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Your most dangerous travel experiences


Parliament

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Back in 2000, my cousin and I went to Burkina Faso to visit his cousin in the Peace Corps.  We connected through the Abijan International Airport, 2 weeks after a coup.  As you would imagine it was a madhouse.  We had to get our bags, walk them through customs, then go OUTSIDE the airport to our departing terminal.

At "security" I walked right through the metal detector with my hiking boots on, then had to bribe the TSA guy not to give me an anal probe of sufficient duration as to make me miss my connection.  And all I had was 20's.  Dude mighta retired on me.

 

 

 

 

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i've been mugged a few times. i was raised in galveston though, were i was also mugged a few times, so whatever. 

once in roatan by a dude and a machete. dude was smallish (no racist) and once we established i was drunk and didn't have any money we just laughed it off. i remember even giving him a pat on the back when we parted. but i remember the scene very vividly. it was 1AM or some late night and i was traversing a path in a deep forest trying to find my bungalow. from a very long distance i could see the moonlight on the machete. 

robbed in ulaanbaatar mongolia. took transsiberian railroad and in the early morning i was looking out of the window of the train, like 6AM and saw the smallish black horses in the morning mist as the sun rose. was unreal. i was on cloud nine thinking i was some kind of globtrotting badass. had the old taxi one - driver stopped for a sec and a fucking huge mongolian wrestler duder jumped in the passenger seat. was just 20 bucks. but after getting pissed and thankfully not crushed by this ginormous dude, i was cool

just missed a knifing in sevilla spain once. however, and actually by far the most dangerous experience was in sevilla actually now that i think of it. stayed in a large house with like 12 people. thankfully i stayed in the room by the kitchen. because one night the wiring box / breaker box caught fire at like 3AM outside my room and the kitchen. thankfully someone was getting water in the kitchen. my room had a huge wooden door which blocked sound, and the window had bars. big thick black death bars. i think of that situation, my luck, and burning alive. holy shit does that one scare me to this day. i never sleep anywhere with bars anymore, ever. 

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16 minutes ago, staboner said:

i've been mugged a few times. i was raised in galveston though, were i was also mugged a few times, so whatever. 

once in roatan by a dude and a machete. dude was smallish (no racist) and once we established i was drunk and didn't have any money we just laughed it off. i remember even giving him a pat on the back when we parted. but i remember the scene very vividly. it was 1AM or some late night and i was traversing a path in a deep forest trying to find my bungalow. from a very long distance i could see the moonlight on the machete. 

robbed in ulaanbaatar mongolia. took transsiberian railroad and in the early morning i was looking out of the window of the train, like 6AM and saw the smallish black horses in the morning mist as the sun rose. was unreal. i was on cloud nine thinking i was some kind of globtrotting badass. had the old taxi one - driver stopped for a sec and a fucking huge mongolian wrestler duder jumped in the passenger seat. was just 20 bucks. but after getting pissed and thankfully not crushed by this ginormous dude, i was cool

just missed a knifing in sevilla spain once. however, and actually by far the most dangerous experience was in sevilla actually now that i think of it. stayed in a large house with like 12 people. thankfully i stayed in the room by the kitchen. because one night the wiring box / breaker box caught fire at like 3AM outside my room and the kitchen. thankfully someone was getting water in the kitchen. my room had a huge wooden door which blocked sound, and the window had bars. big thick black death bars. i think of that situation, my luck, and burning alive. holy shit does that one scare me to this day. i never sleep anywhere with bars anymore, ever. 

daaaaaaaamn.....

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Ok so don’t travel with staboner, got it.

Once walked about 10 blocks at 3am in New Orleans after a rave. Never walked that fast before.

I was taken by my aunt to meet the King of the Gypsies in Yugoslavia when I was 12. She was in the circle of trust because she was the first person ever to translate their language. But I was scared shitless.

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Fucking amateurs...

You haven't traveled until you've had your bus hijacked by terrorists and witnessed fellow passengers being executed while periodically being beaten and having guns put to your head and shoved in your mouth.  Ah, I miss Peru.

 

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Was in a rental car in Barcelona and got worked by a gang. We didn't know it when it happened but had a tire punctured by a motorcycle rider. We pulled over to change the tire and had to take luggage out to get to the jack. One guy on a motorcycle distracted us while someone else stole work backpacks with computers, money, etc. Not really dangerous but was unsettling. Luckily I had my passport in my pocket but my colleague had his in his backpack and lost it. 

