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One People, One Planet: A Close Brush with a Global Hitch-hiker

© Bernd Wechner

A few years ago now a beautiful friend in Lausanne referred me to a book by a Frenchman who had hitch-hiked around the world in the 1960s/70s. It was called "La Terre N'est Qu'un Seul Pays" and the man was André Brugiroux. I find reading French a little arduous so I kept my eyes open for an English translation. It turned up on-line one day and not long after joined my library. There it sat for another year, the victim of shuffled priorities until this January past when I set off to Tasmania. As reading material I took along Brugiroux's English text "One People, One Planet - The Adventures of a World Citizen".

A few weeks later I found myself lying on the grass at a Spiritual Unity of the Tribes Gathering in Tasmania during one of the very few sunny spells we had reading the last chapters of Brugiroux. During the days of rain that preceded I'd won a mysterious new neighbour who now appeared from her tent to enjoy the same rays of sun. Brooke had set up tent beside me in the rain, and because of the rain neither of us had spent much time around our tents, preferring either to be cocooned inside of our respective tents or elsewhere under cover.

She noticed my reading and asked what. I showed her the book, and with a spark of recognition in her eye she tells me this man was just in Launceston (not far from where we were in Tasmania). No, I couldn't believe that, it must be a simple mistake, a similar name. After all, this was a Frenchman, who'd written a widely unheard of book in 1975 about his travels in '60s how could he possibly be in Tasmania just now? But no, Brooke insisted, he was Bahai (Brugiroux was Bahai), had that name, resembled the man pictured in this book (allowing for the passage of decades) and was touring those few parts of the world he missed in his youth lecturing about the Bahai religion.

I was amazed, and back in Hobart set out to trace the guy. Surely enough he was just in Launceston, in Hobart too, mere days ago, lecturing on his travels and the Bahai religion, but had just flown to New Zealand! A near miss if ever I'd seen one!

So it is, that in lieu of an interview with Brugiroux, I can only regale you with the tale of a near miss and an account of the man's most remarkable journeys, a most remarkable life, as I came to know it from his book "One People, One Planet".