Ten Worst Travel Moments
1. Being arrested, blindfolded, stripped, and flung into solitary at a Pakistani torture prison.
2. Being given the ‘rubber glove’ treatment on the border of Liberia and Sierra Leone when passing innocently through ‘Blood Diamond’ country.
3. Having dengue fever in the Madre de Dios jungle in Peru. That, along with having stomach problems, no skin on my feet, and worms burrowing out of me.
4. Having the most indescribably bad food poisoning in a locked down military area in Baluchistan, having eaten the sushi platter for four in Karachi the night before (a huge mistake).
5. Swallowing a live murrel fish in Hyderabad, a supposed cure for asthma.
6. Being lost and alone in a storm in a Cessna 152 somewhere above the Florida Panhandle, when I was aged 17 and learning to fly.
7. Being robbed of all my money, my travel documents and my luggage in the night on a train from Madrid to Algeciras.
8. Waiting for five days in a remote village in western Ethiopia for a truck to drive through so that I might have a chance to hitchhike to the next town and get stuck there.
9. Being on an organized tour of northern Namibia with retired workers from a ball-bearings factory in Dusseldorf (managed to escape, luckily).
10. Being lost at night on the live Niryagongo volcano in Congo with the threat of it erupting very likely.
How about you? What are your worst travel memories? Please share in the comments.
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holding baby daughter who is puking blueberries on me,
on a very seasick voyage back to the mainland from Isle Royale
on Lake Superior. Other daughter saying “no more Barneys Daddy…”
after they had asked me several times during the agonizing eternity
on the water, how ..much longer this hell-trip would go on. Half
the passengers heaving, or trying to, over the side of the ship,
and the remaining ones staring balefully at me as I hold this vomiting
baby there in front of them, in the cabin. A “Barney” meant a half hour,
a measure of time the younger kids related to. A fond memory…now.
Seasickness is never good…especially with children.
Being on the 38 hour train from Bamako to Dakar with no toilet to go to. They used it as a storage room for empty coca cola crates three hours after departure and I was stuck in a compartment with a smelly woman and her 4 small children. I have to say, the children behaved beautifully, no crying at all, but I might have blocked them out, being half comatose from heat and exhaustion, not drinking anything for fear of having to use the non-usable bathrooms…
Well, nothing quite compares to your worst travel moments. Glad you survived to tell the stories!
I was made to de-plane at Cusco, Peru and has my luggage searched in front of a hostile team with a massive K9. I think they were looking for a cocaine smuggler.
Detailed account.
http://www.sunilshinde.com/2010/01/20-scary-minutes-with-the-peruvian-customs.html
Severe food poisoning after 2days and nights on trains from Cochin to Kolkata in India; having to leap from my taxi every time it stopped the following morning to throw up in the middle of the traffic.
Walking across the snow covered Pyrenees, from the Bay of Biscay to Cap de Creus, in a pair of sandals. I’m definatley not Socrates.
Was that due to lost luggage, lost winter boots, or…?
Everything on your list makes my arriving by bus in Mexico City, dehydrated,with my teeth stuck to my lips seem a bit tame.
I can fully sympathize with you re # 9 ranking worse than an inminent volcano eruption
As a 10 year old being tapped on the shoulder to wake up in the middle of the night, by my perpetually insomniac 6 year old brother, on a flight across the Sahara heading to Lagos, Nigeria in 1963. He jovially told me to look out the window, “it’s so pretty”. Looking out to see sheets of sparks and flame streaming back from the wing & then realizing that virtually everyone else on the flight was fast asleep & somehow unaware. Then frantically calling the stewardess, who looked out and was deeply shocked. We ended up having an emergency landing in the desert just north of Kano, Nigeria.
Flaming wings are never a good thing, are they?
Ta, have you forgotten the 40 hour train ride from Beijing to Lhasa when the squat toilets were blocked and overflowing almost immediately…or when 7 month old Timur had diarrhea ON the sushi conveyer belt in a restaurant inPort Cairns (sorry there seem to be a lot of poo-stories here!)…or your 1am high speed drive to Delhi airport, through thick fog, with my severely inebriated cousin behind the wheel.
Before you left for a Peru trip, you left 2 months supplies, hiking gear etc. outside the front door for the guys to load into their car to take to the aiport…except that they forgot to do so, and the garbage collectors got it.
Can probably think of loads more ‘events’ over the last 21 years…but will leave them to rest in my subconscience where they reside safely!
R x
The funniest most selfless stories. Funny to read I mean except for the first one.
I was talking of the stories of Rachana Shah in case not clear. Sorry.
Long train rides with no toilets seem to be a recurring theme here.
