Bad Travel

RHYS BOWEN: Today, as you read this blog, I’m on a plane, somewhere over the North Atlantic, heading for England. I’m visiting Europe for the first time in three years. That’s a big chunk of my life without seeing friends and family and I’m so looking forward to it. But I’m really out of the habit of traveling. Airports, security lines, airplanes, taxis are all scary things at the moment. I wear my mask and hope for the best.

And I remind myself that travel is always an adventure. When it goes smoothly and the hotel is lovely and the sights are spectacular and the food is great the memory passes into a pleasant haze. The trips we remember are those when everything did not go well.

So this is a post about my worst travel experiences: at number one on the list has to be our journey to Ladakh. This was back in the seventies. Ladakh had just opened to foreigners and we thought we’d like to be the first tourists to see what was essentially a forbidden country. So we arranged for a Ladakhi driver to take us in a jeep. He arrived at five a.m. speaking no known language. We communicated by gestures and set off.

                At first the trip went up into the Himalayas through pleasant alpine meadows. Then the climb began in earnest up the Zoji La pass (15,000 feet). Road unpaved with occasional water coursing across it. Occasional groups of nomads with their goats to be negotiated AND a sheer drop on one side.  We made it to the top and entered the Dras valley—coldest and highest inhabited valley in the world. In an open jeep we wrapped in blankets. On the other side of the valley we encountered a bleak area of high desert mountains, and then suddenly, a police road block.

We stopped. An Indian army person approached, sporting a turban and magnificent mustaches. We would have to go back. (he waved his hands at us) There had been a landslide and 25 km of road had washed away. For one crazy moment we considered carrying our luggage across 25 km of landslide in the hope that we'd find transportation on the other side. Then sanity prevailed. We had no alternative but to turn around and go back. Of course the driver had known this but conveniently failed to mention it. His inscrutable Tibetan face betrayed nothing as we got back in the jeep. We hadn’t eaten since 9. It was now 4:30. We were cold and hungry and had almost twelve hours of travel ahead of us.

                That was when we found the driver’s idea of saving gasoline was to turn off the engine when going downhill. Seriously downhill, like a 15,000 foot pass with a sheer drop on one side (and streams rushing across it. And goats.) I was sitting beside him and my job was to slap his hand every time it went to the key.  We finally got back to Kashmir at midnight. We did not tip him.

And the kicker to this, the insult to injury.... we had a lovely houseboat on the lake in Kashmir and both got dysentery so badly that the doctor had to be rowed across to us in the middle of the night. So our relaxing week in Kashmir was spent staring at the carved ceiling in between staggering to the bathroom.

So that was the worst. The others are mild in comparison: the time we went to the station in Lourdes to catch at train to Toulouse, 3 hours away, only to find the trains on strike. We were due to fly out of Toulouse that afternoon and out of London next day. We ended up taking a taxi (300 Euros), quite illegally, as taxis were on strike too.  And we had a similar strike experience when French rail was on strike as we left Florence, Italy so we had to make sure we took an Italian train into Nice. 

We’ve had bad hotels, dodgy plumbing, Dehli belly etc but on the whole it’s been all good. Amazing, actually. I feel so blessed to have experienced India, Bali, Mayasia, Thailand, almost all of Europe, Australia, NZ etc etc. as well as Egypt, Morocco.  These days I find myself opting for more comforting, familiar destinations.

                I’ll let you know how this one measures up.

AND who has a travel horror story to share?