Travel The Hangar Travel Thread

Remove this Banner Ad

Howard Moon said:
So... has anyone got any good travel anecdotes?

i once visited .......... and nearly got kidnapped

One time in .......... we got scammed

Nearly got locked up in ........

Had the best night in .............. once when this happened

You should go to .......... because its like this can happen here ect ect.

doesnt have to be like a pi**ing contest as to who has done what better... I just love hearing (and sharing) stories
Click to expand...
Grabbed a wrong case of a carousel once. Luckily the cab would only take one case in the boot because of the gas tank. So this case was on the front seat. A few ks down the freeway someone's wife announces that's not my case. A few fun and games followed. But it was Tullamarine on the way home so no real big deal.

Lost a passport in Vancouver once years ago. Someone found it and handed it in to the Australian consulate so also no big deal. Getting absolutley bamboozled driving in Petaling Jaya (Kuala Lumpur) and having to get our host to be come and get us was a bit embarrassing. Might have to give in on the anti GPS pro map thing.
 
I've just remembered our mad rush trying to get to Saigon Railway Station and the taxi driver going the wrong way multiple times because our broken Vietnamese just didn't cut it.

Wild times.
 
Im a known sleep talker, I was in a dorm room in Munich with a bunch of younger blokes.

The bunks were set up head to head. I've woken up in the morning and the dude behind me is just looking at me, I ask him what's up? He goes do you know what you Said last night night? Umm no what

You got up on one elbow , tapped me on the head and Said hey mate can I have your pillow? then went back to sleep.

I have zero recollection! Note: sleep talk and dorm room, no mix.

So... So embarrassed!
 

Log in to remove this ad.

ok regulars, every traveller loves a list... whos up for a questionaire?

copy and paste this into a reply; answers as long or as brief as you like...

Favorite city visitied:

Favorite coutntry visited:

Favorite place for nature:

Favorite place for urban life:

Biggest dissapointment city:

biggest dissapointment country:

Best experience with a local:

Scariest experience abroad:

Place visited you would most like to live:

Top of your to go to list:

Best travel moment:

Worst travel moment:

Best travel photo:

Place visited most out of your comfort zone:

Best natural wonder visited:

Best historical wonder visited:

Best event visited:

Best travel story:
 
Last edited:
Favorite city visitied:
Buenos Aries
Favorite coutntry visited:
Bolivia
Favorite place for nature:
Costa Rica
Favorite place for urban life:
Anywhere but Australia
Biggest dissapointment city:
Venice
biggest dissapointment country:
Malaysia
Best experience with a local:
Lol
Scariest experience abroad:
Few dodgy border crossings
Place visited you would most like to live:
Anywhere hot
Top of your to go to list:
Indonesia
Best travel moment:
Always meeting new best mates
Worst travel moment:
Travel can be lonely at times
Best travel photo:

Place visited most out of your comfort zone:
Brazil
Best natural wonder visited:
Iguazu falls
Best historical wonder visited:
Vatican City
Best event visited:

Best travel story:
the book is being written..
 
I've only experienced Europe for 6 months

Favorite city visitied:
Edinburgh
Favorite coutntry visited:
Austria
Favorite place for nature:
Austria
Favorite place for urban life:
Lisbon
Biggest dissapointment city:
Rome
biggest dissapointment country:
Spain
Best experience with a local:
Sex
Scariest experience abroad:
Running of the Bulls (was fun also)
Place visited you would most like to live:
Austria
Top of your to go to list:
South America
Best travel moment:
Beer festivals
Worst travel moment:
Getting turned down for sex
Best travel photo:
Beer festivals
Place visited most out of your comfort zone:
Prague (didn't stay at a backpackers so was harder to meet people)
Best natural wonder visited:

Best historical wonder visited:

Best event visited:
Beer festivals and bull run
Best travel story:
Three some at a backpackers
 
Howard Moon said:
That's cause you gotta target travellers!
Click to expand...
But to your previous post, after 4 months of straight backpacking I got over places. A church is a church and the next mountain looked like the last one.
The last 2 months I travelled for the hostels/people, I kept asking people which were their favourites and if one was mentioned like half a dozen times I would make my way too it.
 
