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Man Mailed Himself Home!


radioman
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Some lateral thought might provide a way to send home those Bangkok beggars claiming they've run out of money.

 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-31700049

 

The man who posted himself to Australia

 

By Jason Caffrey BBC World Service

 

In the mid-1960s, Australian athlete Reg Spiers found himself stranded in London with no money to buy a plane ticket home. Desperate to get back to Australia in time for his daughter's birthday, he decided to post himself in a wooden crate.

"I just got in the thing and went. What was there to be frightened of? I'm not frightened of the dark so I just sat there.

"It's like when I travel now if I go overseas. There's the seat. Sit in it, and go."

Reg Spiers makes it sound very straightforward more than half a century later, but it caused a media storm in Australia at the time.

He explains his attitude like this: "I've come up with this mad scheme to get back to Australia in a box. Who can say it won't work? Let's give it a shot."

Spiers had come to the UK to try to recover from an injury that had interrupted his athletics career. A promising javelin thrower, he had been on course to compete at the Tokyo Olympics in 1964.

But when it became clear he would not make the games, Spiers set his mind to raising enough money to fly back to Australia, and took an airport job to earn some cash.

But his plans changed when his wallet, containing all his savings, was stolen. With a wife and daughter back home, Spiers wanted to get back to Adelaide, but "there was one catch," he explains. "I didn't have any money."

And with his daughter's birthday looming, he was in a hurry.

"I worked in the export cargo section, so I knew about cash-on-delivery with freight. I'd seen animals come through all the time and I thought, 'If they can do it I can do it.'"

 

Continued on the BBC site link above

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Reg has been busted a few times for herion, hashish and cocaine trafficing. First time he got busted in australia for trafficing and jumped bail only to get caught in India for trafficing and escaped then he was given a death sentence in Sri lanka and got off on a prisoner exhange. he is currently facing court in australia again for trafficing in his 70's and trying to get permission for an overseas holiday. Either a hopeless idiot or a very lucky idiot.

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