This Travel Is a Risky Business
Or is it?
All travel involves an element of risk. No, we're not talking about nude sunbathing on an ice shelf in Antarctica or floating down the rain-drenched Congo River rapids in a leaky canoe. But when you leave the comfort of your home, stuff happens.
Sometimes, the unexpected can intimidate. Often, it turns out that the question marks lie entirely in your own head. We've experienced both and, in the process, have come away with some fond, if curiously shaped, memories.
Five of our more eccentric adventures:
Stromboli:
The evening ferry from Sicily was near-empty. The island was no more than a smoldering volcano with a minor village attached. We disembarked in the moonless January off-season to find a single municipal light, no street signs of any kind, and no one from the rental property to greet us. Within minutes, there was no one about at all.
Eventually, we found longitude and latitude marks for our destination on a smartphone. With a compass app, we trudged for an hour in the dark before we came to a sign on the wall of a shuttered resort. When we called the phone number, a voice protested that they'd been looking for us all over the island. We ended up with the mini-palace to ourselves for two gorgeous days, before a winter storm flew up the Tyrrhenian Sea and forced our evacuation.
Luzern:
After a few glasses of champagne, we realized we'd never done the adult thing at the presumably sharp tippy-top of an alp. We set out into the moonless night and eventually found ourselves winding up a steep country road. Except it was more a cow path than an Autobahn, and the gentle slope to our right soon disappeared into a precipice to nowhere.
With inches to spare, we had no choice but to keep going. But then, by pure luck, we came to a barn built into the cliff. After a half-hour of turning the car and catching our breath above the glittering lights of the valley, we crawled back to civilization and sanity.
East Jerusalem:
Two weeks after the insurrection known as the Second Intifada, it didn't help that we were evacuated from the bus station in Eilat for a bomb scare. But we climbed aboard the Jerusalem bus anyway and traveled with a full complement of heavily armed IDF troopers (younger than our children) into the city. We wanted to walk The Twelve Stations of the Cross, but the entire hike lay beyond a narrow gate down a steep, crowded, overhung, chariot-sized alley in the Arab enclave.
We'd managed a hundred meters or so, when a blind panic seized both of us. At least we didn't run, but it was definitely one of the power walks of our lives.
Back in the Jewish Quarter, we glanced at each other and realized how silly we must have looked. So we turned back and spent the rest of the afternoon wandering down through the Arab Quarter and chatting with all manner of friendly Palestinians. They might not have cared for some of their neighbors, but, to our surprise, they couldn't get enough of us Americans.
Istanbul:
You can't climb up to the towering Pera District from the Galata Bridge, and the Galata Tunel Funicular closes at 10PM. So when we showed up after dinner at 10:16, we were stuck. We refused to take a taxi, so we ended up wandering for three hours around to the back of the mountain.
Centuries ago, the Ottoman Sultans carved this area into compact commercial communities to keep tabs on their foreign merchants. No one lives here anymore, and at 5PM, the streets empty of human beings. Five hours later, the alleys and arcades—none of them bothered by a street light—seemed to have changed little, when we tiptoed through in the eerie, silent dead of that January night.
Mexico City:
We only include this one because of the sheer volume of knowledgeable advice we’d received from gringos who’d probably never visited the city. Never take a bus or a green taxi and above all, stay away from the red lights of the Zona Rosa. As it happened, our hotel lay on the edge of the Zona, and from the day we arrived, we took the buses and green taxis everywhere. But one of our high points was a political demonstration that erupted on la Reforma.
A local news cameraman spotted Glinda taking photographs and started a conversation. We peppered him with questions, until he offered to park his wife with Ben, while he guided Glinda into the middle of the chaos. In case you were wondering, our girl is no wallflower.
The point being…
Most travel risks fall into four broad categories:
Disease
Crime
Anger
Your own fear
The first two exist everywhere and can be contained with intelligent preparation and reasonable precautions.
Long before COVID-19, there were yellow and dengue fevers, malaria, rabies, grisly infections, and all manner of hypothetical medical mishaps. Yet the world continued to turn, human beings slept, ate, and rode trains and buses—and toured the world.
Crime will probably be with us until we're uniformly poor and satisfied with a drab equality. But criminals spend more time than you think picking their targets. Your job is to avoid gifting them with the easiest bullseye on the bus.
Anger, on the other hand, shifts with the winds of religion and culture and the global competition for resources, but mostly with the leadership cycle in a given country.
Right now is probably not the best time for an American to go bar-hopping in Kinshasa or Caracas. Probably not the best time to try out your new bikini on the beaches of Riyadh or Casablanca. Beirut was a paradise in the 1950s and a catastrophe from the 1970s onward—but who knows what will greet you in another few decades? In less than a generation, Vietnam has gone from American bugaboo to the best kept vacation secret in Asia.
In other words…
When gossip and paranoia edge out research and common sense, when you pull back from true experience because of the ugly thing that almost happened to that friend-of-a-friend-of-a-second-cousin, you forfeit to the biggest risk of all—doing nothing. In future articles, we'll get into the weeds of specific adventures, but for now, keep this in mind:
Risk is non-binary. It lies on a long, intricate continuum between minimal and foolhardy. And you have much more control over where you land along that line than you might think.
And no, there is no sharp point awaiting you at the tippy-top of a Swiss Alp. But keep trying—we certainly will.
Thanks for your comments
Awesome insight. Made me laugh at the sheer adventure of traveling and the honesty of the writers.