Last week, I started off 2020 by rounding up my Top 5 Worst Travel Moments of the Decade. In the last 10 years, I went from having only travelled to 5 countries, to having travelled to 29 – which helped me achieve my goal of 25 countries by age 25. I travelled sporadically and mostly locally for the first 4 years; in 2015 came the big backpacking trip around Europe, which I always say was when the travel bug bit; after that, I travelled to a new country almost every year.
So from all that travelling, which I was privileged to be able to do, I needled out the top 5 worst travel moments of the decade. Here they are:
5. A man in the park
The time when my sister and I were in Park Guell at nighttime, and a man started following us as he touched himself. It was pretty disturbing. Two words: no thanks.
4. Nausea to the nth degree
What could be worse than being followed around a park at nighttime by a creepy man? The time I had the most extreme case of nausea — and I would have rather jumped into the ocean with the Great White Sharks while I was cage diving in South Africa.
3. Period pains while travelling in the Philippines
Period pains are already bad when they leave you in fetal position on the couch, hugging a hot water bottle. They’re even worse when they make you pass out in the back of a tricycle in a foreign country.
2. Dealing with food poisoning while hiking
It seems that many of my top 5 worst travel moments have to do with bodily functions gone wrong… And this one is no exception: I was vomiting my guts out as I hiked down the mountains in China.
1. Nighttime hotel break-in
At first, I thought I didn’t know which one was actually my worst travel moment, because at the time, they were all equally terrible. They all made me feel like nothing could be worse.
However, since I have to really put superlatives on it, the nighttime hotel break-in takes the cake. It made me fearful. Since then, I have been more cautious – on the boarder of paranoid – at nighttime. I will triple check that I locked my doors at night. I will tread carefully when exiting an elevator, look both ways down the hall before leaving the room, and peer around in the dark… just in case someone is there.
None of these terrible things were location-specific — it wasn’t because I was travelling that these things happened. It was just something that happened while travelling. All of these moments could have happened at home. So while my memories of Santorini are tainted because of the hotel break-in, that doesn’t mean I will never visit Santorini again. I just have to get a better security system… door wedge, anyone?
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