No Great Story Ever Starts With ‘I Stayed At Home!’

No matter how much you plan, or how experienced you are, at some point on your travels something is going to go wrong. It will. That is not pessimism, it is just life. Every single traveller who has ever picked up a backpack has missed a train, taken the wrong bus, got lost, argued with a ticket office, been ripped off, got sick, felt overwhelmed or stood in the middle of a strange city wondering what the hell they are supposed to do next. It happens to all of us.

The point is not to avoid every problem, because you can’t. Life doesn’t work like that. If you have followed the excellent advice elsewhere on this site then you will have a plan. You will be prepared. It may panic you at first, stress you out, but you know that you have done everything humanly possible to reduce the risk, and now you know the steps you need to take to deal with whatever problem is facing you. All that information and preparation means that when those moments come, you are not broken by them. You take a breath, work the problem, ask for help, change the plan, find another route, book another room, get yourself somewhere safe and keep moving.

That is what all the planning, research, common sense and experience is really for. Not to create some flawless, sanitised version of travel where nothing unexpected ever happens, but to give you the tools to handle the messy, frustrating, chaotic, brilliant reality of it.

But the bigger truth to all of this is just to accept that from time to time, things will go tits up, and when they do, you will not only deal with them, you will come to see these challenges for what they are. These aren’t just travel cock ups, they are real opportunities for you to grow, become a little more confident, a little more sure of yourself. You will come out the other side a little sharper, a little more capable and a lot harder to shake. Those are the moments that teach you what no guidebook, travel blog or perfectly edited Instagram reel ever can: that you are far more capable and far more adaptable than you thought.

More importantly though, quite often it is these cock ups that become some of your best travel stories.

Because the truth is, the journeys that go exactly to plan are rarely the ones you dine out on for years afterwards. The stories you tell again and again are the ones that began with a mistake, a delay, a bad decision, a ridiculous misunderstanding or a moment where everything briefly went sideways and you somehow found your way through it anyway. Those are the tales that become part of you. Those are the memories that make travel addictive. And that is why no great story ever starts with, ‘I stayed at home.’

What Is Life Without A Few Misadventures?

I have been backpacking around the world for more than 25 years now, and at this point I like to think I am a pretty worldly and confident traveller. The version of Marcus Brody that Indiana Jones describes as having friends in every town and village from here to the Sudan, knowing every local custom and able to blend in and disappear.

I have had some of the greatest experiences of my life on the road, from the ridiculous to the profound, and I’ve built a career out of helping other people travel with more confidence, independence and common sense.

But honestly, quite often I’ve been more like the version of Marcus Brody that got lost in his own museum.

As experienced as I am with 25-plus years of travel and over 180 countries under my belt, I have also made a ton of mistakes! I’ve fallen for scams I should have seen coming, taken spectacularly wrong turns, trusted the wrong timetable, misread situations, annoyed officials, ignored my own advice and found myself in more than a few moments where the only honest thought in my head was ‘oh shit’.

Because even with the best planning in the world, travel still has a way of throwing chaos into the itinerary.

But these mistakes, mishaps, scrapes, detours and occasional backside clenching near misses are the moments that have stayed with me long after the trip has ended, and in the finest tradition of Uncle Albert, given me a a wealth of stories from my travels with which to bore people senseless with.

Travel Isn’t Always Perfect And Glamorous

Of course, not everything that goes wrong while travelling is dramatic. In fact, most of it isn’t.

When I first started backpacking I was just as wide-eyed and inexperienced as everyone else, and like most first-time travellers I quickly discovered that the reality of life on the road didn’t always look like the perfectly edited Instagram reels. I endured endless overnight buses that seemed specifically designed by chiropractors looking for repeat business, slept in hostels that generously stretched the definition of the word ‘room’, I even got offered a cot in a stable once, I kid you not! I have spent hours haggling with taxi drivers who insisted the meter had mysteriously stopped working and learned that in some parts of the world a determined tout can somehow spot a bewildered backpacker from half a mile away.

I have almost certainly paid more than I should have in tourist markets, been talked into more than one unnecessary tuk tuk ride and, more than once, arrived somewhere after a fifteen-hour overnight journey looking like I’d been dragged there behind the bus rather than sitting inside it.

But honestly, that’s just travelling.

These are the little inconveniences, discomforts and occasional frustrations that every backpacker goes through. They aren’t disasters and they certainly aren’t reasons not to travel. They are simply part of learning how to find your feet in a completely unfamiliar part of the world and for the most part genuinely become a bit of a fond rite of passage.

