My sister said it best, “How the hell are you still alive?” I don’t know – I never really thought about it like that. I’ve traveled all around the world, fully exposing myself to people and places that a more cautious man would judge imprudent (and by exposing I don’t mean I stood on the steps of the Louvre and bare-ass mooned the good citizens of Paris, though I definitely thought about it.)
Isn’t it dangerous to travel in foreign countries? Yes it is. But here’s the thing you’re not realizing – it’s damn dangerous in the US too. In some ways it’s even more dangerous. Life in the US, for the average person, is such a dream world, so sterilized from normal existence that we become docile, our survival instincts muted. Never once when I was travelling did I hear of a kid going into a school and shooting the place up. There is no “Bowling for IStanbul”. Unless I missed it, disgruntled employees don’t show up the next day in Ecuador and spray machine gun fire at their peers. Senators don’t get gunned down randomly at Wal-Marts in Bangkok. Furthermore, would you walk around in the South Bronx by yourself at night? Could a traveller from another country easily see the murder rates in Baltimore and decide that Washington DC is too dangerous to visit? Maybe.
I’ve found that there’s street crime, and then there’s political crime. A random dude on the street mugs you with a knife – that’s street crime, and the intent is to take your money or possessions. Political crime is far more nefarious. Radical political groups, drug cartels kidnapping and killing people, and religious zealots perpetrating violence are examples of political crime. No es bueno. That is what it’s very important to avoid those situations – and relatively easy to control; don’t go places where there is a bad problem with political crime. Don’t hike near the Iranian border without a map. That’s not funny, it’s not a game, and it’s not adventurous - it’s just plain fucking stupid.
Outside of being cautious and exercising a healthy dose of street smarts, some things are just out of our control. You can’t always prevent things from happening in life, and the perception that we can make ourselves completely safe is false, and often does us a disservice. We end up surrounding ourselves with so many gates and alarms and locks that pretty soon we’ve just constructed our own prison, not locking the bad guys out but locking ourselves in. Honestly, you’re better off just getting a dog.
So what’s the secret to being safe while travelling abroad? People. That’s it. Win the friendship of some locals and you will always – and I do mean always – be as safe as possible in any situation. And here’s another secret – the poorer a country or a neighborhood is, the safer you will be if you meet the right locals. I prefer to get down and dirty with the everyday people. I appreciate their values and ethics, and if you show just a modicum of respect and humility they will treat you like the richest king on earth. When I was travelling around the world for a year my buddy, Shane, and I had a formula that worked like a charm. Upon arriving in every new city or town we would make a beeline for the local university or public park, where we would find the basketball courts and play some hoops. Inevitably we’d meet some cool guys and gain their respect by mixing it up on the courts and show them that we’re as scrappy as any Los Povres. I’ve met some of the nicest people imaginable in this way – in very humble surroundings, people I am still friends with and would trust with my life. I show genuine interest for people and their lives wherever I go, and you can’t fake that. They know I appreciate them, and from there they look out for me, showing me where to go, what to do, and introduce me to tons of their family and friends. Of course people will test you a little bit at first, but I just try to be myself and surrender to the outcome of any situation while keeping my cool, and I think they sense that confidence.
So what’s the most dangerous place I’ve been? That’s a hard question to answer. I’ll run down a few countries and situations I’ve been in and let you be the judge.
Of all the places I’ve been the Middle East is bar far the most dangerous when it comes to political crime, particularly Israel and Palestine, spurred by thousands of years of religious wars and land disputes. In Israel (or Palestine, depending on which side of the conflict your opinion lies), danger is a regular part of life. People have written thousands of pages on the subject and still fallen short, so I won’t even attempt to give the Cliff notes. But the potential for political violence and “terrorism” is an everyday occurrence, so people become desensitized to it. Not that they become complacent – absolutely the opposite, but there is a certain fatalism that grows when you live in a country the size of New Jersey and are completely surrounded by mortal enemies who deny even your right to exist.
