worst travel experiences

entropy · 07-16-2004, 10:34 AM

tell me about yours!

i had a severe intestional infection and had to come home half way thru my mexican trip! anyone else?

jezebel36 · 07-28-2004, 12:43 AM

i haven't had a lot of bad travel experiences, but most of the ones i do have involve old men in southern europe. the worst was while i was in Pompeii, Italy and was followed by an older gross italian man in his car while walking to my hostel. he kept only one hand on the steering wheel because his other hand was busy doing other stuff in his pants (eww). even worse, he kept trying to get me into his car. i was very upset with myself for the way i handled the situation afterwards. i should have thrown a brick at his motherfucking ass.

luminous · 07-29-2004, 05:03 PM

I just got back from two months in Mexico. Overall, I loved it, but I did get sick several times. One week I had the flu, and many many times I had some pretty bad stomach problems.

The WORST, though, was getting stung by a scorpion one week before I left. It was really painful. It was inside the sleeve of the sweatshirt I was wearing and stung my right bicep. I didn't know what happened until I threw off my sweatshirt and saw it crawling around inside. I panicked, not knowing if it was poisonous or not, but the doc at the clinic said the poisonous scorpions live more north or along the coast. Still, my entire arm really hurt like a bitch that whole day.

luminous · 07-29-2004, 05:04 PM

Another story - New Year's Eve in Paris, a waiter spilled flaming Grand Marnier on my brand new seven day old coat, burning a hole right through the lining. Didn't apologize for it and didn't give me any sort of discount on my dinner.

**Bachelor No. 2** · 10-21-2004, 11:29 AM

When I was 13 (1995) I went to visit my great aunt in Arizona over Christmas. My family told me not to do it. They said that I would hate her and would want to come home. Being 13 I didn't listen and decided to go. I knew this lady was old, but I didn't know too much about her otherwise. I arrive at her place and she opens to door. I see she is a hunch back who can only walk with a walker. I noticed she didn't open any of her curtains in the apartment and that it was very dark inside because of that. She made me do weird things: wash her fan blades, flip her mattress. She didn't have a shower curtain so when I took a shower the floor got wet. I couldn't watch TV, except for the nightly news and The Price Is Right with the volume turned down. Everywhere we went we had to take a senior citizens bus. I remember calling home crying that I wanted to come home. When the day came for me to depart back home I arrived at the airport 6 hours before my flight was to leave. I think I talked to her once and twice before she died a few years later, she never did live to be 93 like she told me would. What an experience.

Chuckles · 11-05-2004, 03:59 AM

I have to say that dealing with medical problems in a non-English-speaking country is pretty damn hard.

Take care
-J-

oeter19 · 11-14-2004, 08:53 PM

Diarrhoea for a week in Mexico. Travelling in a bus for 8 hours with one stop was not very fun. This was in Oaxaca I believe...

And then I cut my knee and couldnt walk or swim for a week.

But the worst was living with a woman whose ex-husband kept on coming to her house and threatening her and me. The woman wasn't that great either.

Wacahootaman · 02-28-2005, 12:04 PM

The worst travel experience for me was to get malaria and be caught in the middle of an massacre by the Thai Rangers of KMT Chineese along the Thai Burma border in 1985.(Lucky for me, I am not KMT, so I survived.

I had come out of Burma after a week of high fevers with malaria and was staying in the Shan compound in a border town where all the ethnic groups, who were fighting a guerrilla war against Rangoon, had their fortified compounds. I was so happy to get back into Thailand as I had gotten the malaria in Burma and was really miserable. My Shan hosts were most hospitable and had their doc look at me and he gave me some meds for the malaria.

Unknown to me, I had come into town after the KMT Chinese had killed three Thai Rangers to protest the Thais arrest of a KMT general, and the Thais were hot for revenge.

That nite as I lay in a sweatting delerium I "dreamed" I heard auttomatic weapons fire and remember someone putting a flashlight into my face. The next day when my fevers temperarilly broke, I heard that the Thais had killed about 20 KMTs and had gone on a house to house search of the vill with blood lists and had found me, cut off my money belt, looked at my passport and moved on to find KMTs!

They had killed my guides brother and anyone else who was on their shlt list in a frenzy of revenge.

I left that morning riding in the back of a toyota pickup truck with other Thais for hours on an unpaved bumpy road with my malaria kicking in again. That ride was hell as I had a terrible headache and body aches and fevers and chills. Plus the fear of the violence the nite before would surface everytime we came to a thai checkpoint and they would search me and my pack with a fine tooth comb.

When I got back to Chang Mai, I spent three days in the Methodist hospital there and thought I was cured but had the Malaria nearly kill me later back in the states when the Falciprium strain morphed into celeberal malaria.

Lucky for me, I was near a university med center and my doc had majored in tropical medicine and he pegged it quickly and saved my life.

It took me a year to feel normal as the Malaria had damaged my spleen which resutlted in anemia and my brain which did lose some major areas of memory.

I was taking my chloroquine and fansidar when I was in Burma but didnt know there were resistant strains that had evolved in that war zone that could override the profolatic drugs!

nefar · 03-07-2005, 09:02 PM

That's an amazing story, Wacahootaman.

FaerieHope · 03-10-2005, 12:10 PM

when my sister and i were about 10 and 12...we went to oregon with the family. and we stayed at this really weird hotel in medford. the pool was this weird tropical themed indoor thing with big plastic palm trees and a tunnel. well, my sister and i were walking around and as we walked thru the tunnel, i went in first, i saw a broken glass...well, i didn't speak up soon enough, she stepped right on a HUGE piece and it cut into the ball of her foot, right behind her big toe. there was blood everywhere!!! mom picked her up and rushed back to the room. it took about 4 towels to supress the bleeding enough to take her to the hospital. while my dad went down to the front desk and raised holy hell.....because right by the tunnel where the glass was, was a big sign that said "no glass containers or dishes in pool area"....i mean, HELLO! why do you think it's there? duh!....they offered to give my dad a "discount" on the room. but didn't offer to help pay for the 8 stiches they had to put in my poor little sister's foot.
ick, the jerks
i'm always afraid of stepping on glass now. never quite got over that. and i still am wary of swiming in hotel pools.