Every now and then though, the travel gods think you have become a little too comfortable and decide to throw something a little more memorable at you.

When The Proverbial Hits The Fan

Over the years I seem to have developed an almost supernatural talent for finding myself in situations that, statistically speaking, really ought not to happen to one person. I’ve been lost in the jungle in Belize, caught in a Saharan sandstorm, stranded in the Egyptian desert after our vehicle broke down and nearly drowned in Thailand. Twice. Because apparently not learning my lesson the first time seemed like a perfectly reasonable life choice.

I once went sea kayaking in Aruba and came within an embarrassingly realistic chance of being blown all the way to Venezuela by the trade winds, despite the rather significant problem that my passport was sitting safely back in my guest house. I’ve narrowly avoided being run over by a speeding boat while scuba diving, found myself caught up in part of the Arab Spring, picked up dengue fever in India, discovered first-hand that altitude sickness in the Himalayas is considerably less fun than it sounds and collected enough other scrapes, near misses and spectacular tales of bad luck to convince some people I should probably just stay at home.

I have also learned a few valuable lessons along the way. Taxi drivers in Thailand for example are rarely persuaded by passionate speeches about honesty and fairness, and they really don’t like it when you pay them the true fair and walk away. Or when you unexpectedly come face to face with a wild bear, your first thought should almost certainly not be, ‘Aww… he wants a hug!’

The truth is, most of those experiences were simply rotten luck. A few were entirely my own fault. As it turns out, even after 25 years of travelling I remain perfectly capable of making the occasional monumentally stupid decision. And some were simply life reminding me that sometimes the universe doesn’t need a reason to throw a curveball your way. And that is true whether you are travelling or not.

The Best Travel Stories

The funny thing is, those are always the stories people actually want to hear.

When you get home, you quickly learn that nobody really cares about the flawless parts of your trip. They may smile politely when you talk about the idyllic beach you fell in love with and stayed on for a month longer than you planned, or that gorgeous luxury guesthouse you found for just a few pounds, it doesn’t matter how much you love to make them jealous! You’ll just come across like a demented Uncle Albert going on and on about the war.

But tell them about the time everything went spectacularly wrong and suddenly they are wide awake.

They want to hear about the time you got on the wrong bus, woke up at the border of the wrong country and decided to spend a few weeks there instead, or the river crossing where you slipped and soaked your entire pack, or the time a gang of little furry criminals stole your sunglasses in the monkey forest in Ubud and sat in a tree looking smug about it. Evil little sods that they are.

Because all of those moments, where everything goes wrong and you aren’t quite sure if you will get out of the situation or not, tend to become some of your best travel stories!

And if we are talking about spectacularly poor judgement turning into a story I have been dining out on for years, I should probably start with the time I nearly caused a full-on riot on a train platform in Delhi.

And in my defence, this one was absolutely not my fault. Mostly.

Nearly Causing A Riot In India

Have you ever seen some of the local trains in India? They are the very definition of insanity! Packed to the gills with as many people as possible to the point a sardine – or an average airline passenger on an economy class seat – would feel that they had acres of space. Every seat is taken up at least once with people sitting on top of one another, everyone is then crammed in till you are nose to nose standing up, and then – once the physical limits of the inside are reached – even more people clamber onto the top or hang off the sides by holding onto anything they can.

Like I said, it is insane!

I had only just arrived in Delhi off a long flight, and I was still reeling from the metaphorical baseball bat to the face that India can deliver to your senses when you first arrive. The heat, noise, crowds, smells, traffic, colour, movement and sheer intensity of it all had hit me at once, and I had not yet found my footing. I did not know my way around, I had been awake for the better part of two days, and I was disorientated, hungry and running on the last fumes of whatever patience I had left. None of which, as it turns out, is the ideal state in which to negotiate the Delhi public transport system.

But that was okay. I was an experienced traveller. I was confident enough to bluff it until I could get to where I was going and find a room. Or so I thought.

After becoming very well acquainted on the train with a dozen complete strangers with no sense of personal space, keeping a very close eye out for pickpockets and being more than glad I’m quite a large 6”2 and nowhere near the height where I would have a dozen sweaty armpits in my face, I eventually noticed the signs for what I thought was my stop. Time to get off.

But there was a problem.

This is where we come back to the peculiarities of the Indian train system and what seemed like an entire countries inability to form an orderly queue. As the train began to slow down near the platform, everyone on the train began jostling to get off, and everyone on the platform began jogging alongside the train to get on. Keep in mind we are not talking about a few commuters on their way to work here, we are talking about dozens if not hundreds of people with absolutely zero sense of personal space all clamouring in a scrum that would cause the New York riot police some problems. The term ‘crowd’ really does takes on a whole new meaning in Delhi! So with dozens of people around me pushing and shoving to get off and on the train all at the same time, I was literally stuck. I couldn’t move.