Favorite city visitied:
Cape Town. Something about Table Mountain constantly in the background just gets you. Good beaches, good people, cosmopolitan, gritty in places.

Favorite coutntry visited:
Mexico, got it all, great beaches, Jungles, waterfalls, history, deserts, canyons, colonial cities, big cities, small cities, good food, no rules, cheap, Perfect.

Favorite place for nature:
Bolivia, has everything but a coast line.

Favorite place for urban life:
Reckon the old town in Granada, Spain would have been my favorite urban type place.

Biggest dissapointment city:
Brussles is a bit of a hole – France lite with rats.
Biggest dissapointment country:
Belize no doubt. No redeeming features.

Best experience with a local:
Other than sex…. I was in South Africa for the world cup, in a place called Nelspruit for the Socceroos game. I met an old guy at the pub who invited us back to his place for a braii before the game. His place happened to be a big farmhouse which was in paddocks within sight of the stadium. So a few of us stayed there all day eating and drinking before the guy said, we had better get you to the game… so he got the tractor out and drove us to the front door on a trailer behind the tractor, awesome! We beat Serbia in the game, was so exciting, walked out all drunk, interviewed all rowdy by ABC news.. then our high was shattered.. we looked at the line for busses back into town.. horrendous! Only way back and it would have been a 2 hour wait at least. What happens next? Tractor rolls back up.. picks us up and drives us back to the farm house for more food!
Best day/night ever.

Scariest experience abroad:
My girlfriend and I decided to scrimp on a hotel in LA, as we were flying the next morning… we decided to book a place that had like 1 star on trip advisor.. how bad could it be? Pretty bad!
It was in Inglewood on the wrong side of the tracks, gun shots all night, sirens, in a dorm with three live in junkies falling over our bed all night, walking to the train the next morning got menacingly followed and circled by a dark Cadillac through the dunkin donuts car park – then waiting for the train a gang banger came up and said.. you should not be here.. get on this train.. and never come back. Message? Never scrimp in Inglewood.

Place visited you would most like to live:
Beunos Aires. Mmm steak.

Top of your to go to list:
Potala palace in Lhasa, Northern lights, then I’m done.

Best travel moment:
I always think back to a night in Goa at a beach called Palolem – Watching the sun set over the water… Sat back with some old hippies drinking 2 for 1 kingfishers. Dropped acid and listened to psy trance all night while debating the complexities of the world… while eating nonstop hot garlic naans fresh out of the tandoor til the sun came up.

Worst travel moment:
Cant really think of any.. as they say a bad days travl is still better than a good day at home working…

Best travel photo:

Place visited most out of your comfort zone:
Never felt totally at ease in Cairo, it’s like Mos Isley, a hive of trickery.

Best natural wonder visited:
Reckon the salt flats in Bolivia just outstrip Iguazu falls. Gob smacking place. But maybe that’s the altitude talking.

Best historical wonder visited:
Reckon Tikal in Guatemala beats the pyramids in Egypt, sure they are iconic.. but its all about setting.. the pyramids are on the edge of the city. Tikal is in the middle of dense jungle on all sides with animals everywhere.. feel like Indiana jones.
Best event visited:
Although Glastonbury rates pretty high, have to place the 2006 soccer world cup in Germany. Following the Socceroos epic run around what I consider a perfect travelling country. Swilling beer, eating pork knuckle, getting trains always ON TIME…Talking football all day long with random people. the train home from stuttgart to munich after we drew Croatia to advance to the knockouts was epic, 7 carriages of aussies all crammed into one beverage car – like sardines, singing top note to cheesy aussie classics like hey true blue pumping through the tinny railway PA system. I think I consider that 3 weeks travel/sporting utopia for me, ill never forget it.
 
Favorite city visited: For a short visit, Tallinn is fantastic. Lovely people, great food, cheap beer and a big slab of history, all packed into one beautiful little package.

Favorite country visited: Maybe the Philippines. Friendliest people I've ever met, without the exposure to international tourism that encourages scams and rip-offs, so it's great place to get off the beaten track. Unfortunately the food is reliably appalling or a ticket to a coronary. Or both.