Lying awake at night, in the dark, listening to rats. Once in a mission in Zambia where one was scurrying around the floor; and not so long ago, in a cheap hotel in London where a rat kept trying to gnaw through the floorboards.
yugoslavia campsite early 70s w my 3 sisters dark, raining, shower was locked, key was lost (for 2 months) next morning our tent had collapsed on our faces, people laughing could see us breathing as the tent fabric sucked in & out of our upturned mouths/noses – oh, and the 40 hour train ride when the controllers wouldn’t let us sleep on the luggage racks and kept waking us up, so we slept on the floor in the “hallway” but we laughed through it all – hung our laundry out the train windows
Rachana – poo stories are the ones we hate to remember the most : ) but most of us have at least one – my travels now arent very exotic and I only have to deal with our 2 german shepherds’ accidents on the wood floor – it wouldn’t be so bad, but living room flooring is old and has cracks – I have to use a toothpick to get the poo out – ugh! now, if my contractor husband would ever let me get some work done at home I would love new floors
oh, and one more – being halfway across the atlantic ocean and realizing the sun was on the wrong side of the plane – engine had died, we were dumping fuel, pilot turned the plane VERY SLOWLY didn’t tell us until we started asking questions – glad to get back to london
Being on a plane on 7-06-2005 (my birthday) out of Heathrow headed for Florence. Lost oxygen and was told by pilot we had to descend and quickly and steeply as possible so as not to break up the plane. Forced landing at an airport in a country we weren’t scheduled to be in. We ended up held on the tarmac way away from the airport and not allowed to disembark before security determined we were who we said we were. There were less than 50 passengers on the plane. All panicked except one and she’s telling this story. My traveling companion shat himself and hasn’t forgiven me for that ovrsight since.
I think I ’ll rewrite that story I put on face book.
1 Destitute in what I think may have been the state of Arizona I thought it would be best to try and sleep on the desert floor under the stars.
No sooner had I got half way comfortable and overcome the discomfort the unfamiliarity of my surroundings caused me than I was beset by a fear of rattle snakes despite knowing nothing of their likely habits; any information I had was anecdotal and vague. The fright grew so enormous that I was compelled to leave my uncertain bed.
The next thing I remember is being in some kind of all night food place where two bag ladies, as discouraged it seemed as I, were huddled over a table. So wretched and discomforted was I in that stale hangout that I left despite one of the ladies kindly telling me that it was very dangerous out there. My memory fades at this point.
2 Being woken out of a greyhound bus at about three o clock in the morning in St Louis Missouri grey with disturbed sleep to sit glare eyed in the glary lights of a cafe. A halt for the driver I imagine.
The above are tales from my more than ordinarily foolish youth.
3. Arriving in the lake district in England to cold enveloping rain after being slowly driven up through the same rain suffering from stomach pain. When we arrived I longed not to be there.
4. At about the age of seventeen I was driven up to London from Weston Super Mare. A journey that should have taken four hours took nearer nine so slow was the driving. I could have jumped out of the window.
Less horrid was, many years later, in Colorada I think going down hill in a large articulated lorry when the brakes went. The driver did very well and landed us in a convenient pond. I had no sensation of fear but when I got out of the cab my legs gave way.
Oh and a panic stricken moment on a flight to Kuwait when my nine or eleven year old self along with my sister were not allowed back on to the plane at Beirut because we had no passports ?? We thought the plane was going to leave with out us.
lLater the air hostess said ‘I told you I had your passports. I told you, told you.’ Yes well…. Circa 1956.
2: Being smuggled out of the San Francisco Hare Krishna Temple (1970) in the back of a pick up truck to avoid being married off to someone not of my choosing.
3: Hell’s Condo at Lake Tahoe. Filled with drunk dot com dweebs. I didn’t know any of them but was there with someone else who thought their friend owned the place. Turns out it was a timeshare and nobody knew anything. No way out until two days later.
4: Taking off from San Francisco airport when my traveling companion decided we were through and ran down the aisle and demanded to be let off the plane. We had almost achieve take off speed and had left the gate far behind. We returned to the airport and the traveling companion was taken off the plane. FBI and airport security questioned me for 2 hours in my seat while searching our luggage and the seats around where the traveling companion had been sitting. We were held on the tarmac for two hours. Yes, drugs were involved. His, not mine. This was prior to 9-11.
