Adventurous GrownUps – Margaret

Picture this: you're a dairy farmer originally born in England but come out to New Zealand as a ten pound Pom. For years and years, you longed to travel, but were tied to the farm. Back then no one travelled to far flung places like they do now. What holidays there were, were brief and spent round the South Island, not far from the farm.

Time passes.

Your eldest daughter grows up and starts travelling to the places you'd always wanted to go to. Suddenly everything clicks into place and you realise it's all possible, that now at 61, you can finally go and do your big O.E.

Meet Margaret. This is her story. Now 70 years young, in the last 10 years she has backpacked around the world. She began her O.E by camping around the Australian back country for three months. The next leg began a year later in Singapore. After catching a bus up to Kuala Lumpur, she then went on to the Cameron Highlands. She made friends at the backpackers there with a young Australian woman and a German man and together they travelled to the Perhentian islands close to the Thai border.

"The water was warm and we swam with the turtles and had an amazing time. We just had an absolute ball there. There was no one pushing you, no TV, no pressure. It was incredible," she recalls.

"From there, I went to Istanbul via London combining three tours through Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Egypt. That was a fantastic trip. It was very, very hot. The heat in Jordan was up to 50 degrees. Damascus, Hamas, I went to all the places that are now a war zone. I was so lucky. They will never be the same. The whole area is so rich in Roman history, the desert and the wadi's were another world. We stayed in the wadi that Lawrence of Arabia was said to have stayed in. Actually doing it and seeing it was absolutely amazing."

After returning to London, Margaret joined the Busabout trip through Europe where you can get on and off wherever you wanted and they'd arrange the backpackers for you.

"It was a fantastic trip because it was like travelling with a huge family. Lots of different people were on the trip and as a few got off the bus to spend say a week in Croatia, others would rejoin the group. I never, ever got on the bus without knowing someone."

While she was in Europe, she camped in Morocco and went paragliding in the Austrian Alps. Then Margaret went down to South America to climb the Inca Trail before being invited to join a group of family and friends in biking down the Death Road. She and a Canadian guy hiked into the Colca Canyon on little more than a goat track with the sun blazing 50 degrees overhead – that was hard, she remembers. After that, she reluctantly returned to New Zealand seven and a half months later as "I'd promised the kids to come back home".

Other journeys followed. Margaret went on to trace the Ho Chi Minh trail with an American ex-vet on the back of a motorbike, went to South Africa and Botswana to do volunteer conservation work and then on an eight-week camping safari from Uganda to Capetown including hiking into see the Gorillas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Now she has India and Nepal in her sights and quite fancies the prospect of taking the railway from Shanghai through to Lhasa in Tibet – with her backpack!

She says she's not sure who she'll go with this time round, but if it turns out that she's on her own, she won't be daunted because as she says "It's surprising who you meet."