Illness, Accidents, And Over-Friendly Strangers: The Worst Things That Can Happen Overseas

There’s plenty that can go wrong when you travel, so we’ve teamed up with Visa (because Visa cards are basically money you can’t lose) to bring you a series of travel tips, dos, don’ts, and epic fails that will hopefully make your next journey abroad hassle-free.

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We consider ourselves here at Junkee a well-travelled bunch, however, everyone has a horror story from time spent abroad that they’d rather forget,  whether it be losing a large sum of cash, falling prey to a local parasite, or something as simple (but heartbreaking) as having to pay for excess baggage on a $10 Ryanair flight. So move over Jack Kerouac, Freya Stark and Norman Lewis, we’ve asked our writers to recount their worst (and, by default, funniest) travel moments for this series of short stories.

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Stuck Inside Of Nagano With The Tonsillitis Blues Again

By: Edward Sharp-Paul

I disembarked in the city of Matsumoto, in Japan’s Nagano Prefecture, and promptly fell apart. My tonsils are pretty much golf balls at this point, and I can’t really ignore them anymore.

I find a hostel. I am groggy. In fact, I feel like a mug full of slugs on drugs, and I’m starting to regret my diet of convenience store sushi, vending-machine beers and peanut brittle.

I need to see a doctor, but I don’t speak a word of Japanese. What does one do? Well, obviously I wave hastily-scrawled medical symbols — a Swiss cross, the pharmaceutical symbol R_x, that sword-and-snake thing — at the receptionist. She seems to get it, and she draws a map with directions to the nearest sword-and-snake man.

The doctor eyes me warily. I make the universal pen-and-paper gesture, he hands me some letterhead, and I draw a stick figure with two golf balls lodged in its neck. I do little motion lines to denote throbbing pain, and a sad face to denote sadness.

The doctor peers down my throat and tenderly explores my neck, a symphony of purrs and revelatory grunts. He disappears, and then returns with a small bottle. He then attempts to mime the prescription with a graceful array of hand gestures. What do they mean? I don’t know. I decide to take two a day.

I stay in bed for a week, with a snowdrift slowly covering my window. I decide to lay off the vending machine beers for a while, but I keep up my prodigious intake of convenience store sushi and peanut brittle.

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Without A Leg To Stand On

By: Patrick Lenton

When you’re in Vietnam (or any country with a questionable lack of road rules) and doing that thing you do when you’re travelling and trying hard to not be a stick in the mud and experience things outside your comfort zone, getting on the back of an engine with wheels and driving alongside your friends into the swirling maelstrom that is Vietnamese traffic seems like a good thing to do.

My girlfriend, Bridget, had similar apprehensions, but is generally a much braver person than I am and rode her motorised scooter with the brow-furrowed intensity of a newborn foal learning to walk. Somehow, our intrepid band got through the day with a minimal amount of near-death experiences. We zipped back and forth through the streets of Hoi An, ending the afternoon with a massage at the mud baths.

Relaxed and empowered, we drove our bikes back to the hotel we hired them from, ready for another night of binge-drinking. After a day of severe driving anxiety, Bridget pulled in like a graceful pelican landing in the water and parked with ease — until someone from the hotel came out and told her she’d have to move slightly up the road. Then, with a rev of her engine and a buck like a middle-aged lady riding a mechanical bull on a hens’ night, Bridget and her bike surged forward, over the gutter, over the sidewalk, and directly into the lobby of the hotel. One of our fellow travellers made a grab for Bridget as she whizzed past, latching onto her shoulder and being propelled into the lobby with her where she smashed her way through a bunch of chairs before finally stopping.

“You have to pay for those,” Bridget was told, after wrestling her scooter out of the wreckage.

“Okay, I’ll pay to repair them,” Bridget replied, with a decent amount of aplomb.

“No — too broken, you’ll pay to replace them!”