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10 hours ago, Bill Brasky said:

Taxi ride back from boys town to the border in Nuevo Laredo.  Driver takes us through a checkpoint so the federales can shake us down for cash at gun point.  

I've been through that but it's more of an "ah shit" moment rather than a terrifying moment. Always remember to keep your fake cash stash in your pocket and real money hidden because they usually just empty your pockets.

 

 

 

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Well DixonHur is a tough act to follow. Was that in the 80s? I got to walk through the Tenderloin in SF in the middle of the night to my hotel without my phone. Slipped out of my pocket as I was getting out of my then-gf's car at the airport and was unable to get hold of her before I had to board. I memorized a map on the BART and wasn't even aware of the existence of the tenderloin when I started my trek with a rolling suitcase around 1 am. I felt like I was in Hamsterdam and I realized I probably shouldn't be there well before a cop I passed told me to be careful. I worried that if I deviated from my memorized route I would end up in an even worse neighborhood. Made it through without any incidents other than being offered a lot of fun-sounding drugs.

Sent from my SM-G950U using Tapatalk

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35 minutes ago, hookem2010 said:

Well DixonHur is a tough act to follow. Was that in the 80s?

Nope, this was during their brief attempt at a resurgence in 2001...unfortunately for them, 9/11 happened and the US went all kinds of bat shit crazy stamping out terrorists, whether Islamic or otherwise.

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Was in Dakar and got in a taxi with a wild eyed taxi driver who was smoking something that didn't smell like weed or tobacco. He did a fine job driving (by African standards) us to where we needed to be though. On the same trip coming home I came just a few hours away from getting deported from Spain back to Senegal when my passport disappeared in the airport terminal. They wouldn't let me leave the airport terminal without a passport and I couldn't board a plane without a passport. Spent like three days in international purgatory including a brief stay in the holding area of the airport police station where they keep all the folks who try and use fake visas and stuff before I was finally able to get someone from the embassy to bring me a temporary passport just five hours before my deportation flight was supposed to take off.

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Went to Acuna across from del rio when I was in college in 2002. Paid 10 bucks for all you can drink at a club. Friend and I decided to cab it to boys town. He fucks a girl he met in her car while her accomplice steals my friends wallet and my wallet. He had his money and my money so now we are stuck in boys town with no way to get back. We started walking back to town sometime in the middle of the night despite the repeated warnings that we would be robbed or killed. About 20 minutes into our walk a Mexican guy pulls over and opens the door to his van. There was a two year old in the back so we figured that maybe he wouldn’t kill us in front of his kid. Luckily he didn’t. Got back to town and remembered that our hands were still stamped for the club so we drank more before trying to get back into the US with no ID. That was pretty easy for a white guy. We then hitchhiked to a friends house in del rio and crashed there. 

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On 5/19/2018 at 9:01 AM, Parliament said:

Back in 2000, my cousin and I went to Burkina Faso to visit his cousin in the Peace Corps.  We connected through the Abijan International Airport, 2 weeks after a coups.  As you would imagine it was a madhouse.  We had to get our bags, walk them through customs, then go OUTSIDE the airport to our departing terminal.

At "security" I walked right through the metal detector with my hiking boots on, then had to bribe the TSA guy not to give me an anal probe of sufficient duration as to make me miss my connection.  And all I had was 20's.  Dude mighta retired on me.

 

 

Security in quotes gave me the lulz.

Anyway...wife and I and another couple were damn near kidnapped in jungle in Mexico.  Don’t tell @Brisketexan though...he’s sure it was all Fox News’ fault.

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I submit to y'all, that as dangerous as the moments described might have been, many near-death experiences go unremarked because we thought we were perfectly safe.

 

But anyway, every now and then I have to cross a Juco parking lot. Between mashing the gas pedal and checking the phone, those kids don't have much left over for brakes or steering. Spice of life.

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20 minutes ago, Onboard 2.0 said:

Yeah, but the reality is there are some scary ass places here.

Agreed, been to 70+ countries and I feel more safe/comfortable than all but a few of them.

