After I had spent the guts of a year travelling around Australia in 2005, I made my way over to sunny Asia so that I could finish off my travels with a bang.

Little India in Singapore was my first stop, and I loved it. It is one of the most exuberant, colourful and interesting places I’ve ever seen. It really is the perfect name for somewhere that is a complete replica of India.

Upon finding a hostel called, The Rose Inn, I settled myself into yet another strange room and busied myself unpacking. My roommate walked in then, and she was a bit of a surprise for me. She was a woman in her sixties and she was in the bunk bed below me.  I hadn’t had a face to face conversation with a middle- aged woman for a year and I was dying for a motherly chat , so I asked her to head to the nearest bar with me for a pint.

She was a lovely Scottish lady called Angela and we ended up staying in a dusty warm bar for the rest of the day.  While drinking our cool and welcome Tiger Beers, Angela told me one of the most powerful stories I had ever heard at that stage of my life and has left a lasting impression on me. It’s a story I have to tell!

Mary told me how she had met her husband at the age of sixteen. They fell in love within days of meeting each other and got married at the age of eighteen. Throughout their engagement and first few years of marriage, Angela and her husband Brian, always said to each other that they would love to travel around the world and discover the sights and sounds that were completely alien to them, apart from the dog-eared pictures of far-off lands Brian had kept since childhood.

After the birth of their first child, the couple said they would leave the travelling for a year or two when they would be able head off with the baby. After the birth of their second child, they put the trip off for another year. Their third, Forth, fifth, sixth and seventh children put a stop to the whole idea for a long long time. One day though, their eldest girl asked them if they were going to do the trip at all now that all their kids were adults and self-reliant. That got them thinking all over again, said Angela.

The middle aged couple set off just two months previous to Mary meeting me in the Rose Inn, and were on their way to realise their dream in the guise of two year round the world cruise.

The first stop on their travels was Delhi in India.  They spent two days there. The next afternoon, Brian and Angela were at the train station looking forward to their next adventure.  Brian stepped onto the tracks so that he could see where their late train had disappeared to when an oncoming train mowed him down where he stood and killed him.

As she was relating this story to me, Mary still spoke about her husband in the present tense. She said she went back to Scotland with Brian’s corpse and arranged the funeral. She said she went through all the motions that a recent widow would go through until one day when she’d had enough. Mary bought another two year cruise one month before I met her and at that time, she had every intention of fulfilling her travelling dream despite all her heartache.

For me, having listened to hundreds of stories from hundreds of strangers in my year of travels, Mary’s story was the most emotive and significant of them all.