When I was in Israel I, too learned the culture of violence, and grew to accept it. They tell you not to take the bus in the mornings, because if someone plants a bomb it’s probably going to be where the crowds flock. When you go into the movies or a mall the police search your bags and backpacks thoroughly. Military service is mandatory in Israel, even for women, and so every nineteen year old you see is in uniform and carrying an M16 machine gun. They are required to carry these guns with them even when they are going about their civilian lives, so you might be in a disco and see a stack of machine guns by the front door, or in line at a crowded café and the barrel of one of their machine guns pokes you in the back. These measures aren’t just precautions – the war is going on daily not on battlefields but among the populace. Several times in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem I saw a bunch of police and Bomb Squad trucks rushing down the city streets, responding to a bomb threat. A bomb went off in the resort seaside city of Eilat while I was there, killing a dozen people. One of my last days in Tel Aviv I was taking a stroll on the beach right near the beautiful Mediterranean ocean. I had my headphones on so was in my own little world and didn’t notice that no one else was around. In the distance I heard yelling but thought nothing of it, until four soldiers came sprinting at me with guns drawn, waving their arms and screaming for me to stop. They told me there was a bomb scare on the beach and they’d cleared the area of people, but I had inadvertently walked right into the middle of it. Oops. How do the Israeli’s deal with this stress and everyday violence? They party their asses off.
Third World cities are always dangerous in the wrong hoods, just like any big city in the US. A lot of cities that are complete shit holes with few redeeming qualities, and you’ll only find the extremes of the ultra-rich or the extremely poor. Rio de Janiero, on the other hand, is one of the coolest places on earth, so vibrant and beautiful that I guarantee I’d be living there already if they spoke Spanish and not Portuguese, which is like trying to understand Bob Dylan with marbles in his mouth. The Favelas, or bad neighborhoods, are so dangerous that a gringo would be robbed, stripped and stabbed before they got a chance to take two steps inside. They act as their own self-sufficient reservations for the poor, who don’t have to pay rent, and have their own schools, stores, and medical clinics in the Favellas, so they never have to leave. They’re governed by the brutal violence of drug dealers and gangs, and even the police won’t go up there. They even give guided tours of the Favellas – and you’re 100% safe if you’re with a Favella resident.
Shane and I were shooting hoops at a huge park complex outside of Copacabana one night. The good people of Rio exercise all day and night, and the beaches, soccer, and volleyball fields are lit up and busy at 4am just as if it was 4 in the afternoon. We met some cool local guys on the court and one was a DJ who invited us to a party that night in a neighborhood called Lapas. He said he spun a lot of hip hop – one of my first true loves – so we were excited to go. That night we jumped a cab and headed out. When we told the driver that we wanted to go to Lapas he did a double take. We had to tell him ten times, and still he didn’t want to go into that neighborhood. We found the place on a dark, deserted street of warehouses – and he wouldn’t stop the cab. We had to scream at him and open the doors while still driving for him to drop us off, and then he sped off with tires squealing. Outside the warehouse there were no signs of life except a couple guys standing in the door, smoking weed. We asked them about the party and showed them the flyer and they nodded us in. The warehouse was jumping – a bunch of local kids rented it out and set up huge speakers, a few pool tables, and brought in a ton of beer. There were hundreds of poor Brazilian city kids and not one gringo, nor one single kid who could even be described as middle class. Everyone single person looked at us hard as we walked in – testing us, but no one gave us shit. We found our DJ friend and he enthusiastically greeted us and introduced us to his friends. It was all love from there. We didn’t have a problem all night, mixing and mingling with these kids, especially when they saw we loved hip hop as much as they did. We all drank out of 32oz bottles that were about 80 cents each and got properly faded on some wild Brazillian herbs, and danced until around 6 in the morning, when we found a cab to get back out of there. In retrospect I guess you could characterize that as incredibly dangerous – the two gringos amongst hundreds of glue-sniffing poor hip hop heads in a Brazilian neighborhood that even the taxis wouldn’t go into. But once we got some local love I felt safer than going to Chili’s on a Friday night in the US.