Scariest thing I have done was in the Sinai Peninsula Sept 2017. Decided to go to Giza for my birthday and then decided I wanted to make my way over to Jordan after. Now the Sinai Peninsula is a hotbed for terrorist activities and like 2 weeks after I was there like 130 people were shot. Anyways, I was with an aussie mate of mine and he and I are really penny pinching, or at least he is and he didnt want to pay for a bus ticket, so we decided we will hitchhike. So we hitchhiked across the Sinai peninsula and this one particular guy picks us up. He seems friendly enough but after about 30 minutes we start to get pretty nervous. We are in the middle of nowhere, there isnt a terrain out there that I have seen that looks like the Sinai Peninsula, its gorgeous and arid and its huge strange rock formation dominate the topography. This dude is going like 120 mph hour and he hasnt stopped making phone call after phone call, shouting in arabic. In my head im just thinking oh fuck we are so god damn stupid why did we do this. I actually looked over at my buddy and said out loud, "are you as nervous as I am", to which he responded "yep". Well nothing happened, he dropped us off about a mile from the Israeli border in Taba and said I cant go any closer they will shoot me. We gave him a little cash as a thank you for not handing us over to terrorists and a trinket from my buddies backpack. He said he loves us and America gives us a hug and off he went.  Definitely the most scared I have ever been. Well that or maybe Kyrgyzstan.

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In Paris, a couple of guys tried to take my backpack and run. In Bratislava, a man tried to take my girlfriend at the time purse and run but thankfully I was right there and intervened. 

I was chased twice in Columbia by differential locals trying to rob me. Same trip, a taxi driver told me as I got out that he debated just robbing me and dumping me in the ghetto since I looked so drunk  

Guess not travel but while living in DC, I had a guy tried to grab my cell out of my hand and run out of the metro 

none of these were successful but damn maybe I look like a gringo target or something 

 

 

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18 hours ago, DixonHur said:

Fucking amateurs...

You haven't traveled until you've had your bus hijacked by terrorists and witnessed fellow passengers being executed while periodically being beaten and having guns put to your head and shoved in your mouth.  Ah, I miss Peru.

 

Bullshit, I've been to College Station and Fayetteville

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Was touristing Peru. Flew to Juliaca. Driver picks us up in van, i sit up front with him to take pics. He strongly suggests I not do that until we are out of town. Basically if someone were to see my camera and lens, well my life would not be worth as much as the camera, I agree that maybe just seeing with my eyes will be fine for once.

I had seen some TV show about some market in Juliaca where you can get anything, a real black market thing. I ask if that's true. He laughs, says its true, says he saw a motorcycle called a Charley Davidson, that some guy had fabricobbled from many different bikes. I would love to show it all to you, but they would probably kill you.

We drive to Lake Titicaca. Get to our hotel, no problems. Next day we see Lake Titicaca (tourist bs) and then go to an even higher smaller lake to see a typical small local village. On the way back to the hotel we run into a demonstration. Our driver drives us way up in the hills, by some prison where the "Shining Path" are incarcerated, I can only hope that Van der Sloot piece of shit is there, because that was a bleak fucking existence. We finally emerge back out on the road, just down from where the protest is at. We still get a few rocks thrown our way.

We have a mid-day flight out of Juliaca the next day. Our driver suggests we leave at say 4am, to avoid any problems, even though it was only an hour drive. We do. We get out of Titicaca just fine still dark when we get to Juliaca, but damn, people protesting a dam about to flood a bunch of villages get up early. They were just forming up. We got hit with about a dozen rocks, thankfully they all either hit the side or the roof of the van, no window damage. Again our driver took evasive action, actually driving into more of Juliaca, instead of taking the main road. It worked, no more troubles but he was super nervous, never really stopping at any intersections, afraid everyone we saw was about to point a gun on us.

When we got to the airport it wasn't open. There was a couple of other vans transporting tourist that rolled up. There was one guard at the gate and he had us all park ready to go in, but he couldn't open the gate until 7am. We were all pretty nervous everytime another car would come, especially the guard, but it turned out to either be workers, or more passengers. Finally in, and never happier to be wheels up.

 

 

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Was in SFO, in a Chinese Restaurant when the Loma Prieto earthquake hit in 1989.  I sat there feeling queasy, when I realized I was in SFO and my plate started rattling on the table.  The restaurant never reopened, but there are several other locations for Henry's Hunan in the city.  The street outside,  Kearny, was pitching like the deck on a ship. Looming back down Kearny toward downtown, there was a huge dust cloud that came up suddenly; I was pretty sure the facade had fallen off some building.  When it calmed down, I went back in to pay for the meal, but the Chinese guy would not let me give them the money.

