Most of us go on vacation to relax, but as it often happens when you are in a place where you don’t speak the lingo, things can go south in more ways than one. Someone asked “Travelers, what are some of the creepiest/scariest experiences you’ve had abroad?” and people shared their eeriest stories.We got in touch with solo travelerLavina Dsouzato learn some tips to avoid the sort of stories here. So get comfortable as you read through, upvote the most interesting posts, and be sure to comment your own thoughts below.More info:Continenthop.comThis post may includeaffiliate links.
Most of us go on vacation to relax, but as it often happens when you are in a place where you don’t speak the lingo, things can go south in more ways than one. Someone asked “Travelers, what are some of the creepiest/scariest experiences you’ve had abroad?” and people shared their eeriest stories.
We got in touch with solo travelerLavina Dsouzato learn some tips to avoid the sort of stories here. So get comfortable as you read through, upvote the most interesting posts, and be sure to comment your own thoughts below.
More info:Continenthop.com
This post may includeaffiliate links.
Hiking in Huaraz Peru, has been told to watch our gear as locals (and apparently foxes) might make off with items left around the campsite. So we made sure to clean the campsite extra well, packing all our gear in the tent and inside the fly. And after a long day hiking, off to bed. Middle of the night our tent starts shaking like crazy, I wake up freaking out thinking we were getting robbed, I started yelling and screaming. Part of the tent pushes in real far. I manage to get outside to start swinging and come face to face with the cow that had wandered into the tent ropes and got startled. Pretty lucky that it didn’t step down into the tent and hit us.
On a train in Athens traveling alone, a group of men tried to push me off the train with them at a stop. Three women started yelling at them and pulled me back. It happened to fast I didn’t know until the one that spoke English explained they were trying to take me. They made sure I made it back to the hostel and told me not to wear what I was wearing ( shorts and a tank) while alone.
I witnessed a creepy old man groping a teenager on a crowded train in Osaka. The girl was just enduring it and you can tell that she was holding back her tears. I whipped my phone out and started filming the guy which made him use his other hand which was blocked from my view so I asked my guy friend to switch places with the girl. After that, on the next stop, the creepy guy got off. I asked the girl if she was ok. She thanked us and her friends also expressed their gratitude. I think all of them (all teenage girls) were aware of the groping but I read somewhere that it is not the Japanese culture to make a scene. I was aware that this kind of thing was prevalent in Japan but I’m still shocked to see it in person. That creepy man and the poor girl’s face will be forever etched in my mind.
Bored Pandagot in touch with Lavina Dsouza, a veteran traveler, journalist, and photographer fromContinenthop.comand she was kind enough to answer some of our questions. Given the dour nature of many of these stories, we wanted to, instead, explore some of the positives while still staying safe. So we asked Lavina what travel advice she would give her younger self.“Never be afraid to travel solo! But irrespective of whether you travel solo or not, always do research and have backup plans ready and have some breathing space if and when things go wrong so that you’re not caught off guard and don’t end up spending a fortune when you panic!”
Bored Pandagot in touch with Lavina Dsouza, a veteran traveler, journalist, and photographer fromContinenthop.comand she was kind enough to answer some of our questions. Given the dour nature of many of these stories, we wanted to, instead, explore some of the positives while still staying safe. So we asked Lavina what travel advice she would give her younger self.
“Never be afraid to travel solo! But irrespective of whether you travel solo or not, always do research and have backup plans ready and have some breathing space if and when things go wrong so that you’re not caught off guard and don’t end up spending a fortune when you panic!”
I was traveling in Nicaragua several years ago when I got lost and ended up having to take a taxi at 9:30pm back to my hostel. When the taxi pulled up to the curb, the taxi driver locked the taxi doors and told me that I had misunderstood the fare. He claimed I owed him $100 USD which was several times more than we had agreed upon. I tried to pry the doors open from the inside but was completely trapped. Thankfully, he let me out of the taxi after taking all the money I had on me.The hostel workers told me I was incredibly lucky. A few days earlier, a taxi driver had kidnapped another young female, assaulted her, then dumped her barely conscious body in a field outside town thinking that she was dead. A few local schoolchildren found her on their way to school in the morning.
In India our bus rounded a corner in the mountains and another bus was on the other side of the curve. Both busses skid to a stop about 1 foot from one another. Both drivers started laughing and poking fun at each other. We saw a bus from the ’80s that fell down the mountain about 15 minutes later. Hella intense.
1992 I was walking up the stairs to the ticket booths in the Warsaw, Poland central train station. All of a sudden this dude is falling down the stairs coming to rest a few stairs above where I was standing. Dude had a long screw driver sticking out of his abdomen.
