Blind Fate

"She really wanted to travel and go abroad, and so she found a program where she could do the exact same thing she was doing in Ottawa but in New Zealand ... just to live abroad for a while.
"Both of them are very outdoorsy people. They've travelled a lot together, and they really like doing adventuring vacations like that.
"She was very, very excited. She was planning this trip and adventure for a very long time. And she was just so optimistic and looking forward to it. It was really her dream to work abroad and be abroad.
"She was just so full of energy and excited and just optimistic about the whole thing. Her general personality was just so warm and enlightening and everything is seen in a positive twist in her eyes. She's just so happy all the time.
"[And Connor Hayes is] a very sweet, genuine, caring person. They seem really happy together."
Tamara Sagadore, Chicago

Police in New Zealand are searching for two missing Canadians travelling in the South Island. Connor Hayes, 25, and Joanna Lam, 24, were last seen at Fox Glacier on the afternoon of Sept. 10. Photo: Handout

Connor Hayes, 25, living in Ottawa, was planning to move out west, possibly to Manitoba, to look for work. His long-time girlfriend, Joanna Lam, thought to take advantage of his absence until they might be able to re-unite, to do some travelling herself. She was a medical imaging specialist at Ottawa Hospital's Civic campus. Connor Hayes was employed but planned to work elsewhere for awhile. And this is what Joanna Lam planned to do herself.

She had arranged to work for six months in New Zealand on a work-abroad program. The two decided to launch themselves into the near future to spend several weeks first in South America, and then travelling around New Zealand, before she was scheduled to begin her new job. Joanna Lam never did appear at her accommodation in Nelson, N.Z. She also failed to appear for her first day of work at a local hospital. This, according to Joanna Calder, director at the health recruiting company involved with her New Zealand placement.

It is feared the two young people met an untimely end. No trace of their possible whereabouts has yet been found. But they had rented a camper van, and in it had been travelling around the country. That camper van, or part of it, was found in a remote location in "rugged country" where cellphones could not transmit or receive. It appears, according to Barbara Dunn, a spokeswoman for the New Zealand police that the vehicle had crashed off a rural road where the area had experienced flooding and road damage after heavy rains.

The rear wheels and chassis of the vehicle were found 80 metres down a bluff close by the Haast River on the west side of South Island. Police were attempting to determine by visual clues whether the two travellers had been in the van when it left the road to plunge down the cliff, ending their plans and their future together.