Our Scariest Travel Stories from Decades of Travel

Thinking you're going to die on a highway in Tunisia, wondering if your baby's going to survive the trip abroad, I don't know, having your kid fall down a flight of stairs and bust his head open. Hey there, fellow travelers, what are some of your worst travel experiences out there? Because today we're going to talk about are some of the worst travel experiences that I've had during my decades of travel. And I think when I think of worst, I also think of scariest kind of things that happen. And I would say one of the most consistently scary things that's happened on my travels is the driving. Like, we were just in Albania, we were driving around. We're on Bulgaria and Romania, and I'll tell you, when you're on mountain roads, and the locals know what they're doing, and you don't, and you see them snake in and snake out really quick, thinking you're going to die in a head-on collision, that kind of fear is a special kind of fear you have, and I've seen that a lot when we've been driving around the Balkans the last few weeks, and it reminds me of one of the times when the first time I really got into a car thing where I was scared that we were going to die, and that was when we were in Tunisia, and we were driving with the louages, like the drivers that will take I'll take you to different cities and literally, We're talking no seatbelts, no nothing, driving down the middle of the road thinking, oh my gosh, we're going to die. And that's the thing, is the driving situations I've had around the world have been pretty scary. But I think if I really want to go down to it, one of the scariest times I had is when I was in high school and I was in Guadalajara, Mexico, and I'd met some people when I was there and we had a great time and we went out for the night and at the time I was skinny and had long blonde hair and we ended up getting a ride around Guadalajara in the back of a pickup truck. And some guys saw us. They just saw the blonde hair flowing. And they're like, oh, who's that pretty girl? They didn't realize. Maybe they realized I was a guy. I don't know. But the thing is, they were literally chasing us around Guadalajara, Mexico. Like, for hours. it was scary as heck and the guy in the pickup truck eventually dropped us off and we ended up having to hide behind a wedding party to actually like get them to leave us alone and it was really not an enjoyable experience and i remember when we left the wedding party we're trying to get back to where we needed to be and my friends i was with like hey mark look we're going to a part of town that's not really the best part of town if we start running you just run too if somebody grabs us you keep running as well and it literally it's like in the movies where it's like everything's lit up and then there's like a four block stretch Five blocks stretch where there's no lights on. I'm like, we can get a cab. We can get something. Like, no, no, no, we don't need to. We don't need to. I'm like, no, we can really do this. They're like, no, we'll be fine. Luckily, a cab pulls up then he's like, yo, you kids can't be here. It's like either and the kid they're like, we don't have any money. I'm like, we have money I can pay for it. He's like, no, no, no, we don't have any money. He's like, it doesn't matter. This is not a safe place to be. He let us get in the cab and he took us back to my friend's place and actually ended up okay. But I remember that was the first time I realized I think it was about 17 at the time. That was the first time I realized travel isn't always the safest and funnest thing out there. So that was a really scary thing. But the driving situations a lot of times can be a scary thing. And I know for some people, it's just driving on the left side of the road. England is scary enough? Well sometimes it can be a lot scarier than that, okay? Now the next thing I want to talk about is when I was in Peru in the 90s, and this is when Shining Path was still... causing trouble in Peru okay and we're there and I was actually there myself and I was backpacking through South America and I'm in Lima and I'm in Lima and there's this big street that's there there's people selling stuff on the side of the road and you know I'm just like you know walking down checking out the stuff people are selling and then all of a sudden there's this wave of people that come running around the corner. We're talking you ever see the zombie movies where it's the fast zombies and they come running around the corner to get everybody like World War Z kind of stuff and I'm like oh my god what's going on and I'm like backing up and all these people start I'm going to start running like I probably should get going and around the Down the corner comes a personnel carrier, like, from the military, and I'm like, oh, crap. So I start running to it, and literally everybody in the entire street starts running and dispersing out through the things. Now, I got away, got back to my hotel, but that was one of those scary times where you don't know what's going on. That's where I learned it. That was when I was in college, and that's where I learned, hey, always pay attention to the political situation where you're at in case things like that can happen, okay? So I've had scary situations. And I've been learning, I've been learning, okay, so we have that. Now, next up on my list of scary situations, this is when I was teaching in China. And Liam was, I think he just, he was two years, he just turned two. And Liam got his hand smashed in a door. Now, not in the door that, like this, he got smashed in the hinge of a metal door and smashed his hand, okay? Now, here's the situation. I'm in a meeting with all the other professors and our translators, and I get a call from Jocelyn, and I hear her screaming, and I hear Liam screaming in pain in a full panic mode. She's like, Mark, Mark, Liam's hand, it's his hand, we gotta go, we