I don’t travel often, but when I do, something bad always happens. At this point I’m shocked my friends still ask me to go on trips with them. I’m just going to focus on the ridiculous events that happen when I’m in other countries because if I include domestic travel stories too, this post will never end. I’m going to start at the beginning, with my first trip out of the country.
- Mexico
- I bought the flight for the wrong day. My friends got there a day before me then had to come pick me up at the airport when I landed the next day.
- Since I arrived late at night, I didn’t have a chance to buy sunblock right away, so I got sun poisoning our first full day. Our air bnb neighbors were visiting from Mexico City and they were super chill. They invited us to go on a road trip to a lake with them the next day. I spent the entire three hour ride home in pain because my back was covered in blisters from spending all day on a boat with no protection from the sun.
- Argentina
- My debit card wouldn’t work at any ATMs for the first few days so my friend had to pay for everything until we found one that would work for me.
- I fell asleep before we could make it to the NYE party we got tickets to. They don’t go out until like 3am in Argentina, and I’m used to being home by 3am so this one I’m blaming on cultural differences (even though it’s 100% my fault).
- Pretty much everything in this country shuts down on New Year’s Day, and one of my traveling companions did not handle this well. We basically couldn’t do anything fun until we found an open restaurant because she didn’t want to just eat granola bars all day.
- Brazil
- I had the same travel companion from Argentina, and from here on out she will be referred to as TC to save me time because I’m a lazy typer.
- Almost every time we went out we had to go back to the air bnb early because TC got tired.
- We went on a hike to some waterfalls with our new local friends and they hike to get there was absolutely insane. They described it as a course similar to that ninja warrior show. There is a 110% chance that this park would have been shut down in a second if it was in the U.S. At one point I was dangling off a cliff clinging onto a rope.
- Out of all the beautiful beaches in Rio, TC wanted to go to Copacabana because of that stupid song. It was super touristy which equates to super sketchy because of pickpockets. My friend and I went to get in the water and told TC to watch our stuff. She did not watch our stuff. My backpack got stolen and I lost my phone, ID, money, shoes, clothes, water bottle, and many other things. The best part of this: SHE NEVER APOLOGIZED!!! I don’t get mad easily but I will never get over this. She got mad at ME! Because my stuff got stolen! How ridiculous!
- Dominican Republic
- I got sunburnt on a boat again. Will I ever learn my lesson?
- Most of the bad things on this trip happened on our trip to the airport at the very end. We had to take a bus to a mini-van to a motorcycle, all just to get to the airport.
- The bus ride: A girl that was visibly on drugs sat next to me, first red flag. She slept on my shoulder for the first few hours of the ride, which was annoying, but honestly best case scenario was for her to be asleep and not talking to me. When she woke up, she leaned over me and threw up out the window, second red flag. She kept like elbowing me to try to make me move over more to give her more space but I was pressed against the window with no where to go. When she finally got off the bus, there was blood all over the seat next to me because she got her period!!!! That was the final red flag and half the bus was just staring at me waiting for me to freak out but I calmly stood up and got off before I lost my mind.
- The mini-van: We told the driver so many times to make sure to drop us off at the airport but he drove right past it then told us we had to take a motorcycle the rest of the way because it was too unsafe to walk.
- The motorcycle: My two friends were on one bike and I was on another, so I was super sketched out and was ready to leap off this bike at any second because he would randomly drive over to the other side of the road away from my friends. They also way over charged us, 7 times as much as it should have been. When I got off the motorcycle I was so happy to finally be getting off that I practically leaped off, causing my flip flop to get stuck on the foot rest which caused me to trip and burn my leg on the exhaust. It was such a bad burn that we went straight to a pharmacy in the airport to get medicine for it. This was over a month ago now and I’m still taking care of this damn burn.
I hope you all enjoyed reading about the downsides of traveling. The next time you see me post a picture from my travels on instagram, please remember this and know that there is definitely a really bad experience to balance out the good one that I post about.
Emily Wessel 