Bad hair day turns into quest

ILLAWARRA MERCURY

MULLET QUEST: Simon Varwell in a photo from his website. Mr Varwell travels the world visiting places called Mullet.

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As fashion crimes go, the mullet ranks up there with acid-wash jeans, multi-coloured polar fleece jumpers and wearing socks with sandals.

Generations of Argentine soccer players may have thought they looked cool, but most other people would agree the mullet should have died out with the 1980s.

For Scotsman Simon Varwell, however, the search for the elusive mullet has turned into a seven-year odyssey that has cost him thousands of pounds and probably gained him more than a few strange looks.

While travelling through Eastern Europe in 2001, a friend began counting the number of mullets the pair spotted on their journey.

A few weeks later, Mr Varwell ran an Internet search on mullets, and to his surprise discovered a small Albanian village named Mullet.

He was hooked, and so launched an ambitious plan to visit every place on the globe with the word mullet in its name.

After visiting Albania (where he got his mullets mixed up and went to the wrong village), Mr Varwell travelled to Mullets in England, then similarly named places in Ireland, Canada and Australia. Now his quest is bringing the university consultant to New Zealand.

There are three places with Mullet in their name in the Auckland region, a Mullet Rd in Southland and a Mullet Creek about 16km from the base of Farewell Spit in Golden Bay.

This is where Mr Varwell needs readers' help.

He has an approximate location for Mullet Creek, but like any intrepid explorer, he wants to know how it got its name, how to get there, and any local history.

Mr Varwell will arrive in Nelson in the second week of January, so anyone with information on Mullet Creek is urged to email him at

mail\@\simonvarwell.co.uk.

And to put your mind at ease, he keeps his hair nicely trimmed.

"Mullets are a hideous haircut, absolutely dreadful," he says. "It's like a car crash - you just can't take your eyes off it."