In Caracas, Venezuela we hired an old taxi driver to drive us all around the city and show us the attractions – including a glimpse of the bad neighborhoods to see how the common person lived. He was very hesitant, and we had to urge him again and again to drive us into these barrios. “This doesn’t look so bad” we said to ourselves, and I snapped a couple photos of the scenery. When we turned up this one street the driver whipped the car around and sped off in the other direction, tires screetching. When we questioned him why he abruptly drove off he only said “ladrones”, which means “thieves.” We thought he was crazy and being paranoid, but found out otherwise quickly. We were waiting at a red light only a few blocks down and all of a sudden a motorcycle with two guys on it rolled up. They pulled up right next to my door and started yelling and reaching through the open back window, trying to grab at me. They were trying to rob us for cameras, wallets, and watches, whatever a tourist would have on them. I was in shock but in a split second it was obvious they were about to get violent and we were trapped in the back of this taxi. All of a sudden the old man slammed the gas and took off – speeding through a red light and dodging traffic. The thieves on the bike followed us for a couple blocks, trying to catch up and pull alongside the swerving taxi, but our cagey driver eluded them, and just as quickly they stopped following. We were safe.
It took a minute for my heart to stop jumping. Our driver explained that they were gang members, controlling that barrio’s drug trade with violence, robbery, and intimidation. He said that they had knives and maybe guns and they weren’t afraid to use them. So when they saw a taxi cab in their neighborhood (which never happens) and a white guy pulling out a nice camera (which never happens), and decided to jack us. This must have looked as conspicuous as if a helicopter landed in the middle of your street and Donald Trump got out. The driver turned his face around and showed us a big scar that led from his cheek to the side of his mouth. He told us that he’d been carjacked before in his taxi, and the robbers pulled a pistol and shot him at close range. The bullet ripped through the side of his mouth and luckily came out of his cheek.
Bolivia was quite poor, even by South American standards. I enjoyed it thoroughly. La Paz, the main city, it at such a high elevation that it looks like they built a city on a crater on the moon. The young people have all of the passion and anger that every generation experiences, but they have no hopes for the future. They will always be poor as shit, and have few, if any choices, other than to scratch and claw to eek out a meager existence for the rest of their lives. Their only outlets are football, beer, music, and partying. I loved going to the bars in Bolivia, though Shane and I stuck out like aliens. But people were so friggin friendly it was amazing. We would show up at the bars on a crowded Friday night and jump in line along with throngs of Bolivians in their early 20’s waiting to get in and blow off some steam. Soon enough the local guys would say wassup to us, asking where we were from, and teaching us the fight songs of their local football clubs. Everyone wanted us to meet their friends, so Shane and I were ushered here and there for introductions and shots to celebrate, split up and not seeing each other again for the entire night, other than passing briefly amongst the insanely crowded, hot club. Crowd control is a real problem in places like that because if there was a fire they was no ventilation, no sprinklers, no fire extinguishers, and blocked all of the doors and windows with bars to keep thieves out. So if there was a fire or a fight people would panic and trample each other trying to get out the door, and inevitably a bunch of people would be stampeded or burnt to a crisp. This particular night didn’t end in a fire but another kind of pyrotechnics. There were a bunch of crazy drunk guys causing trouble on the street outside the bar, so the police came. The police represent a corrupt establishment in Third World country more than they do safety and service – no one is happy to see them. The youths started talking shit to them and next thing you know the cops are spraying tear gas to break up the crowd. Tear gas is a son of a bitch – the green clouds float and linger in the air, sticking to flesh and clothing and drifting on the slightest breeze, until the whole area is infected. Once you even get a whiff of it your lungs are on fire and your eyes feel like someone poured bleach in them. The tear gas wafted into the club and caused a frenzy of coughing, choking, and people trying to run for the exits. Somehow I got out and ran across the street to the park to safety and fresh air. The bar was dead for a couple hours as it aired out, so someone bought a bottle of rum and a two liter of coke we all sat around doing shots under the green moon until it was safe to go in again.
