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THE communist checkpoint on the Mekong River must have looked a forbidding place to the two long-haired travellers in September 1974.
The details are sketchy, viewed through a kaleidoscope of second and third-hand reports, but it appears one of them got spooked and threw or dropped his camera into the swirling brown water.
The soldiers saw it and, suddenly, American Charles Dean, 24, and Neil Sharman, 23, from Sydney, a former reporter for The Australian, were suspected of being spies. They were in big trouble.
The 30-year mystery of what happened next was partly solved late last year when their bodies were found by a US team in Laos, but Sharman's journey ends at 10.30am today when his remains will be put to rest in Sydney's Northern Suburbs Crematorium.
Tall and gregarious, Sharman was working on the Northern Territory News in Darwin in mid-1974 when he wrote to his brother, Ian, that he was leaving "the sun-drenched north for Indonesia, Malaysia, India and all places in between. Maybe...