Generally, more extreme experiences come when a person actually goes somewhere off the beaten path, but sometimes it’s simply a result of wanting to save some money at the cost of time and convenience, so we wanted to hear Lavina’s take on balancing the two. “I have been sharing travel tips and tricks onContinenthop.comfor almost a decade mainly for professionals and yes, they value time over money!”
We went on a family trip to croatia and on our way to the Beach we pulled over to the side of a road for a pee break. So we opened the car door and like always our dog jumps out first. He ran into the field right next to the Street. Then suddenly my mother starts screaming the name of our dog, because 10meters away from our car was sign that said: Stay Away, old minefield. Thankfully nothing happened
I had a pack of wild dogs chase me from my bus stop to my hotel at 3 am in Kosovo. I also had a old woman yell at me in Russian about not making my bed right on the train and then watched over my shoulder til it was to her satisfaction when I was on my way back to Bucharest from Moldova
“Travelers, especially from countries like the USA, tend to have limited holidays and prefer to see as much as possible within the limited time they have. While slow travel is the trend currently unfortunately not everyone can afford that in terms of time and for many countries who depend on tourism, as long as this is done in the most sustainable way possible it still helps provide innumerable locals with income! So in short, there’s no right way to travel!”
A good friend of mine in Zimbabwe was grabbed at gunpoint and forced into a van, thankfully they only took her to an ATM and made her drain her account then they left her somewhere outside town. Could’ve been so much worse
Was on a flight once going into Orlando that hit some unexpected turbulence. This was no ordinary turbulence. We went from 0 to 100 in an instant. People literally flew out of their seats, luggage fell from the overhead bins, people screamed like they were going to die. There were several sudden drops in elevation strong enough that people’s arms flew up in the air and my butt came out of the seat. I’ve flown quite a bit and sometimes it gets bumpy. This was the first time I seriously thought something bad was going to happen.
It was my first time visiting New York City. My aunt and uncle who both work in FiDi (Financial District) took the whole week off to show me and my family around Manhattan. It was a beautiful Tuesday morning and we just had our photos taken around Wall Street when the first plane crashed into the WTC
She is absolutely right here, asslow travelhas become a pretty significant movement over the last few years. In short, the idea is to beas sustainable as possible, which often means traveling shorter distances, using up less carbon, walking often, only eating locally, and, generally, staying in a place for a longer period of time. But, as Lavina mentioned, this does tend to come at a cost. Slow-travel enthusiasts still need to work out a framework to make this concept actually applicable to the average person.
Met a guy in Munich on the street who had lived in the same house as I did… in Cincinnati… 40 years ago…
I was walking around in a town in Algeria. I wandered in to a neighborhood, and noticed there were hardly any people out. A little further, and there were literally no people out. I started to feel a little uneasy. And then I see an extremely tall man walking towards me, straight towards me, obviously with intent. He gets closer, and I see an older gentleman with a long grey beard and wearing a grey tunic. I stop. He comes right up to me and says, in pretty good English, “you’re not safe here, we need to get you off the street”. I say “OK”, and he says “follow me”.We walk a few blocks and we come to a door, he says “wait here a minute”, and he goes inside. He opens the door again and invites me in. When I get inside, there are maybe a dozen men. They are all dressed in black, and they are staring absolute daggers at me. Grey-beard lays in to them, starts shaking his fists at them, gets really worked up. Then one of the younger guys goes in to the kitchen and brings out some tea and cookies, and offfers them to me.So, I’m drinking tea, and trying to smile, and one of the young guys asks where I’m from and I say “The States” and he starts talking about the CIA and stuff… and then I say “you think the CIA is bad here? Let me tell you about Central America”, and then pretty soon everybody is warming up to me and we’re laughing and talking s**t about American foreign policy and drinking tea.After a bit of that the older man invites me back to his apartment. He has a huge library. I gift him a book that I had finished. And then he tells me what had just happened. His little brother, who was one of the younger men, was the leader of a radical group, all the other men I had met. He had overheard them getting ready to kidnap me. But he had shamed them for not being good hosts, and for disrespecting him because it was his house. He said that I would be safe from then on.TLDR: Gandalf saves my life and got a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for his trouble.
A friend and I were waiting for a night train in Naples and after someone tried to steal our bags decided to go everywhere together. It was a good thing because a man who had been whistling at us for an hour tried to follow us into the bathroom.
