Wild ride lives on in our psyche

The first Contiki bus tour took place in a 12-seater van, and while it was a fun ride, it wasn't always the most reliable. Photo / Supplied

The next time I'm editorialising about the binge-drinking culture of our youth, I'll try to remember the polar bears.

My first tangle with a polar bear came at a sparsely populated camping ground in Moscow some time in 1992. It's the name of a very dangerous drink - mix cheap Russian vodka with even cheaper Russian champagne and you can have only one result: Disaster.

I was that disaster.

My tent buddy on that Contiki tour of Russia and Scandinavia was a Wellington lad by the name of Dave Chung, who to this day tells the story to his children. He doesn't seem to blame the polar bears.

"You woke up with cuts and scratches to your face and didn't know how you'd got them," Chung, now a Nelsonian, recalled this week.

"The boys told me you'd got yourself caught in a swing chair and it was swinging back and forth, bashing your face on the ground.

"The next morning I had to tell you to have a shower. You proceeded to have a shower with all your clothes on. Within an hour of sobering up, you wondered why you had a bag full of wet clothes."

It's one of the more minor tales of misbehaviour on a Contiki tour and company founder John Anderson has heard them all.

Anderson, 71, has been reminiscing a lot lately. It's an occupational hazard when you've spent three years researching a book that means so much - charting the start-up and rise of one of Australasia's best known tourism companies.

Contiki has taken two million 18-35-year-olds on coach tours of the world, predominantly Europe. It has introduced an estimated 20,000 people to the person they would eventually marry - including Anderson and his wife Ali (1969) and high-profile personalities like TV presenters Simon Dallow and Alison Mau, who met at a Contiki campground in Rome.

It started in 1962 when Anderson hit England with £25 to his name. He desperately wanted to tour Europe and decided the only way it was going to happen was if others paid for his trip. So he bought a 12-seater van on credit, sold 11 seats at £115 a throw and off he went.

Twelve weeks and plenty of problems later, he was back in London and had a viable business to build.

By the late 1980s Anderson had grown his empire to 700 staff, 160 coaches and had tours running in dozens of countries. But a move into building and operating hotels, and the sharemarket crash of 1987 when Anderson had leveraged himself to the hilt, meant he was forced to sell out to the Cayman Islands-based Trafalgar group in 1989. He was left with nothing, not even his house, and leaves none of it out of the book.

"It was the most tragic thing ever," Anderson said. "I walked up the driveway with my wife and four kids with absolutely nothing."

He has rebuilt some of his fortune on the celebrity speaking circuit and he's also about to launch a new tourism business - tours of South America for the over 45s. He hopes his former Contiki clients will remember him fondly. They probably will, as many have written testimonials recalling how Contiki changed their lives.

As one passenger writes in the book: "My husband of 29 years and I met on tour in 1979. I was engaged to be married to another man, but was taking the trip as a last fling with my best friend. Upon introducing ourselves to the rest of the group, my friend told everyone I was engaged to her brother and she was my chaperone. That was a challenge one man couldn't resist and I couldn't resist him. The rest is history."

Anderson is touched. "It's affected so many people. It was the first time they'd had freedom, total anonymity. It's experiences they will never forget.

"It gave young people an opportunity to see parts of the world they hadn't seen before in company with people their own age."

He's written the book mainly as a business resource for those in the small-to-medium enterprise field. "It's got all of my stuff-ups, all of my court cases. Entrepreneurs never look back; they always look forward." There's even an online test for those who read it and want to make sure they've learnt every lesson possible.

But there is little doubt this is a publication that will appeal first to anyone who has done a Contiki trip. Contiki has a brand awareness in Australia of 92 per cent with the public. This is the story of the man who started it.

"I loved the company to bits and I still miss it terribly. I still wave at every Contiki bus that goes past me."

As a former passenger, I'm not quite that smitten. But there's no doubt it had an impact. I met Dave Chung on the bus, and he's still a great friend. I attended his wedding.

And I'd like to think I learned how not to treat my friends. In 1992 I didn't know how to put the tent up, but claimed the credit; I held the bus up by losing a key to a hotel room in Minsk and soldiers detained us for hours; I drank more in three weeks than some people will in their lives.

As Chung said this week: "You were diabolical - but very loveable at the same time."

Thank you, Mr Anderson.