In Ecuador the police love using tear gas as well. I was shopping for a pillow one day downtown and stumbled upon a University protest. The college kids were protesting a raise in tuition rates, which is a big deal in a country where you have almost no opportunities for education or advancement unless you’re part of the 1% of ultra-rich families who run everything. On one side of the wide intersection all the students gathered, with signs and bandanas covering their mouths, and hiding their appearances, and the police were set up on the other side. I had wandered up behind the policemen, barricaded behind riot tanks with water hoses and plastic riot shields and clubs. Of course there was no organization and it was amazing that someone like me could just walk into the middle of the fray without being stopped. The kids would yell and scream and throw rocks as hard as they could at the cops. Some hit but most of them fell short. The police endured it for the most part, just deflecting the rocks with their riot shields, but if a kid got too close they drew their guns. After a while when the students didn’t look like they were disbanding anytime soon, the cops fired off tear gas grenades into the throng of students. The corridor of streets filled with toxic smoke, and I caught some great pictures before my eyes and lungs started burning too. I high-tailed it out of there before things got really bad.
I lived in Ecuador for a few months, in a tiny concrete bunker with no heat, no hot water, and only one lightbulb. My only window overlooked a postcard-beautiful valley amongst the mountains on West side of the main city, Quito, which rests at 10,000 feet above sea level. My roommate was Loco Gringo John, a cool cat I met at the bars one night, who was coincidentally from Connecticut, my home state. He was an awesome guy with an interesting look – a shaved head and all ripped up and covered with tattoos. He was an atheist who went to a conservative Catholic college where he used to drop acid and then sit through Mass. Whoaaa that’s a mind fuck. He was also one of the nicest guys you’d ever meet.
Our best local friend down there was a huge Brazillian dude named Santiago. At first glance Santi was imposing – a 6’6” man-giant who was black as coal and a monster on the basketball court. But as we got to know him his intelligence and kindness stood out – he was in school for architectural engineering and as sweet as pie. Every night every one of us went to the same bar, Arribar, in a funky neighborhood of Quito. Every night Loco Gringo John and I would get fucked up, and every night Santi insisted on walking us home the fifteen minutes up hill to our apartment. He was like our little-big brother, and was just genuinely concerned for our safety. We thought he was just being paranoid, but there was a reason why the security guys at the Arribar wore bulletproof vests and carried shotguns – someone got stabbed or robbed at gunpoint almost nightly around there. I never had a problem (probably because I was with Santi – duhhhh!) but once I was gone Loco Gringo John got jumped by two guys with knives and robbed, and then a bus he was on got boarded and robbed by two masked bandits with pistols. The poor dude couldn’t catch a break.
The streets around Arribar were safe for us when we were together. I remember clearly one night – one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had – about seven of us were at Arribar. Our local friends had a tough time affording the $1 beers, so we’d all leave together and walk down the block to the local liquor store. They’d buy a bottle of Aguardiente, the local firewater, and bring it on the street and mix it with Coke in a plastic bag and then pore it into plastic cups, or sometimes just pass it around and take slugs of it straight. All around us were robbers, drug dealers, hookers, and the toughest gang in town, the Policia. It was about as gritty as you could get. Two men in tuxedos, carrying big instrument cases, walked by. We said hi to them and offered them a drink. They considered it for a moment and then joined our circle and took a slug. Santi asked them were they were going dressed like that, and it turns out they were classical musicians on their way home from giving a concert at the Cultural Center. They were nice guys and so we gave them another shot of our precious Aguardient, and on a whim, half kidding around, I asked him to play. To my surprise they unlocked their cases and took out a full sized cello and a harp and started playing right there on the street corner. Those two instruments created the most beautiful sounds my ears have ever heard. I closed my eyes as they strummed a melodic symphony, and the noisy street; car horns, drunks breaking bottles on the sidewalk, quarrelling of lovers, all faded away until their was nothing but the music. I opened my eyes and for the first time that night I noticed the sky was filled with stars. They seemed to grow bigger and brighter like they were leaning in to hear the angelic notes rising to meet them. When they were done it was dead silent on the street and we were speechless. They packed up their cases, thanked us, and jumped on a bus before they got robbed for their instruments. I will always remember that.