I got lost while walking through the Algerian Sahara (the Hogar – earth’s landscape most like the moon.) I wanted to watch the sunset and thought the Toureg guide, Mouli, had told me (in French) that we were camping near by. The sun set. it was immediately pitch dark and when I went behind the dunes I found I was alone. I lit my matches (for burning the toilet paper) to follow the camel track but that proved impossible. After wandering around, I yelled into the enormous sky, thought I heard a response but it was only an echo. I thought about all the horror stories I’d heard of people dying in the desert, the thirst, the animals. I prioritized my clothes and burned my turban, socks and underwear to make a signal fire. Hours later Mouli tracked me down.
Far off the beaten path in Botswana we parked in our truck to watch about 20 elephants have their mud bath. “Mr Big” soon came to visit us, visibly upset that we had chosen to park in the middle of the herd’s dust bath. We realized too late what was going on, after “Mr Big” had snuck past the point where we should have started the engine and moved off. After paralizing us with fear and coming ankle to bumper with us, he did a lot of ear flapping and trunk swinging before he moved to the other truck to explain their mistake by inserting one of his tusks in one of their open windows.
Second place was poo. Who knew that feeding our baby son a little eggs florentine in a nice New Orleans restaurant would have such dramatic results, or that the only place to clean ourselves up resembled an open sewer with an audience.
My anti viral protection thing has popped up again on this site saying a menace has been detected. I used the email to open the site.
Thanks very much. It has been cleaned and fixed now.
Dear Tahir Shah,
Dealt with so efficiently and quickly.
Thank you for being so kind as to acknowledge message.
Toni.
If you ask my kids who the nicest people they met in Costa Rica were, they’ll say it was the Paramedics. On our first day, while at the Children’s Museum in San Jose, my son wanted to look at the cannon sitting on a stone base across the parking lot. I told him to wait while I… but he charged across the cobblestones, stumbled and fell, and bashed his forehead on the stone base. As I charged across the parking lot, seeing blood pour from his forehead and pool onto ground in front of him, my only hope was that his screaming meant he was still conscious.
In moments the parking attendant was beside me having radiod the first aid attendant, who arrived with an assistant and a large tacklebox of first aid supplies. By the time the paramedics showed up our son had been cleaned up, assessed, and wheeled to the museum infirmary. Happily, the ambulance driver could stitch him up there. No doubt other patrons were terrified by Ben’s screams of pain, but the staff treated him with patience, and one even renamed him “Valiente”, once they realized he was 8 years old and not the 12 suggested by his size.
We were very impressed by the museum attendants’ competence. If only they had been there to help when we were held up at gunpoint on the way back to the hotel…
Oh no! Happy to hear your son was so well taken care of. Sorry to hear about the mugging.
Not really a dreadful travel moment, but it may amuse you. I was somewhere between Marrakech and Essaouira when I realized I needed a toilet right away. We stopped the car and I ran into a gas station. Directed by the mechanic, I ran up to the rooftop ‘squatty’, only to find a dead cat in the pan. I was desperate, so I removed the cat with the aid of two sticks, and did my thing, and went on my way, thinking it would make a good travel tale.
Fast forward a little while to Azrou, a ‘hole-in-the-wall’ cafe, another W.C. Again up some stairs, but enclosed this time. I closed the door (yes, it had one) and as my eyes became accustomed to the gloom I saw….a dead cat!!! I eased it out of the way with my foot, and realized that my experience the first time may not have been all that noteworthy.
I eventually spent 2 years in the Azrou area…..but I did not eat in that particular cafe again.
Sounds like you’ve had some bad luck with Moroccan toilets! I imagine after the first incident that you never thought you’d see that again…
That woman with the gold fish in the picture is seriously mean-looking. She gives me the creeps!
re sofia poullada my sister dont know how old less than twelve also spotted thick oil driving down the wing of the plane (no fire) and alerted the air hostess who hurried off to the cockpit looking worried. we were on our way to kuwait , landed at beirut airport shortly. there may have been reassuring noises from the captain. adults had seen where my sister was pointing.
On what should have been a very mundane flight from Chicago to Shannon via Dublin in 2004, we encountered 50 mph winds crossing Ireland from Dublin to Shannon and the flight returned to Dublin to wait it out. Let’s just say that tummies were upset from the turbulance and the chicken curry that had been served so the toilets soon became backed up. Five hours later, they tried again and again they turned back. An hour later, the pilot came on and declared that “the third time’s a charm” and said we were going to try again. The turbulance was horrific; you could hear a lot of people praying with the exception of the flight crew, who were sitting right behind me, crying and saying goodbye to each other and bemoaning the fact that they should have been off the clock hours ago, and the gentleman sitting in front of me who was yelling, “We’re going to die… we’re going to die…” As we were descending, he unfastened his seat belt, stood up and proceded to vomit all over himself and me. This infuriated one of the flight crew, who screamed, “I hope you’re happy now. I AM NOT cleaning that up.”