Time was ticking away quickly and I began to think I was going to miss my damn stop, and with only the vaguest idea of my bearings and exhaustion dulling my decision making process, the idea of the train taking me elsewhere was not appealing. So I did what any sane and rational man would do, I stopped thinking and acted on instinct.

In hindsight, the part of my brain running my instinct is a damn idiot.

I stood in front of the crowd trying to push their way onto the train, grabbed hold of two men in front of me and used them to push the entire crowd back like some big human snow plough. The remaining passengers behind me jumped off creating a wall of people behind me, and the train began to move off again. Unfortunately not everyone who I had just shoved back onto the platform made it by running and jumping onto the open doorways and I was suddenly faced with a large crowd of very angry, and very shouty, Indian men.

Oh shit.

At this point it is really important to remember the Indian norm of gathering in massive crowds and staring incessantly. Where a crowd of angry Indian men gather and start shouting, an even bigger crowd of Indian men will gather very, very quickly to stare and watch, and perhaps even join in. Pretty soon I was surrounded and severely outnumbered.

Double shit.

Readying my fists in case there was an abrupt and complete failure to communicate, I attempted to get the hell out of there as quickly as possible. A tactic that wasn’t going well due to the fact that I was completely surrounded by a lot of angry, gesturing men and couldn’t move in any direction.

So again, the rational and calm side of my brain took over, apparently another section of my brain that is run by the same moronic part of me that runs my instinct, and I started shouting back.

This was not going well.

Luckily for me the police turned up pretty quickly. The sight of their uniforms was to be honest a little bit of relief.

Unluckily for me instead of calming the situation down they began joining in the shouting too!

Pretty soon everyone was just shouting, and I had no idea at this point what was being said or who most of them were shouting at!

I was at least grateful the police were aiming their shouts at the crowd and not me, and soon enough everyone was just shouting and gesturing wildly at everyone else. I’m not even completely sure what they were arguing about was what I originally did to start it all! So after doing my bit for English – Indian public relations, I decided the best thing to do was just back away out of the scrum as best I could, disappear away from the crowd and leave them all to their shouting.

And I did, straight to a private room and a cold shower!

For all I know they are all still there shouting at each other to this day!

Not my finest moment I grant you, but I made it through safely. One thing is for sure, it gave me a good story to tell. One that I never would have had unless I had a spectacularly bad error in judgement, and certainly not one I would have had if I hadn’t decided to go to India on a whim!

The Cat That Saved My Life

Oh, did I not tell you this one? Sit back, because this is one of my favourites.

I was waiting in Cairo train station for the Abela night train to take me down to Luxor and Aswan, and thanks to the ridiculously early check-out time at my guesthouse, I had a long wait ahead of me before the late departure. Honestly, I didn’t mind. There are far worse places to kill a few hours than a train station in Cairo, especially when you have nowhere else to be.

I found a small café with an outside seating area tucked behind a high wall, dropped my pack beside me and settled in for the long haul. Around me, Cairo carried on being Cairo. Egyptians came and went, backpackers drifted through with that familiar look of dusty exhaustion and wide-eyed excitement, glasses clinked, chairs scraped, conversations rose and fell, and the station moved around me in that wonderful, chaotic rhythm that makes people-watching while travelling such an underrated joy.

So I ordered something to drink, pulled out my notebook and let myself sink into it. For a few hours I was perfectly content just sitting there, writing a few chapters of my novel, watching the world pass by and soaking up the atmosphere.

All this time there was a little ginger cat that would not leave me alone from the moment I sat down. She was a skinny little thing but so cute, and she wasn’t doing any harm, she was just constantly hanging around me for some reason but never came near enough to allow me to stroke her.

Now I should explain I am a huge animal lover and I tried to entice it down with a little chicken off my plate, but she would have none of it. She simply sat patiently, staring at me. She moved around from time to time, sitting on the high wall looking down at me, sitting on the chair next to me or on the floor glaring at my pack. Since she seemed content simply to be there, I was happy just to leave her be. Maybe she’d curl up and have a nap, at least she’d be safe there next to me and I was happy with that.

After a couple of hours, a good chapter of my book written and a few more drinks and snacks later, I still had a long time to wait so I decided to stretch my legs and go for a walk around the platform. The cat was still there, staring at me incessantly. I said my silent goodbye and lifted up my pack.