gotta find a hospital. And so my translator, I'm like, hey, we gotta leave. We run back to the hotel, get the, Liam's hand, I mean, he's like two, so he's a little kid, his hand's like triple the size, and we hop in a cab. Luckily, Cherry, my translator and my TA, when we were there, she had family. I lived in Beijing. They said, okay, then you need to go to the bone hospital. So we're going to the bone hospital, and he's screaming the whole time. His hand just looks horrible. We get to the bone hospital. It seriously looks like a mass unit. People are lined up, and things are laying on the ground, all kinds of stuff. We finally see a doctor. Like, oh. Oh, it's not for you? It's for the kid? No, no, you have to go to the children's hospital. We don't see that. We're like, what? And so then we have to go to another part of Beijing. And we go to the children's hospital in Beijing. And they see like 10,000 kids a day. And each of those kids have both parents and probably the grandparents as well. So this place is a madhouse. It is packed. And so we finally get in. And I mean, it is insane when you're there with so many people and everything. And he's still like losing it with his hand. And we're like, oh man, this isn't good. And so we eventually get to go and get an x-ray on his hand. Well, while we're sitting there waiting to take a hand, there's a little kid that's there and the mom holds out the baby. The baby poops on the floor. The mom grabs a rag, picks up the poop off the floor, then throws it away. And we're like, oh, okay, that's how it rolls here. All right, we're fine. And then we go in to get the x-ray, and the doctor's yelling at us, yelling at the TA, saying, if your kid can't calm down, I'm going to sedate him because he wanted to take an x-ray. I'm like, you're going to sedate the kid to x-ray their hand? We're like, no, this isn't, no, we're going someplace else. We heard there was a private hospital, and the private children's hospital was right across the street from the public children's hospital. And so we went over there, and we had to buy Liam a lifetime membership. So Liam has a lifetime membership to the children's hospital in Beijing. It's like four hundred dollars, best money ever spent. We go in, the people were super helpful, super friendly. Got him, got the x-ray, the doctor came out. Turns out the doctor, his best friend is a fan of Walter's World, you know? So I was like, hey, that's cool. So we had this connection. But by then his swelling had come down and the doctor said, look, there's no broken bones. It's okay, the good thing is he's so little, his hand's so small and his bones are so like gummy. He's like, they're like gum? Gummy! I'm like, yeah, he's like, they're like gum, and so therefore it comes back, so he'll be okay. And so that day was super scary, because we didn't know what was going on. I had a phone call with a screaming, just like broke my heart, and then tried to find the stuff for him. There was that. And then there was the scariest, honestly the scariest day of all of my travels. Like, I have goosebumps thinking about this day. This is, Jocelyn was about 21... 20, 21 weeks pregnant with Liam. And we had gone home for, we were living in Portugal at the time. We went home to the U.S. We got like the 3D scan to see the baby. And Liam's like, hey, I'm a boy. Because his winger, he's like wide open like this. He also gave us the middle finger. It was the ultrasound scan kind of thing. So we're all pumped and everything. And so we go back after we were home for a couple of weeks. Fly back, but Jocelyn has her usual ultrasound, and you know, the 22, 20 weeks ultrasound goes in. And in Portugal, where we were, only the mom could go in. Nobody else could go in, because they didn't have the space. So Jocelyn goes in, she comes out, she's in tears. Like, what's wrong? What's going on? And she's like, she can't talk, she's just bawling. And she gets out, it's like, the baby's coming, like, the baby's coming, he's not even halfway there yet. It's like, what? And then the nurse comes out and she's like, hey, look, the doctor was saying, the doctor was doing his stuff. His English wasn't that great. He's just like, look, you need to sit down now. The baby's coming now. And basically what he said is like, look, you need to sit down or the baby will come out now. And so we're, you know, in a really bad position. And we go see Jocelyn's, you know, OB. And the OB's like, Dr. Patricia was wonderful. She was fantastic. Can't say enough good things about Dr. Patricia. She had a CoofDescoberitus and Blitzman. She's like, hey, look, your cervix is basically where it is like the day before you have a baby. So you need to lay down and not get up. And so Jocelyn spent four months on bed rest. And after about two and a half months, we're like, hey, maybe things are getting better. Like we talked to specialists, all kinds of stuff, find all the things we could do. And it turns out nothing was helping. And on Valentine's Day, before Liam was born, the Valentine's Day, we're going into her appointment thinking, oh, maybe they'll let her get off bed rest now. And so we can go have like a romantic, you know, Valentine's dinner together and so she goes in to see the doctor and I'm waiting outside and then they say oh Mark could you come in? So I come in and the doctor's like well Jocelyn do you want to tell him or do you want me? And so then Jocelyn's like you tell him Dr. Patrice and Dr. Patrice says uh we're gonna keep Jocelyn here so if you could go home and go get some clothes for her we're gonna keep her here until the baby comes. And this was still, I mean, Liam still had probably, so he was probably another two months away until he was supposed to be born. Yeah, so then it was a new scare, but like, hey, we've gotten this far, so things are getting better. You're like, you'll follow the thing, it's like a walnut in the bay. It was like a candle up at that