One would thing that a departure to more “civilized” countries would make us safer, but I found the opposite to be true. A good example is our visit to Australia. Jesus Christ everywhere we went in Australia we got into fights. The white dudes there are very racist, very anti-immigrant, and sexist pigs, and love to swill massive amounts of beer and display their toughness – not a good combination for the rest of us. Within a four-day span we got in at least three altercations. One night we were chilling at a local disco when Shane, who was smooth with the ladies, saw a chick he wanted to meet on the dance floor. He went up to her and said hi and touched her on the arm to ask her the time or when the place closed or something. Out of nowhere this diesel psychopath with a shaved head and prison tats ran onto the dance floor and threw Shane back about ten yards. He started screaming that no one was going to touch his girlfriend, and was ready to fight. I ran up behind him and got him in a great chokehold. I have no idea where it came from, but I had his head, his neck, and his whole right arm completely immobilized like a dangling puppet. I guess I should have hit him – I have a bad habit of not taking the cheap shot in a fight, and I thought it was going to cost us dearly. The dude kicked and thrashed, ripping my shirt, but he couldn’t get free. By now the commotion brought four HUGE bouncers, all rugby-playing Mowlrys (think Samoans), who made me let the guy go and ushered us to the door. As we all marched outside I thought for sure I was going to have to fight one of the Mowlrys, and I began mentally preparing to eat my meals through a straw the rest of my life. But they were cool and just wanted to clear the imbroglio out of the club. Once we were on the front street the psycho guy huffed and puffed and yelled and jumped up and down, and then charged at Shane, who stood their cool as a cucumber and didn’t say anything. As the guy came at him Shane executed a flawless side step and rode the guy’s momentum into a parked car. His head hit hard enough to create a dent and set off the car alarm, and from there they went down on the pavement and punched and kicked a few times before the bouncers broke them up again. Nice work Shane. We walked off unscathed.
But random acts of violence kept happening. We decided to go to an opera at the historic Sydney Opera House, so I went to buy us tickets that morning. I got my tickets and was looking at some of the colorful pictures of past operas at the side of the big entrance hall when I heard a commotion. I turned to see a man, a normal-looking tourist in his 40’s, screaming at the top of his lungs at the gal behind the ticket counter. I have no idea what he was upset about, but judging by the way he was foaming at the mouth and waving his arms frantically, he was out of control and about to get violent. The poor girl was petrified, but she was stuck behind the open counter within arm’s reach of the lunatic. Everyone in the place stopped and stared, frozen. His rage escalated until I was sure that he was going to attack her and I had to do something. I walked over and squeezed in between him and the counter, blocking her. I asked him what was going on and told him to calm down, and gave him a look where he knew I was ready – that he’d have to go through me to get to her. This brought him somewhat out of his violent trance, and his mind for the first time started registering consequences for his actions. He took a half step back and continued to yell, but now the gal was safe, and he didn’t come at me. The police ran in from outside and came up behind him and wrestled him to the ground and cuffed him. I advised the cops that I thought he was schizophrenic or mentally ill but off his medications. When I turned around the gal was in tears, and looked me in the eye and thanked me as sincerely as I’ve ever seen a human being say those words. In retrospect I should have parlayed her gratitude into a hot date that night, but back then I wasn’t nearly as opportunistic as I am now.
With all of that behind me I returned with Shane to the opera house that night. It was a classy affair, most of the men wearing suits or tuxedos and the women wearing cocktail dresses. The opera was Turandot by the Italian Puchinni, a dynamic explosion of color and movement set in an ancient Chinese Emperor’s court. Of course it was in Italian, which added to the majesty but made it impossible to understand. There was an electronic viewing screen where they translated the singing into English, but our seats were so far in the back that it was out of view. No worries, I sat back and enjoyed it… until the Eurotrash dude next to me started in. He was some swarthy self-important Italian with his Froggy French girlfriend, and upon the opening scene he started whispering to her. I thought they were just getting settled in and it was only mildly rude, but soon realized that they planned on talking the whole time. He was translating the opera to her – word for word. Are you kidding me? I “shhhhd” them once, softly. They kept on. I shushed them again, a little more vehemently. They only got louder. So I told them to shut the hell up. They kept talking, but did quiet down a little, and I resigned myself to watching the opera next to the most inconsiderate people on earth without letting it ruin my experience. Once the opera was finished and the curtains closed and the lights came on I turned and walked away without looking at the Italian. I know my temper and I didn’t even want to go there. To my amazement he grabbed me by the elbow and yelled at me “Don’t you shush my wife!” Oh boy. Here we go. I was shocked that he put his hands on me and I saw red, but I tried to be chill about it. I told him something eloquent, like “then don’t talk the whole way through a Goddamn opera next time.” We went back and forth a little bit, and I told him that if he ever touched me again I’d knock him back to ancient China. I tried to simplify the problem for him so any third-grader would understand, that we all paid a lot of money for these seats to listen to the opera, not to hear him talk the whole time.