Only to find a small snake had somehow nestled itself under it.

Now I am no expert in snakes but from what I have gathered in hindsight from the size, colour and general demeanour (as well as the sudden screams and sheer panic from everyone around me) this was an Egyptian saw scaled viper, one of the more dangerous species of snake in the country. Whatever breed it was it was obviously aggressive, most likely scared at somehow being out of its environment and very pissed at being disturbed! I have never seen a bunch of Egyptians move so damn fast in my life as tables and chairs toppled and everyone on the tables around me scrambled away to safety with loud shouts of warning in Arabic for me to do the same!

Before the snake could get near me – and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it would have bitten me if it had been just a touch closer – the cat had jumped down in between me and the snake, hissing loudly, and somehow managed to keep it at bay with its paws. If it hadn’t have been for that cat I have no doubt that snake would have had time to bite me, and if it had, I would have been very lucky to survive, even being in a major city!

Long story short, the snake was dealt with (best not to ask), and the cat and I were both fine.

After that, the cat finally accepted a small stroke and a cuddle from me, and then disappeared over the wall as people returned, chairs were picked up and the small cafe – and my heart rate – began to return to a semblance of normality.

I never saw that cat again, but I am convinced that she was watching over me! And the first opportunity I got after that I bought a small statue of Bast, the cat Goddess, in remembrance of her. I still have it now, and I try every chance I get to pay back the karma by helping cats in need.

To this day cats are always alright in my book!

I have no idea how that snake got under my pack, but I do know it is rare to come across them in the Egyptian desert, never mind the built up suburbs of Cairo! It was just one of those rare, unfortunate, can never plan for incidents that can happen anywhere at any time.

But would I let that scare me from going back to Egypt? Of course not! Would I let that stop me from travelling? Never! That experience, and that amazing little ginger cat, have become one of my favourite travel stories!

The Good Times Always Outweigh The Bad

It is easy, when you write all of this down in black and white, to make travelling sound like one long series of disasters interrupted only occasionally by a decent sunset. Lost in the jungle, stranded in the desert, nearly hit by a speedboat, dengue fever, Delhi train riots, venomous snakes in Cairo train stations. Put like that, I can almost hear nervous parents everywhere quietly confiscating passports and Googling “safe hobbies for adults.”

But that is not the truth of travel at all.

These stories stand out precisely because they are rare. They are a handful of strange, stressful, ridiculous and occasionally arse-clenching moments spread across more than 25 years of travelling the world. They are tiny potholes on a very long, very beautiful road. For every bad moment I have had, there have been thousands of extraordinary ones. The quiet mornings in desert temples before the crowds arrived. The months spent on beaches I never wanted to leave. The friendships made in hostels, on buses, in cafés and on the side of roads. The cities that overwhelmed me, the landscapes that stopped me in my tracks, the meals I still think about years later and the countless small moments that reminded me why I fell in love with travel in the first place.

I am not telling you these stories to scare you. I am not telling you them to prove that travel is dangerous, or to add fuel to the usual scaremongering that says the world is something to be feared from behind a locked front door. I am telling you because things will go wrong when you travel, just as things go wrong in life, and that does not mean you should stay at home. It means you should prepare properly, use your common sense, reduce the risks where you can and then trust yourself enough to deal with the rest when it happens.

Because you will deal with it. You may not enjoy every second of it at the time. You may swear, panic, sweat through your shirt, question your decisions and wonder briefly whether a quiet life would have been a more sensible option. But you will get through it, and when you do, you will come out the other side a little more capable, a little more confident and a lot harder to shake. Those moments test you, but they also teach you. They show you who you are when the plan falls apart, and more often than not, you discover that you are far more adaptable than you thought.

That is what travel has done for me. The easy days gave me joy, but the difficult ones gave me perspective. The mistakes, mishaps, risks and ridiculous detours helped shape me into a better traveller, a calmer person and someone who knows, through experience rather than theory, that most problems can be solved if you keep your head and keep moving. I would not go back and erase those moments, even the bad ones, because they are part of the journey that made me who I am.

And honestly, they have given me some brilliant stories.

If I had stayed at home because I was afraid of what might happen, I would have missed some of the best experiences of my life. I would have missed the beaches, the mountains, the temples, the deserts, the cities, the people, the freedom, the perspective and, yes, even the ridiculous misadventures that I now bore people senseless with at every opportunity.

So prepare well. Be sensible. Take the risks seriously, but do not let fear make your decisions for you. The world is far too big, too strange, too beautiful and too full of stories for that.

Because no great travel story ever starts with, ‘I stayed at home.’