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3 minutes ago, idahorn said:

Was in SFO, in a Chinese Restaurant when the Loma Prieto earthquake hit in 1989.  I sat there feeling queasy, when I realized I was in SFO and my plate started rattling on the table.  The restaurant never reopened, but there are several other locations for Henry's Hunan in the city.  The street outside,  Kearny, was pitching like the deck on a ship. Looming back down Kearny toward downtown, there was a huge dust cloud that came up suddenly; I was pretty sure the facade had fallen off some building.  When it calmed down, I went back in to pay for the meal, but the Chinese guy would not let me give them the money.

And then?

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Didn't want to drag it out too long.  Walked back to my hotel; everyone was walking in the street not the sidewalks.  I saw Gene Hackman coming toward me from about 30' so I had a chance to think.  As we passed each other I said "Poseidon Adventure" ( a 70's Hackman movie about a tidal wave-induced by an earthquake turning an ocean liner upside down). He laughed pretty hard but kept moving.  Got a bus to the airport (we didn't go on any overpasses) and tried to sleep a few hours on a bench somewhere in the lobby.  Flew out about 2 PM the next day.

There is a Henry's Hunan at 924 Sansome and another at the intersection of Grant and Green.  If someone were paying for my meal and I had a choice between Henry's and the French Laundry, I'd take Henry's.

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Caracas, Venezuela. Decorative crazed glass elevator kept getting prettier. Because the rebels were shooting at my hotel. Thought there were too many car valets at the hotel entrance, each carrying a chrome baton. Nope. Sawed-off shotguns. Fuck the rental car. Took a taxi to the embassy.

Walking down a busy cobblestone street on a blazing hot late afternoon near the Spanish Steps in Rome with my wife and her parents. Confronted by the almost naked most beautiful woman I have ever seen in my life. Just a wisp of a filmy scarf around her waist.  (Unfortunately no pix.)  Holding a baby begging "Money for the bambino". Felt a touch at my coat pocket. Reflexively swung back connecting hard with the little kid trying to pickpocket me. Gypsies. We'd walked into a spiderweb with the woman as the diversion. About twenty men started running away. They really do have olive skin and their hair is so black it shines as purple. Made me a hero with the inlaws, though.

Guatemala circa 1994. Conscripted teenagers in full BDU with automatic rifles on each street corner.

Afghanistan. When they say roadside landmine, a road is an unpaved camel path anywhere from the width of a truck to a mile wide. 

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I was on the street in Matamoros the night the Mexican cannibal / Satanic drug gang took Mark Kilroy and rendered him into stew and jewelry. They tried to take my best friend, but he fought them off. He told us about before we even crossed back into Texas, much less before we even knew Kilroy was missing. Meanwhile, I was feet away, making out with the woman who is now my wife. Fucking TWISTED night.  

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I got stranded in Iceland during a storm once.  My cabbie driver was certifiable shit faced (which I did not realize until I got in) and drove like a manic back to Reykavik.  Nothing like most of these posts, but he hauled ass and was all over the road for the whole drive.  Pretty sure I needed new underwear when I got to my hotel.

 

When I first moved to DC, some dudes tried to rob me late night walking back to my place on Capitol Hill, my landlord came out of the basement apartment with a shotgun and ran them off.   That townhouse sold about 5 years ago for  1.5 million.  Fucking gentrification.

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Lived in downtown Detroit for two weeks back in 1994 for some business training.  A bunch of us used to go to the Windsor scrip clubs and catch the last bus back to Detroit.  If you know Detroit you know that area right across the border is the worst.  Every night we'd give the bus driver $ to just take us the extra 10 blocks or so to our apartment.   One night the guy said no and told us to get out.   We go five blocks and heard someone in an alley say "lets get them".  3 of us broke out in mad sprints to the apartment.

I had a tuk tuk try to take me to gem shop in Bangkok.  When I said no for the 50th time he finally said ok.  I thought he was going to take me back but then drove for about 5 mins into an absolute ghetto shanty area with random dogs, open fires going etc and told me to get out.  A month earlier a American tourist got stabbed to death by a tuk tuk driver.  I said shit.  This might be it.   Told him I pay him to take me back to the river which he finally agreed on.  I gave him a 10th of what I promised and got out. 

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On 5/19/2018 at 8:27 AM, elfenix said:

i've flown on china airlines and malaysian airlines

I flew Aeroflot in the 80s. Lived to tell the tale.

Quote

Aeroflot in 1991. Half the seatbelts were missing. Military pilots flew that plane like it was a Mig.

Posted before I saw yours. Yeah, and those planes were like some Bizarro-world version of a 737. Kind of the way they copied the look of the Space Shuttle, but when you go up close you realize it's all barely held together. 

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