time. And I'm like, okay, all right, all right. So I went home, got Jocelyn a bag of stuff, and brought it back. And so for the next month, Caleb and I, little Caleb and I, like, I would go to work, and I'd take him. Like, I'd walk to school with him on my shoulders, and I would tell him The Hobbit. And I'd tell him to him. So he always thought I wrote The Hobbit. And I'm like, no, that wasn't me. He's like, that wasn't you. Like, no, that was a story from another guy. I was like, oh. But I'd take him to school every day, drop him off, go to work, and I'd pick him up. And then we would take the subway. Subway, or sometimes take a taxi, but most of the time it got too expensive because I was a PhD student at the time, so money wasn't something we had, and so I would I would literally take the subway out, we'd go visit her for visiting hours, and then we'd come home. And we did that for a month. And the thing was, it's like we were going and going, and then it got to the point like, hey, you know what? You're at like 32 weeks now. You're at 33 weeks now. You might be able to go home for a bit, but they didn't want her to go home until there was someone to watch. Then my mom was coming to visit for a few weeks, so then the doctor's like, okay, you can go home because your mother-in-law is going to be there. I'm like, how is my mother-in-law going to help my mom? My mom doesn't speak Portuguese. She doesn't know what 9-1-1 is in Portugal. 1-1-2, by the way. So I'm like, that doesn't make sense, but it'll be okay. So Jocelyn got to come home, but she still had to be on bed rest. So then she had another about, let's see, about... A month on bed rest at home and then they let her hey you know what you're at I think she got to like 36 weeks like hey now you can walk around but you can stand up again. So Jocelyn only got to enjoy like one week of being pregnant in Portugal because there's so few babies in Portugal. Everyone's like oh my god a baby. And so she only had like one week of being able to like sit with her coffee on her tummy and go to places. People oh the babies are coming yay. And so she got one week of being like normal pregnancy and then we went in for a checkup at 38 weeks and the doctor's like he's coming tomorrow. But I'm not working at this hospital tomorrow. So we're having this baby now because we've worked too hard to make sure that he comes out safe and sound. And so that night, you know, we had to get someone to take Liam because Liam couldn't stay with us. So they sent Liam to his thing. And then they're like, okay, let's go to do this. And the doctor's like, okay, I'm going to go get the nurses. And then, like, literally, the doctor walks out. Then Jocelyn's like, Mark, go get her. The baby's coming. I'm like, well, she's going to come back. She's like, no, go now. So I had to go get her, bring her back. They go, all right. So they're wheeling her down the way. And they had showed me... Like when we were there months before, when she had the month bed rest in the hospital, they showed me where to change. And so I go in there and I wasn't as fat as I am now, but I was still a pretty big dude. And they didn't tell me where like the larges were or the extra larges or the extra, extra large, like doctor's shirts are or the patient's shirts are. So I found a medium. Like, and so I somehow got into this medium shirt, it's like to my belly button, and like trying to figure out where the heck they are. And so I'm like, I don't want to be like that, I was scared. I'm going to miss the baby being born, right? And so I go in and I see him in there and I open the door. And apparently Jocelyn just said, where's my husband? And the door opens and everybody starts laughing because I come in and this thing is like cutting off my arms here. And it's like at my belly button. And we have the camera, like we're talking old school Nikon Coolpix kind of camera. And they're like, wait, stop. We need a picture of this. So they stopped and took a picture of me and my wife and the baby before they got started. Because like, dude, this is too funny. And then Liam, being the good boy that he is, knew that mom had suffered quite a bit. So I remember I started pushing record on the thing for the birth. It was literally four minutes for when they said, okay, I've pushed record, now let's get started. And to where they cut the cord, had him weighed at 3.00 kilos. Like, that was in total of four minutes. Like that. So she had a lot of bed rest. We had a lot of scares. But Liam was very nice to her to only make her a four minute, less than four minutes of actual birthing kind of stuff. So, yeah. So I'm glad that all these kind of scary stories all have a happy ending in it. But I would say one thing I learned, if you're going to be traveling and you're pregnant, make sure you have the insurance because you never know what might happen. We actually had a fan who had. A baby, like the baby came early and they were living in Finland and it was like a really scary kind of thing and they're like, oh with the insurance and the visas and all these kind of things, thank goodness it all worked out so there is that but it's one of those things now I'm like, hey, never take the chance, have the insurance when you're going to travel because you never know what's going to happen, alright? So yeah, those are some of the scariest things that happened to me on my travels. Luckily, there's been nothing super, super horrible. I know other people have really horrible things happen to them. I've talked to many people over the years have had bad things happen on their travels and some have had no bad. So I just wish everyone to have a very safe and happy traveling season and travels wherever you're going to go. But I want to share some of the scary stories that happened to me and know that, hey, scary things happen, but you can keep on traveling. Anyway, I wish you all the best. I'll say bye from here in Kotor, Montenegro.