I have mostly traveled through Europe, and the only time I’ve ever really felt uncomfortable was when I was groped on the metro in Rome. We were packed into the car, and I felt a hand against my back…no big deal, I live in New York City, it happens. But then the hand slipped between me and the next person and around to near my stomach. Oh, maybe a pickpocket? Well I had a money belt, so I was okay there. The hand grabbed my breast. We were so tightly packed that I couldn’t turn around, and I just…froze. I wanted to say, “stop” or “don’t” or anything at all but in the moment every word of my Italian fled from my brain and I felt like a bucket of scalding water had been dumped over my head. The ride felt like it lasted forever. At the next stop I forced my way out of the car and out into the fresh air. Rome is so beautiful, but it felt pretty damn ugly that day.
A handful of men in Thailand were vehemently trying to haggle with my friends to purchase me. They kept pulling my arms to try and seperate us and asking “how much” and offering different amount of money.Edit: Jesus this blew up! Thailand is a very beautiful place and very safe for travel, guys! The place I was at, Pattaya Beach, is the central location where we are allowed to stay when the ship pulls into port. It’s basically nothing but bars and brothels. Don’t go there. I don’t know why they even let us go there. Even if you did go, you’d most likely not be in any danger, the people are very helpful and kind but every place has bad people and we happened to run into them. I’m not even sure if these men were Thai. Don’t let this freak you out from going. SEA does have a dark underbelly of human trafficking but it’s pretty unlikely you will be involved in it as a tourist.And everyone who is freaking out about the Sailors “buying” underage girls; they’re just stupid kids who want to get their d**k wet. They have literally no idea that these girls are underage and just think they’re paying a prostitue. Most of these idiots can’t even fathom that child trafficking is a thing. We make every effort possible to keep this from happening and inform our Sailors about what is really going on. Your average US servicemember is just as disgusted as you are that this happes to children.
A cult behind several [crimes] in China tried to recruit me for some reason.
I was traveling in Costa Rica with two flashy businessmen who were there to possibly purchase a gentleman’s club. We were staying at the Radisson and asked the concierge to get us a cab to the club. We got in the cab and made sure that the driver knew where we were going. We were told it was a 10 min drive. About 7 min in I realized that we were not in a touristy part of town. At all. The driver is whispering into his phone in Spanish, staring at us in the rear view mirror. I get uneasy and look at my companions, who are clearly feeling the same way. We ask “are we almost there?” Oh si! Uno momento. More whispering. Not good. We are being set up. It’s been 10 minutes and we are in a sketchy residential area.I’m sitting in the middle and my partner opens his briefcase and hands me a pen and tells me to stab someone if I need to. What?! He passes another pen to the other man. He’s sitting directly behind the driver and takes his own gold pen and holds it to the drivers jugular and screams “TAKE US BACK TO THE RADISSON RIGHT F*****G NOW”, the partner snatched the drivers phone and hangs up. I’m just clutching the pen.We did make it back to the Radisson. The jewelry was deposited into the safe in the room for the rest of the trip and we eventually made it safely to the club. I was young and naive, I had had my passport for 3 days at this point and didn’t really get that we shouldn’t have been traveling there with that amount of flashy jewelry.
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Went to Honduras. Nearly drowned in a sea of children begging for money. Also the wife and I went out into the ocean. She was on a paddle board and I on a canoe. She couldn’t paddle back in and it was taking her out so she had to hold onto me while I paddles us in. Good thing I was in really great shape at the time.
The first time I ever visited the London Bridge was the day the terrorist attack happened where they drove a van through the crowd.
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Friend of a friend went to Jamaica with her parents and sister when she was about 12. They came back to their hotel room one day to find a guy in there trying to rob them. He stabbed the girl’s dad (he lived) and escaped. They had to go through family therapy after that.
I was on a volunteer trip to Guatemala and we took a day trip to see some Mayan ruins on a small island. My friend and I were looking for a bathroom and several locals pointed us in the direction of one at the top of the mountain. We found a small building with no door and one toilet. My friend says I can go first and she’ll stand watch. I start going about my business when I hear my friend saying that I should hurry up and then I hear a mans voice shouting something in spanish about “permiso”. Out of no where he barges in while I’m mid pee pointing a very large gun at me. He had some sort of uniform on so he may have been police but I’m not sure. I pull up my pants, completely paranoid, grab my friend, tell the man Lo siento over and over and run as fast as I can down the hill. He was shouting after us but didn’t follow. Although nothing happened I was terrified and my poor friend still had to pee!!
