the calendar - all of which showed assorted cats amidst famous ancient Italian buildings. I remember thinking 'will this calendar never end', and also how typical the choice of calendar was for her.

She delighted in describing a run-in she'd had with staff at a McDonalds in Paris just before they headed back to England. Evidently the staff had taken so long to produce her fish burger that she had decided to become assertive and demand her money back. At first the French girl at the counter had claimed not to understand what she was saying, which angered Tanya even more! Finally they got the message when she really flipped her lid! Her burger suddenly appeared - along with a second free burger - and a very amused and surprised Tanya felt rather pleased with herself. 

She added that they obviously could understand English well enough to get the message, despite their initial denials. Given time she might have learned that some people in the world really don't understand English - although I guess most do understand angry facial expressions and loud voices.

Souvenirs Tanya bought on the trip included three little Eiffel Tower key rings from Paris. When I returned her car keys to her during the Thursday evening, she immediately put one of them onto her keys. Four days later, when the police were trying to find her keys in the grass at Turangi, I told them about the key ring and that presumably gave them something extra to look for - or at least confirmed that they had the right ones.

Below: The combined Integra and Corona car keys as they presently are (mostly to avoid getting zapped for forgetting my driver's licence when playing musical cars). The black-topped Integra key is a replacement in the attempt to 'get rid of' things the killer soiled, but I chose to use the Eiffel Tower key ring as Tanya had only just put it there and its presence therefore means a lot to me.

(Continued...)