Regis Crolla grew up in Amsterdam. After finishing high school, he had worked in a bar for a while. Then, not knowing if he wanted to go to university, much less what he would want to study there, he started to travel.
Taking to the road like a fish to water, Regis visited Thailand and stayed there for three weeks. After that he travelled around Asia with a friend and ended up in Cambodia doing voluntary work at a small orphanage. He loved travelling and meeting new people, but you needed money to do it, so he was soon forced to return to Amsterdam, picking up his old job as a barman and also working as a waiter in a restaurant.
Regis had always had a feeling for business. At the age of seven, having been refused a dog of his own, he started a dog-walking service; by the time he started high school he had bought a few boats and rented them out to tourists.
When he was a child, his big passion had been animals—rabbits and rats, but especially horses. He’d taken to horses after seeing horseriding contests on television, instinctively understanding what the riders were doing and what the horses were meant to do. After he took up riding he became very good at it, entering contests and winning a few medals. As with everything in his life, he became very passionate about horses and during those years he could be found at the riding school three times a week. But girls changed all that—when he was sixteen he discovered them, and they soon took over from the horses. He stopped riding almost overnight.
Now ready to start a course at university in Amsterdam, Regis decided to take one last trip before the term started. His mum had left with a friend for Bali the day before and his sister had left to spend her holidays in the south of France. His trips to Asia the year before had left a lasting impression, so he decided to follow his mother to Bali. He was able to get a business class seat on MH17 just a day after his mum left.
As he waited to board the plane, Regis sent a WhatsApp message to his mother: ‘Boarding soon. See you at the beach.’ After boarding he took photos of the aisle in the plane and posted them on his Facebook page. His mother sent him a message, telling him that she had made it safely to her hotel room, but she never got an answer back.
Benoit Chardome had just married and now he was heading back home to Bali. Chardome had been born in Belgium, but he lived in New Zealand for more than ten years before moving to Bali six years ago. He was a popular former Auckland and Queenstown restaurateur: a maître d’ at the well-known Parnell restaurant Iguacu for two years before acquiring two Queenstown eateries, the Pasta Pasta Cucina and Bathhouse restaurants.
Once known around town as ‘Bathhouse Ben’, Chardome had mentored a lot of staff now working in Queenstown, giving them their first jobs in the industry. He was sociable and good-natured, perfect assets in the hospitality industry. The enterprising 51-year-old had created his own holiday centre on Bali and was working on a community development program there for disadvantaged youths.
He was actually in the middle of his honeymoon when he boarded MH17. Because the two men could not officially marry in Malaysia, Chardome had taken his Malaysian partner, Puput, to his home country of Belgium to tie the knot in Antwerp. The couple had arrived in June and were supposed to spend their honeymoon right after the marriage travelling Europe, but Benoit had been summoned back to Bali to attend to some urgent business issues. Puput had wanted to visit friends in Switzerland and it was Benoit’s aim to return to Europe to rejoin his husband after he had sorted things out in Bali.
The couple had brought their young friend, 24-year-old Wayan Sujana, with them to Belgium to be present at the wedding and he was now returning home, accompanying Benoit on MH17. Wayan was from a little village called Permuteran in the north of Bali. His family was poor; his father was a salt farmer and had barely been able to feed his children. Wayan was now earning sufficient money to be able to help his family financially, in fact the whole village was profiting from the young man’s success.
A true self-made man coming from the humblest of economic circumstances, Wayan had become the backbone and future hope of his family. But they had known since he was very young that he would make something of himself; he had been a scholar and entrepreneur at an early age. At just ten years old, he had persuaded tourists to sleep in his parents’ house so as to experience fully the authentic Balinese way of life. The tourists had paid just a few dollars a night, but for his family it represented a substantial income.
Wayan was talented and spoke excellent English. The young Balinese had visited Paris, Luxemburg and the Netherlands while he was in Europe and he could have stayed to pursue a career in any of those cities or countries, but he wanted to get back to Bali, to his family. He was paying for his brother and sister’s studies and the people he loved and cared about were on Bali. ‘It’s all about family,’ he told his friend Benoit.
On 1 June, Paul Guard had dropped his parents at Brisbane airport for the start of their seven-week European holiday. Roger, sixty-seven, was head of pathology at Toowoomba hospital, west of Brisbane. Jill, sixty-two, was a retired GP who volunteered for Meals on Wheels and helped Sudanese refugees settle into Toowoomba. They were devoted parents, had been married for forty-two years and had raised three children.
From the outset Jill knew that she would dearly miss their two grandchildren, two-year-old Kai and ten-month-old Ella. Thanks to the internet she had the possibility of keeping up to date with photos and videos. Ella would be walking soon and, if she did, Jill knew that she would not have to miss out—their proud daughter would send the video.
Roger had completed forty years of service as a Queensland Health pathologist. Away from work, he was an avid reader and interested in knowing how the world worked; fascinated by the endless complexity of nature, he was a scientist to the core. He was also a bit of a collector: he possessed a collection of National Geographic magazines that included every article printed since 1888, and he had stuck his fair share of stamps into albums and amassed an extensive butterfly collection. He even collected golf balls and was a keen bird watcher. Keeping lists of trucks he saw when driving across Australia was one of his strangest assemblages, a habit that some thought was a little eccentric. He was also passionate about running: as president of the Toowoomba Road Runners, he was involved in organising the Toowoomba marathon every year.
Jill had been a dedicated doctor who had worked in general practice for many years. She worked for most of her professional life at the Family Planning Clinic in Toowoomba, specialising in women’s health. She had also committed herself to a wide range of worthy causes. As a piano and cello player in many local community music groups, she had encouraged her three children to take up an instrument.
The couple had experienced a wonderful holiday. First, they had visited relatives in Devon and then gone on a long trip travelling around Ireland and the UK. To top it all off, they had headed for Budapest, where they met up with Jill’s sister, Liz, and her husband, Malcolm, who were fellow Australians on holiday. The four of them had booked a tour from Budapest to Amsterdam, where Jill and Roger boarded MH17. Liz and Malcolm planned to stay on in Europe and extend their holiday.
When the four of them had separated at Amsterdam on 17 July, Jill promised her sister that they would catch up after all of them had come home.