“Well if it’s the money you want, then I pay for your whole ticket!” he exclaimed, turning up his nose at me.
“Ok.” I responded, holding out my hand. He was stunned by my reaction.
“Ok dude, give me the money then, I accept your offer.” I said. He hemmed and hawed but of course didn’t reach for his wallet. A couple people around us chuckled that I had called him on his bluff and made him look like a fool. It was going nowhere, and the next step was for me to smash his arrogant Euro trash teeth in, but Phil pulled me away. I knew I couldn’t do anything, not because I’d even have to break a sweat to mop the floor with him, but because my mom, my dear sweet mom, who is a huge opera buff, would be heartbroken if her son got in a fight and arrested at the Sydney Opera House. Love ya mom! I needed out of Australia, and back to the safety of more dangerous Third World countries.
I backpacked around the world from 1999 to the 2000, a different time in history before 9/11 changed the world. I consider myself extremely lucky to have gone where I did in the Middle East because it probably won’t be safe to go to some of those places for the rest of my lifetime, and maybe beyond. Even back then there was some anti-American sentiment, specifically targeted at good ‘ole George Bush. American travellers sewed Canadian flags onto their backpacks to divert the sentiment. The Middle East was my favorite place on earth, emitting a primal magnetism that is hard to explain. Every moment in Jordan, Egypt, Israel, and Palestine was like living a grand, fascinating adventure. I was a seasoned wanderer at that point, a pilgrim on a spiritual journey who was as streetwise as you could get. I think people sensed that about me, or saw it in my eyes, or how my dusty clothes hung off of me, and didn’t think of me as a tourist. Even for the Middle East I traveled way off the beaten path. I visited Jordan, a conservative Islamic country, for six weeks. I found Muslims to be some of the kindest folks on earth, and in Jordan people would literally called me in off the street into their homes, sit me down at their kitchen tables with their families, and give me food off of their own plates. I took a train to a bus to a pickup truck to a camel into the vast remote expanses of the desert at Wadi Rum, camping by myself for days on end in a cave with nothing but a sleeping bag, firewood and a box of food. It was freezing cold at night and as I huddled by my fire in the middle of the empty desert I felt at the same time eternally connected but infinitely small. The stars were so thick in the sky I felt I could reach out and grab them. During the day I wandered west, further into the desert, until a tribe of Bedouins, nomadic sheepherders, found me and invited me into their tent village. I felt completely safe. In Egypt I longed to escape the nasty city of Cairo so I travelled down to Aswan, near the Sudanese border, and took a felucca, a small open-deck sailboat, up the Nile, sleeping under the open skies. I travelled to little fishing villages on the Mediterranean, every few days taking a bus to the next village until I was so far out that most of the people had never seen a white person, yet alone an American. But I felt could walk the streets any time of day or night with absolutely no concern.
Between the sun and the dirt I was as dark as any Egyptian, but my with my short blond hair and athletic build some people asked if I was CIA. I traveled across the Egyptian border into Sinai and then through the Gaza strip into Palestine. The Gaza strip is the most densely populated plot of land on Earth, and if you’ve seen it at all it’s because the media loves showing footage of angry youths throwing rocks at tanks and burning flags, but my experience with them couldn’t have been better. The Palestinian people were shocked when I climbed aboard their common local buses. They had never seen an American other than in the movies, but they collectively welcomed me, ushered me to the best seat, introduced themselves and gave me homemade food for the festive bus ride. We arrived at a border checkpoint – a tricky affair because the Gaza strip is technically within the borders of Israel but it’s own sequestered nation, and got in line to have our passports checked. I just got in line with everyone else and was waiting, when all of a sudden three Israeli soldiers started yelling at us, vigorously calling someone in line over to them. I looked around - who was it? It was me of course, but at the time I felt so ingratiated to the local people that it didn’t even occur to. I walked over and they quickly grabbed me and escorted me into a separate line, with just me, to check my passport. They chastised me that I shouldn’t be among Palestinians and took me in a side room and questioned me for a while to find out who I was and what I was doing. If I felt safe before, I certainly didn’t now.