Shortened version of a long tale:Got my phone pick pocketed on the subway in New Delhi, I was able to grab one of the thieves (he didn’t have my phone), a mob of random commuters beat the living fk out of him at the next stop, the police arrived and continued to beat the st out of him with cricket bats, we took him to the police station, told him to call his friend who had the phone, friend wouldn’t come, police close the door to their office with the thief and I just hear screams, I wait and wait, police officer brings the kid into my room with a black plastic bag, throws the kid on the dirt ground, opens the bag, pulls out my phone from a bag of curry.He throws the curry on the ground and makes the kid eat it. He even gave him a spoon.Got my phone back though.
I went to visit Ukraine with my parents because they wanted to see the small villages where their parents were born. We have no family in the area so we hired a guide to take us around since the country can be a bit corrupt. As we were driving around on a highway we suddenly were stopped in traffic (literally middle of nowhere). The guide gets out of the car and takes a look, then quickly jumps back into the car, does a U-Turn and drives off telling my mom we can’t go to her mom’s village. We ask why and he says that was some kind of russian millitant roadblock. This was during the whole Crimea thing.
Saw some “refugees” from North Africa beat up and stomp a guy to death at Rome central railway station in the wee small hours while I was waiting for it to open to catch my 05:30 train to see my grandmother. I mean jumping on his skull until it popped like a watermelon. This was in the late 80s.
I was backpacking in Denali and got lost. Like, real f***g lost, and all around us a we were wandering was fresh bear st. At one point we made a decision between going left or right- left took us to the road, had we gone right I don’t think I’d be writing this
Crossing from Ukraine in to Russia at a small checkpoint was a terrible idea in hindsight. Dudes in urban camo and AK-47s demanding bribes and yelling at us in Russian, while in the middle of nowhere, was terrifying.Edit: This is our route through Russia from Ukraine. I haven’t gone back to update the link since it was created, so I’m not sure what happens if roads change in the interim.https://drive.google.com/open?id=1KrB_SPUlz6mSxZcxjcttZWzM6BA&usp=sharingAt that last camping icon, we ate at a kebab place that was a big metal drum with seating inside, like a tank that was above ground and propped up. It sat on the concrete pad just south of that gas station. Looks like it’s not there any more :(
In rural Puerto Rico, there isn’t any drunk driving enforcement. Makes for some very, very scary trips when the susn goes down.
I was in Guatemala and traveling from Antigua to Guatemala city. Apparently there is a short cut called ‘The Trap’ that we took. It was absolutely insane. We plowed over rivers at about 45 mph because bridges were out & were flung to the side of 1000m cliffs going about 80 made out of sandstone. My buddy passed out due to the trauma. I asked after all of that why the hell we were going so fast and the driver replied akin to “it’s a trap after the sun goes down.” I didn’t fully understand… was it vampires or something? He later stated while driving a bit drunk near sundown at 100mph “No, no monsters in the trap… Only chicken bus. No lights. We would need to pull over and camp until daylight.“Apparently on this stretch of road chicken buses run people off the roads at night without care. I was hesitant to believe it but saw the carcasses of several SUVs like ours along the river the road followed
In Colombia around the elections this year.Traveling from Pereira to Buga to visit the massive church there.Cops there don’t really “pull people over” they just sorta stand on the road and wave people to the side.So they wave us to the side. Ask for ID. I have my US license, didn’t think to to bring my passport—this was my second time visiting for a couple weeks and I never brought it anywhere the first time.So my girlfriends dad has his and her Colombian IDs. I break out my NJ license. Cops take it and go back to talk. My girlfriends dad tells us we’re basically about to get shaken down.Cops come back and say that if we pay them 200,000COP that we’ll be able to pass. I’m like fk no, show them my police badge, cops st their pants like, “Oh f**k. This was a bad idea.” and let us go on our way.In the two-ish months I’ve spent in Colombia, that was legit my only bad experience. The country is amazing.
I was drunk as hell in Tokyo(more like a suburb of Tokyo?) and was having trouble getting back to the place I was staying at as nothing looked familiar and I was too sauced to read the map properly. It being Japan, someone came to my aid to try to get me home. Problem was, he didn’t speak English I don’t speak Japanese so he ended up going into a restaurant to ask for help.When we walked in there were three guys and a lady, all the guys were tatted up which I knew was bad news. The guy immediately went to turn a way and the lady yelled the guys stood and grabbed him and the lay was pointing and yelling at me. I ducked the f**k out of there and started running as fast as I could as I heard the man that was trying to help me yelling. I ran through every back alley and ditched my flip flops along the way so they wouldn’t make any sound. I eventually found my way back home and then left for the north the next morning. Idk I highly doubt it was a yakuza operation or anything like that, but I doubt it would’ve been good if I stuck around.
Prostitution is legal in Costa Rica so I was propositioned multiple times. Only went out with the dog or other people, although that’s because I’m pretty shy not because the country is very dangerous.
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