Favorite place for nature: Jigokudani National Park, Japan:

10173638_10203559450001761_8794932664102960851_n.jpg


Favorite place for urban life: Phnom Penh, maybe. Perfect size, you can quickly learn your way around, but it's big enough you won't get bored, it's stinking hot, the people are friendly, it isn't too tourist-focused (though Manila and Osaka are great for their complete lack of this), the food is decent and the beer is cheap.

Biggest disappointment city: Ulaanbaatar maybe, which is a bit unfair as I went in with no expectations, but it's a dump and we were stuck there for a month waiting on Russian visas. Still, I discovered a few tasty gems and taught myself Cyrillic from Mongolian beer cans, so there's that.

Biggest disappointment country: I wouldn't say anywhere has been disappointing - challenges are all part of the experience - but Laos was underwhelming, and China and Mongolia were certainly difficult at times.

Best experience with a local: Negotiating a $1 head-shave in a back alley in Beijing, with the total useful sum of my high-school Chinese being "meiyou toufa" - "I have no hair".

Scariest experience abroad: Being informed the night before we were due to fly out of North Korea that they'd forgotten to book us on the plane.

Place visited you would most like to live: Tough - I loved Phnom Penh, Manila and Hanoi, but not sure I could live there long-term. Hong Kong maybe, it still has a bit of that edge you get in the developing world, but with the facilities and infrastructure of a modern metropolis, and (for lack of a less culturally-elitist term) the locals are thoroughly civilised. Really though, I'm yet to visit anywhere that holds a candle to Melbourne for livability.

Top of your to go to list: Spain and Turkey are up next, but having done the length of Eurasia we're obliged to do a tip-to-tip of the Americas eventually.

Best travel moment: Those sudden flashes where you realise you've soaked up enough of the language to buy things without recourse to pidgin, hand-waving or trusting you'll get the right amount of change. The accent is probably horrific but it's nice to pretend you could be confused for a local.

Worst travel moment: Trying to feed a vegetarian in China for two months was tough. Individually though, the moment in bum*-nowhere, Laos, when my innards decided they wanted to be outside of me wasn't fun.

Best travel photo: Palawan, the Philippines:

10376291_10202447934614571_1758062747529421794_n.jpg


Place visited most out of your comfort zone: Has to be North Korea, despite feeling entirely safe, purely due to the sheer insanity of it all.

Best natural wonder visited: The Gobi Desert is rad, just for the sheer diversity of weird desert stuff. Bouncing around it for a week in an old Soviet van with a driver who didn't speak a scrap of English was an experience.

Best historical wonder visited: Wonder is a bit of a stretch, particularly given I've seen some that would qualify, but I'm really glad I got up Bokor Mountain before they built a tacky new casino over the old ruins.

Best event visited: Drinking and dancing in a Pyongyang park with old North Korean ladies, celebrating Kim Il-Sung's 102nd Birthday.

Best travel story: So many little gems, but I think having done 20,000km by land makes for a good tale.
 
Last edited:

(Log in to remove this ad.)

Finding somewhere that could feed us both in China (as in, sold vegetables but not just vegetables) was a bit of crapshoot. We'd play a game in bakeries called "buy the four things least likely to have meat in them". You'd buy a croissant, tear it in half and find an entire sausage hidden inside. Lots of pointing at picture menus elsewhere, which is fine up to a point, but plenty of hidden meat again, and in my case, crispy fried pork turning out to be crispy fried pork colon. Delightful. You get thoroughly sick of traipsing around town for an hour every time you want to eat. We finally found a great little local place in Beijing that could reliably feed us both (as in, it sold vegetables but not just vegetables), and probably ate there 7 times over the space of a couple of weeks. Finding a little street-food market where you can see things being made is fantastic too, as you know for sure what's in them. Xi'an was particularly good for that, but I guess it was a bit cold in northern China.
 
Last edited:
Howard Moon said:
So true! Love that moment when you master the useful phrase then from nowhere more comes. Feel like Bart when he learnt French with the wine makers.
Click to expand...
I started revising my high school Japanese on the plane to Tokyo...

