Most unsafe or unsafe event that happened in your travels

Got tailed by some guys in Kingston. It started with two and by the time I confronted them another 3 had joined.

I certainly wasn't going to fight them but I wasn't going to run, either.

So I stopped in front of a store where there seemed to be a lot of witnesses (locals and vacationers) and got loud with them (trying to draw attention to the situation), asking them what they wanted. They got loud in return and started pointing at me and then at the direction we came from. I kind of bladed myself to them and continued walking away from them while we were all shouting at each other.

They stayed put and I was on my way.

It was probably nothing. Maybe a pressure tactic to give them some money. At worst a strongarm robbery. I don't think I was going to be kidnapped or anything. Either way, drawing some attention to the whole thing was the right thing to do. The situation was defused (mostly) peacefully.

That said, my international travel has been limited to the Caribbean and parts of Central America and always centered around tourist spots.

A gang of roaming (Roming?) teens tried to snatch my wife's purse on the train in Rome. One of the kids in their group was trying to grab it and hop off the train right as the doors were closing, but my wife had it strapped across her whole body, so he wasn't able to get it.

Went to Astroworld in the early 90's with the ex wife. She opened the door to the hotel room, and there was a Mexican guy naked on the bed masturbating to porn on the TV. She froze, I pulled her back, slammed the door, and stomped back up to the office. Room was free that night

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Oh man.. Victoria falls.. easily..

I’ve posted this before at various points through the years

So our big group was there at the market and it was getting late in the day.. the one big thing they told us was to not get separated from the group.. sigh…

So my friend and I are walking around and the sun is setting and it’s very dark very fast and I start to notice we are getting swarmed on by locals.. they are touching our hair and trying to sell us stuff too I think but I honestly thought I was about to be kidnapped as we are surrounded
I was panicking because I didn’t know what was going to happen

This escalated very quickly

Luckily some police starting blowing their whistles and formed a human shield for my friend and I and escorted us to where we were staying.

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Interesting. What's the deal with the touching of the hair? Were they being aggressive? Pushy? (Regarding the hair), do you think they've never seen a Caucasian before?

Got in a tuk tuk in Bangkok in front of the temple with the reclining Buddha. Guy says he would take my wife and I to some other statue and bring us back. On the way he stops at a tailor shop and tells us we have to go in and look around. We say no thanks, he pleads with us and gives a look like "they will kill me if you don't go in."

So we go in the shop, there is 6 dudes all huddled around looking like the Thai mafia. I looked at the tie rack for a few seconds and we got the frick out out of there. The driver had a real upset look on his face the whole time he drove us back, made me extremely nervous. But he did bring us right back to the temple. I always wonder what happened to him...


That's my only bad experience with humans. I did almost die trying to surf in California and get into a really rough spot snowboarding in Canada, but that's probably another thread.

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What's the deal with the touching of the hair? Were they being aggressive? Pushy? (Regarding the hair), do you think they've never seen a Caucasian before?

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It was so overwhelming honestly a throng of people surrounded us so quickly. There were some pushy people, and it’s a touristy area so it’s not like we were the first whites they’d seen.. not sure what the motive was there .

All I know is I didn’t really recognize the potential danger until it was too late. Luckily the police saved my arse that night for sure .

My husband and I were in Barcelona during the attack on La Rambla in 2017. We had lunch at Moments in the Mandarin Oriental. We were walking back towards our hotel in the El Born neighborhood, but with plans to wander. We hear a lot of sirens. We keep walking. Siren after siren. People just walking like nothing. We both look at each other like, wtf is going on? But nothing appeared odd. We go into a shop. Nobody shows concern. We leave and I see people running. A woman is dragging two kids and jumps onto a tour bus parked on the side of the street. I'll never forget the look of terror on her face. At this point we decide to go to a coffee shop to connect to wifi and check the news. I don't see anything. Then a woman working there gets an alert on her phone and she shrieks. Then I saw the news on my phone. We rush back to the hotel. There's a guy on the elevator, no shoes, leg bleeding. He and his friends witnessed it. We get to the room, turn on the TV, but the news was in Catalonian so my husband's limited Spanish wasn't a ton of help. We actually thought they had caught the people, and we went to the Picasso Museum that night as planned. There was no lockdown or anything. Restaurants had locked doors but would let you in. The streets were eerily quiet. The rest of our time in Barcelona was very somber and surreal as we realized the gravity of the situation.

Walking back to an airbnb from a bar. I had some locals follow me screaming at me, however, I could not understand them. Then when two of them moved from behind me to the other side of the street and kept following I started to panic I went inside the first open venue I saw.

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I flew from London back to the US on the 1 year anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing which made me pretty nervous.

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I had to fly to Dallas for business about 2 weeks after 9/11. That was a trip. Armed national guards all over the airport and a plane that was about 75% empty. I was a bit freaked out the whole time.