If you travel extensively, you should have a few essentials: a carry-on bag that fits into the overhead bin, a valid passport, all the required inoculations, a pair of comfortable walking shoes, and perhaps most important of all, a sense of humor. The ability to laugh at ones predicament comes in handy when youre confronted with the absurd situations every globetrotting adventurer faces sooner or later: lost luggage that keeps arriving at whatever destination youve just left, unpalatable menu items, bizarre local customs, and the occasional encounter with a fanatically officious, deeply suspicious border guard in a country where you dont speak the language. But rest assured that it could be even worse -- or at least more amusing. Travelers long have regaled their friends with tales of road weirdness. Travel stories have provided comic fodder for writers from Homer to Mark Twain. For your vicarious enjoyment, ive collected a few of those hilarious travel tales 1: Why Its a Bad Idea to Pee off a Cliff The Worlds Unluckiest Traveler contest is sponsored by Travel Guard, a company that insures travelers to cover the cost of trip-disrupting mishaps. The 2010 winner was Dr. Gary Feldman, a semi-retired Ventura, Calif., physician. He suffered a particularly bizarre accident while on a teaching trip to Ho Chi Minh City organized by the humanitarian group Project Vietnam. As Feldman explains in a YouTube video, he went to the edge of a cliff in a terraced valley to take a picture, and then, feeling natures call, moved a little closer to the edge so that he could urinate. The edge of the cliff just gave way, Feldman said. It wasnt solid. He fell about 30 feet, landing on another ledge and shattering his leg. As Feldman explains, that painful injury was a lucky break, because it stopped him from going over that ledge and falling another 400 feet. Getting the injured doctor off the ledge was a perplexing problem for his rescuers. Im big and [the Vietnamese] are small, he explains. So they started stopping cars on the road until they got about 10 of them. They got 10 guys, and they put me on a board and started dragging me along the ledge to where it wasnt so steep and they could bring me up. I was hanging on for dear life and almost fell off the board. Fortunately, Feldman had taken out a travel insurance policy, which helped cover his medical expenses and transportation home. But theres a silver lining to the story. When I got the check, there was a little flyer about the contest, he recalls. My daughter said, You gotta enter it! Feldman ended up winning, and received a $10,000 travel voucher, which he said he would use to extend one of his humanitarian medical trips. At Least He Didnt Gargle With It On a trip to Oslo, Norway, author Bill Bryson stayed in a hotel where the chambermaid each morning left a packet of a mysterious product, Bio Tex Bla, whose label instructions explained only that it was a minipakke for ferie, hyel og weekend. Bryson recalls that he spent many happy hours sniffing the product and puzzling about its intended use. Was it for gargling, or was it a toilet cleaner? Eventually he decided -- correctly, as it turns out -- that it was a complimentary package of laundry detergent, and indeed, it seemed to get his clothes pretty clean.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 13:41:35 +0000
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