It's great once you pass the threshold and start actively looking for excuses to talk to people with what you know (or what you have to paw through a phrasebook for). I made a habit of asking to pet people's dogs, though I only knew how to say "excuse me, am I allowed to touch?", which just made me sound like the world's most awkward strip club patron.
 
dont you think the fear of sounding like a dick with poor accent is a huge barrier?

like we can all find the words to use, but if you say them with Australian accent it sounds silly, you have to really go in with gusto.. like in italian for example, you just have to go all in, start rolling your r's and elongating your words. It takes courage though! but in no time youll be sounding like a poet seranading anyone who'll listen.

in Argentina i memorised the phrase nescicito dos boleto para ........... which is i need two tickets for......

it was working for trains, busses, shows.. then i managed to substitute tickets for habatacion.. which is room.

from there most of my needs were taken care of in one phrase... travel, lodging.. then food which i used the helpful que .. which is that one.. with por favor after everything you cant go wrong!

that phrase was rolling off the tounge in no time! sounded like a pro
 
Favorite city visited:
Seattle or Barcelona

Favorite coutntry visited:
Tanzania

Favorite place for nature:
Ngorogoro Crater or Yosemite Park

Favorite place for urban life:
Seattle

Biggest dissapointment city:
Miami by the length of the straight

biggest dissapointment country:
Thailand - disappointing upon return.

Best experience with a local:
1. Got a balinese bloke to taxi us around Bali for the day, just taking us wherever he thought we would like. He took us to a few different places, then finally to his family compound where we met his family.

2. Friend I was travelling with had done some volunteer work in Arusha a few months before we arrived. Got to meet the family she stayed with. The four kids in the family all sang us a bit of a song about what they wanted to be when they grew up. Finally we jumped on the back of a motorbike and got driven an hour back to the campsite where we were staying.

Scariest experience abroad:
Not really scary, but annoying - having my wallet pinched in a nightclub in Vegas.

Place visited you would most like to live:
Seattle

Top of your to go to list:
Syria (if it ever settles down) or Belize

Best travel moment:
So many to think of! Probably doing the tandem gorge swing at Victoria Falls

Worst travel moment:
Wallet being stolen in Vegas

Best travel photo:
429976_10151190189410902_774370555_n.jpg

or
46497_10151190149495902_219770143_n.jpg



Place visited most out of your comfort zone:
Okavango Delta

Best natural wonder visited:
Sossusvlei

Best historical wonder visited:
Not sure "best" is a great word here, but by far the most moving places were Arlington Cemetery, Mauthausen, Anne Frank house and the Rwandan Genocide Memorial

Best event visited:
Kansas City Chiefs @ Denver Broncos, New Year's Day, 2012

Best travel story:
Again, there are just so many stories. The earlier one about meeting the family in Arusha was pretty special. The one I still re-tell to people is pretty funny, but it is such a small and insignificant story in the grand scheme of things. Anyway, here it goes.

Two mates and myself were trying to get to Disneyland Paris by train one morning. My best mate thought he'd try his hand a French to try and get assistance. We had been in France for about a week now so my mate thought he had a good grasp on French at this stage. Anyway, he walks up to the attendant and comes out with this "Bon soir, je ma pel English?" (translated, it says, "good evening, my name is English?"). The attendant gives him a wry smile and starts to help him. My mate looks over at us and gives us a thumbs up. He thought he was all that and a bag of chips. It wasn't until we explained to him what he had said that he even realised.
 
That second pic is a gem. Nice work.
 
Beerfish said:
That second pic is a gem. Nice work.
Click to expand...
Thanks.

I'm going to get that one printed on canvas to make it the first bit of artwork in my new house (unless you count the 1993 and 2000 premiership photos as art, in which case it will be my third bit of artwork :) )
 
Favorite city visited: New York City

Favorite country visited: Vietnam

Favorite place for nature: Traipsing in the forests at the foot of Fox Glacier in New Zealand was amazing. I'd probably still say my favourite place nature wise is still Hartz Mountains south of Hobart, though.

Favorite place for urban life: New York City.

Biggest dissapointment city: Philadelphia. It's not a bad place, per se, but having just come from Washington DC, New York and Boston, it was a bit underwhelming. A bit one dimensional.

Auckland was also a bit meh.

biggest dissapointment country: Only been to NZ, US and Vietnam other than Australia...so none at this point. I loved them all in different ways.


I'll do the rest later.

Also, the Philippines is an interesting one. fodzilla, why do you reckon it gets overlooked tourism wise compared to Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia etc?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Remove this Banner Ad

Back
Top