The hotel owner then named a fairly large price for a few chairs, even with the exchange rate. Surrounded by the evidence of her crime and with increasingly strident threats that the police would be called, Bridget had no choice but to pay the full amount, despite the fact that the majority of the damage was a few scratches — not really worth replacing the entire chair.

After her money was handed over to the unsmiling hotelier, Bridget looked around the hotel and said, “Well, I paid for these broken chairs, so technically I own them now.” And we each grabbed the wreckage of a seat and took it with us, and to this day, a chair-leg holds pride of place on our mantelpiece.

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Love In The Time Of Colombia

By: Alice Williams

I knew he was sick before he said so. Laying in the hammock next to mine, twenty other sleeping bodies around us and the waves of the Caribbean breaking against the rocks of the tiny island on which we were camped, I could feel a cheap jaffle-iron heat radiating from him through the pitch dark. “I feel really… bad,” he whispered.

We held hands across hammocks until the sun finally turned up, then crossed low tide to the ramshackle mainland camp of Tayrona National Park. The bad news was the boat didn’t come until midday, the worse news was because this was Colombia it very probably wouldn’t come at all, and the Courtney Stodden Twitter poetry-level awful news was that the only other way out was the way we’d come in: a two-and-a-half hour hike through varied tropical terrain. Stark stretches of abandoned beach, dense and mountainous rainforest, mangrove swamps sentineled by super aggressive giant crabs.

Hours later at the hospital that took his credit card and passport on arrival but not his symptoms, we turned over the death-march with a twisted wonder. Four hours of puking, sweating, crying and mild hallucinations had brought us closer than the preceding year of dating ever could have.

He looked at me with shining eyes and said the words my heart had always wanted to hear from a man: “At least now we never have to go to India.”

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The Parable Of The Good Airbnb Guest

By: Jenny Noyes

I’d been hanging about in NYC for a couple of weeks after surviving Hurricane Irene, and was due to move from an airless Craigslist room in Bedford Stuyvesant to my friend’s Greenpoint couch when said friend gave me a call. Bad news: his housemate had had it up to here with Aussies on the couch, so I was no longer cool to stay. I was homeless in New York, so the obvious thing to do was stay up in a bar all night and then catch the 6am bus to Washington DC. How smart and resourceful!

Arriving in DC unwashed and reeling from a long night in a bar, a broken bus chair, no sleep, the sun beating down and no idea how to get anywhere (it seemed clear that public transport did not exist and I obviously couldn’t afford a cab), I decided it would be easy enough to just wander somewhere on foot until I found a bus or a monument to look at or whatever. I’m not going to go too far into it, but suffice to say I spent the day hot, bored and confused before getting rained on and eaten by mosquitoes at the Lincoln Memorial, which was in the middle of renovations that made the surrounding parklands closely resemble their past life as a swamp.

Rescue came in the form of my Airbnb host, who picked me up in her car and proceeded to take me under her wing, hopping around her favourite dive bars and back to her place, where she took pity on the fact that I was about to undertake a 45-hour train ride to Portland (another travel fail that seemed like a good idea at the time?).

She said she had a book for me to read, Tom Robbins’ Another Roadside Attraction. The next morning, she left the book out for me with a freshly baked muffin, a cup of tea and, uh, a massive wad of $20s tucked inside the book she was giving me as a gift. My mind ran through the gamut of possible reasons for me receiving this money. Accident? Charity? Destiny? Trick? Morality test? I thought about how easily and innocently I could have taken the book that morning if I just hadn’t opened it up and looked inside. I could have been halfway to Portland before realising my fortune. But then what?

Being the honest (and rather wimpy) chump that I am, I left the money behind, along with the book, and even a modest tip for the host. I guess I just wasn’t ready for my next travel fail of getting into trouble with the feds — or with anyone who keeps enormous wads of cash lying about, for that matter.

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[feature image via Flickr]

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Got any good travel stories? Tell Visa how you lost cash travelling overseas and you could win one of three ‘Holiday Replays‘, valued at $20,000 each. Visa cards are basically money you can’t lose.