Travel Stories

I was off for my dream of traveling Africa. First, however, a layover in Dubai. Sounds great! I landed in the heart of the Middle East and booked a room at a hotel where I had stayed at before. Now, last time I was in Dubai, I had fish and chips and loved it. So why not do it again? This is the age of globalization; I should be able to enjoy a typical English meal in the Emirati Desert.  At the time, I was tired and extremely jet lagged and only wanted to eat then go to bed. However, it’s never that easy.

I'd wanted to go to Libya for a while but had been put off by what had seemed to be mountains of red tape and the apparently prohibitive expense of having of having to sign up for an escorted group tour. After looking into it a bit more deeply, however, I discovered that it was possible to visit Libya for 48 hours without having to join an expensive package tour.I found that I could combine a longer trip to West Africa - where I could fly into Cotonou in Benin, and then fly home for Bamako in Mali - with a short break in Tripoli. The visa would cost me 90 Euros but there was no extra change for the stopover. As Afriqiyah was the cheapest option from London to West Africa, anyway, I thought I'd try and make it to Libya before all the crowds arrived. 

It was 9pm and the night already fell down on the capital of Caracas, Venezuela. I was with my host of the day named Daniel- a Venezuelian I met thanks to the website of cultural interactions known as couchsurfing.org.

Seriously man! They did! I wasn’t smoking crack! (But I'm pretty sure the zombies were). The Honduran capital is infested with them. But first, let me tell you how I got to Tegucigalpa, because that’s another story.

September, 2008. People on buses are afraid in wartime. That’s all I can think about. The somber girl sitting in the aisle seat beside mine is clenching a rail as tight as possible. Everyone is dead silent. The only thing I can hear is the quivering newspaper pages in front of me. There’s a picture of some soldiers sitting on a dusty tank on page one. Outside my window, a young boy hesitantly crosses the countryside road through the still midst towards the bus. He taps on the front glass window five times. The girl to my right holds her breath. The boy pulls a watermelon out of a yellow plastic bag and offers to sell it. We are stuck in a traffic jam. Nobody is moving. I am on my way to the outermost stop on the red metro line in Moscow.

Forget the US State Department’s travel warnings. In my experience of backpacking the world, I’ve intentionally gone out of my way to visit some of the places listed on their website. Every time I go to one of the godforsaken places I end up having a wonderful time, interact with the locals freely and don’t experience one iota of a problem. In fact, places like Mexico, Colombia, North Korea, Myanmar and the Philippines (countries commonly seen on State’s “don’t even think about going to” catalog) are amongst my favorite destinations ever.

At a favorite gathering place I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in a couple of weeks. We had the usual chit chat to catch up. Then suddenly he interrupted: “Hey, I just heard a hero story about you!”