When Griffith woman Carolyn Flack began to write to Melitus Perera in Sri Lanka in 1965, she never imagined they would still be writing to one another 51 years later.

Beginning as part of a Girl Guides project, the duo continued their dedicated correspondence for more than half a century.

However, they had never actually met until August when Mrs Flack travelled to Sri Lanka to see Mr Perera.

“I thought what have I got left to tick off my bucket list, and I said ‘I’ve never visited my pen friend,” she said.

Within two weeks, Mrs Flack and her daughter Christine Dawson were on their way.

“It was just like seeing someone you haven’t seen for a while because we knew so much about each other,” she said.

“I rang him before we started to drive to Kurunegala where he lived and he said ‘are you really coming, or is this a dream? I’m so excited,’ he said, and if he said it once he said it a dozen times.”

The duo were joined by the Sri Lankan post mistress who used to frank Mr Perera’s letters and who, with her family, had travelled six hours over windy roads to be a part of the meeting of the two pen pals.

A born storyteller, it was easy to see how Mrs Flack managed to sustain the long distance friendship, as she described the years of their friendship from the terror for her pen-pals safety following the Boxing Day tsunami to sharing the joy of the birth of her daughter. “He lost everything when the tsunami hit, he was working at a timber corporation and they lost everything,” she said. “When we were there he kept saying I cannot believe that this little tiny baby’ and he showed a baby photo of Christine when she was six months old ‘has turned into this beautiful girl who looks so much like her mother’.”

Mrs Flack said she could barely put into words the joy she had felt through the letters over the years. “The happiness and the joys and the pleasure that I had just to get a letter, to be waiting at the letterbox for the post to come I used to wait every day to see whether I had a letter,” she said.  “I feel sorry for the young kids of today because they don’t have the advantage of getting a letter and what they miss out on.”