[gary]

In 1985 I had begun a journey starting in China, had made my way through
Asia and the sub-continent and in April of 1986 found myself in Rome.

I had begun making inquiries about a tourist visa to the Soviet Union when
I dropped into the poste restante at the American Express office to see
whether I might have any mail waiting for me.

There was a letter from an old university buddy which in short said
"stop wandering around the world and come back to Sydney where we
have a new job opportunity for you".

So I cancelled plans to go to the Soviet Union and flew to Sydney.

It was a fortuitous decision as a couple of weeks later the Chernobyl
meltdown occurred at the very time I planned to be in that part of the
world.

We all watched the news reports as the radiation cloud blew over the
eastern Soviet Union and Europe.

Nine years later I was in Hiroshima in Japan and I had arranged to meet the same
colleague in Kawasaki one evening where we needed to attend some
engineering meetings.

I caught the shinkansen up and passed through the city of Kobe in
the late afternoon.

The hotel in Kawasaki in which we stayed was quite tall and during the night
everyone awoke to it swaying and shaking.

Turning on the TV in the morning, the news showed the city of Kobe in
flaming ruins and the elevated shinkansen line I had travelled on only a few
hours earlier had collapsed due to a 6.9 magnitude earthquake.

So it was the second disaster I had narrowly missed because I was
scheduled to meet this same friend somewhere.