Most travel stories worth telling do not start with a perfect plan. They start with something going wrong or a stranger showing up unexpectedly or a moment so strange you could not have planned it. The travelers below were not looking for anything extraordinary. They just went somewhere and something found them.
I was at Uluwatu in Bali when a monkey appeared from nowhere and grabbed my glasses off my face. My vision is terrible and I would have been in trouble without them. My first reaction was to walk toward the monkey but it showed its teeth at me so I backed away quickly because I did not want injuries and rabies shots. Fortunately a local person saw what happened & gave the monkey a piece of fruit in exchange for my glasses.
I was in a small coastal town in Portugal and followed a group of locals carrying accordions toward the docks. I ended up at a neighborhood sardine roast right on the sea wall. There were maybe twenty people with plates of grilled bread and music playing until the stars came out. I did not understand any of the lyrics but they kept giving me food and teaching me the steps to a local dance. You cannot book that kind of experience on TripAdvisor.
I got off the train in this tiny Italian village & was completely lost trying to find my guesthouse. This older man on a worn bicycle saw me struggling with my map and signaled for me to follow him. The five-minute walk turned into a full neighborhood tour. Every few houses he would stop to shout something in Italian & introduce me to his brother at the butcher shop and a cousin hanging laundry & eventually his aunt sitting on a porch. By the time we reached my door I had met half his family and had three people tell me exactly where to get the best cannoli. He would not take a tip. He just seemed genuinely happy to show off his town. It was the first time a place actually felt like home instead of just a spot on a map.
In Costa Rica at a wildlife center the path between the dining room and the guest building winds through the jungle. At night it is completely dark. One night while going to the dining room I saw a pair of bright yellow eyes staring at me from between the trees. I could see nothing else but noticed some movement around the eyes. I thought it was a black jaguar and screamed for help. That was real fear unlike anything I had ever experienced. My scream startled the animal and it disappeared. But a moment later it reappeared by my side breathing heavily and said sorry in Spanish. I screamed again. It turned out to be a local man apologizing for scaring me.
I was on a train from Prague to Paris and realized about an hour in that I had boarded the wrong one. Not the wrong direction but the wrong country. I ended up in Dresden with no German and a return ticket that was not valid. A retired schoolteacher at the station bought me a coffee and drew me a map by hand and waited with me until I got on the right train. I still have that map.
I got chased by a huge seal in Ireland. A bit more to the story is that we visited a beach with friends & it was beautiful with two large hills surrounding the beach. I went to the beach directly while my friends went on top of the hill. I saw a seal in the distance and I was initially happy to see it coming close until it started coming out of the water. At that moment my friends from the hill said they would start running if they were me and not to worry because they would record video as proof that I only defended myself if the seal got too close. There was no harm to the seal or myself. It was fun in a way but in that exact moment when that big animal came out of the sea I got scared.
I am a sixty-four year old man and had my electric toothbrush in a cloth bag in my backpack. When I picked it up to board I must have turned it on.
I finally heard it when putting my bag in the overhead compartment and several people behind me were looking my way. I pulled it out of my pack as fast as I could and said it was my toothbrush. I got a lot of laughs and even a couple of flight attendants were laughing.
On my last night in Munich I needed to buy tampons. The only package in the store had 100 OBs in it. I only used a couple but I refused to leave the rest behind because I hate wasting money. My suitcase was full so I put them into the side pockets of my carry-on bag. At the airport security line a guard grabbed my bag and started to unzip it. I tried to warn him but that seemed to make him angry. He held the bag up in the air and pulled hard on the zipper. Dozens of tiny white bullets went flying through the air. Some of them landed on other people. I will never forget watching security guards on their hands and knees trying to pick them all up.
I was staying at a guesthouse in rural Vietnam when the power went out at 9pm. The owner showed up with a lantern & took me and three other guests to the roof. She brought out a gas burner and an enormous pot. We sat up there for four hours eating whatever she cooked in batches while insects flew into the lantern. The valley below was completely dark. Nobody had planned this & none of us knew each other two hours before. There was a French couple who had been fighting all day but they stopped arguing somewhere around the second pot. There was also a solo guy from New Zealand who barely spoke at dinner but he turned out to be very funny once the lights were out. When the power came back on nobody moved. The owner turned the lights off again from the switch by the stairs and we stayed up there until midnight.
Travel has a way of surprising you right when you think everything is under control. Those unexpected moments are always what you remember. Not the itinerary or the hotel but the moment that made no sense & stayed with you anyway. What is the one thing that happened to you on a trip that you still think about?