There was a time that I messed up – I admit it – and could have really ended up in deep shit. I was in Eilat in Israel and heading to the party beach town of Dahab on the Sinai Peninsula. Every time there is a conflict between Israel and Egypt, or it’s other inhospitable neighbors, the borders get shuffled and Sinia changes hands. At that time it was still within Israeli lands, so I thought nothing of the bag of weed I had in my luggage when I bought a ticket for a high-speed boat across the Gulf of Aqaba in the Red Sea over to Sinai. It wasn’t much – about a quarter ounce or so, and I don’t even remember where I got it. At the docks I was shocked to see that the boat was a huge ultra-modern ship with two decks and hundreds of passengers. There were a few military personnel around, but that’s normal for that part of the world, so I just got on with everyone else. Halfway through the hour-long trip they announced that we would be going through a security checkpoint in Sinai and so we should have our passports ready. To my horror we docked at an international militarized zone, complete with US marines with machine guns, Nato troops, plenty of Israeli troops, drug and bomb-sniffing dogs, and x-rays machines. The security would make John F. Kennedy airport look like kindergarten. My stomach dropped - I was fucked. Everyone lined up and had to go through the metal detector, right by the dogs, get frisked, and get our passports stamped, bags in tow. The weed was in my toilet bag and I was sweating bullets, sure that the dogs would get me. I have no idea what kind of hell of a military prison I would end up in for a very long time if I got caught bringing drugs over international borders, but I got lucky, and walked through security and by the dogs with no issues other than a minor heart attack. When I got to my hostel in Sinai the first thing I did was flush the weed down the toilet.
As I look back on my travels I think I was more at risk of cracking my head open being an adrenaline junky or dying of dysentery than anything else. I jumped out of a plane in New Zealand, sky diving from 11,ooo feet, jumped off a mountain in Brazil, hang gliding down and landing on the beach, and went trekking through the jungles in Thailand amongst poisonous snakes, piranhas, and wild elephants. One of the most dangerous endeavors I pursued was rafting down class 4 rapids on the Rio Pacuare in Costa Rica –on a kayak. I’d never been in a kayak before and we survived the churning white warer rapids on cajones alone. For two days we were launching off of six-foot boulders, got dumped into the swirling cauldron of deep “holes” that we might not emerge from, avoided the deadly power of fifty foot waterfalls, and generally got tossed around like rag dolls. When we were done with the two-day expedition, soaked to the bone and utterly exhausted from fighting the river for our lives, all of the indigenous river guides came up to us and signed one of our dry T-shirts with a marker. They were impressed we hadn’t drowned, and were making bets on our chances the whole time. The adrenaline rush, the flirtation with a near death by drowning, was so addictive that we returned the next weekend to repeat our expedition down the river on a kayak. I still don’t know how we lived through that one.
I’m older and now and content to have my wild, crazy days well behind me. Sure, I still travel a lot, and live in a Third World country at the time of the this writing, but for the most part my experience and prudence keeps me out of harms way. It seems like another person who did all those things and went all those places. I guess I’ve realized that true safety only comes from going for it 100% balls out, completely surrendering yourself to the inclination that if it’s your time to go then there’s nothing you can do about it. Now that I am conscious and have something to lose there’s no way I would do half of the things I did, but ignorance is bliss, and when you’re young and indestructible, it’s all bliss. So the real question is if I one day have kids, would I let them travel around the world by themselves? If it’s a son the answer is – hell no, and if it’s a daughter the answer is…HELL NO!
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