The camaraderie is strong among these men. The 11 still alive are all in Wellington this weekend with invited Australian guests, former test offspinner Ashley Mallett and a couple of greats from the same era as the New Zealand men, Alan Davidson and Neil Harvey.
Four of the team have died - Noel McGregor, Murray Chapple, Dick Motz and Zin Harris, father of former international Chris.
The memories will flow over those days half a century ago.
The tour, which took in a handful of games in Australia, began on October 12 in Perth and the last game began on March 9 against New South Wales. They played 27 games, captain John Reid playing the most at 20 games.
The story of the tests was a 30-run loss in the first match at Durban, followed by a draw at Johannesburg, a 72-run win at Cape Town, and an innings and 51-run loss at Johannesburg before, to unbridled delight, the series was squared with a 40-run win at Port Elizabeth.
Then as now, South Africa were a tough outfit, loaded with top-class players.
The bulk of the bowling was in the hands of four men. Legspinner Jack Alabaster took 22 wickets at 28 runs apiece; Frank Cameron 20 wickets at 24, Motz 19 at 26.5 and Reid 11 at 19.7, with perhaps New Zealand's all-time quickest bowler, Gary Bartlett, providing the shock value.
Reid struck 546 runs at 60.66. McGregor, Harris, Graham Dowling and Paul Barton all scored more than 230 runs in the series, but none reached 300.
Harris and Barton hit their only test hundreds on that tour.
They were a team of players who all chipped in at various important times but Reid was the cornerstone of the side.
On that tour, he was a colossus.
A strong personality who led from the front, Reid scored 2083 first-class runs on the tour at 61.26, with seven hundreds. Next best was Dowling's 929 at 32.03.
Reid's stature was immense and he was in the form of his life.
An aggressive middle order batsman, feisty medium pacer, fine fielder, Reid would have been a terrific one-day player.
He is 83, the oldest of the men at the reunion, and still well capable of making a forceful point with a jab of the finger.
One of the curiosities of that tour is that Bert Sutcliffe, perhaps New Zealand's finest batsman, was unavailable for the trip.
He also missed that maiden win over the West Indies and had retired before the success in Christchurch in 1968, so never played in a winning New Zealand team.
Not that there were many in those years as New Zealand strove to get a foothold and be competitive against the leading nations.
Seven years later, New Zealand won three tests in the space of 10 - two of them overseas - and a corner had been turned.
Acknowledgment is due to those who set the ball rolling on foreign soil.
The survivors? Reid, Dowling, Barton, John Guy, John Sparling, Bryan Yuile, Artie Dick, John Ward, Bartlett, Cameron, Alabaster.
