These mistakes travel bloggers make talk about mistakes made around language barriers and cultural misunderstandings. This is a four-part series in collaboration with fellow travel bloggers. Follow the links at the end to read about language barriers and cultural misunderstandings, medical misadventures, attention errors, and my biggest travel mistakes.
Sleeping in a Park
A story from: Travel Collecting
This mistake to avoid while traveling occured in Spain. I arrived in Pamplona, Spain for the Running of the Bulls without a hotel or hostel reservation. Not surprisingly in retrospect, everything in town was totally booked out. Fortunately, they had it set up so that you could check luggage at the train station, so I left everything except my camera, cash and passport there, figuring I’d sleep in a park. However, the city was wise to that and trucks came by every few hours throughout the night and watered the lawns of the inner-city parks to discourage people sleeping on them.
After two days of sleep exhaustion, I went to a park a little out of town and managed to get a few hours’ sleep. Unfortunately, on my way back into town at 5:00 am all alone, I was surrounded by a group of teenagers and mugged at knife point and had my camera stolen. The good news? I ran with the bulls and didn’t get gored!
Perhaps not the most comfortable sleeping place.
By Three Minutes
A story from: Phila Travel Girl
I’ve had many travel frustrations when my friend was meeting me on the road after I lost my job and ran away to Europe for three months. We met in the Malta airport, gave the taxi driver an extra twenty euro to drive like an F1 driver to the ferry terminal. We missed the ferry by three minutes and watched it pull away sailing to the island of Gozo. We arrived late and exhausted to the island and our Airbnb.
In the morning, my friend woke up covered in bug bites and explored (and documented) the filthy house. On day two, I tripped on one of the loose steps and ended up in the ER with a fractured foot. We fled to a five star hotel on the island to hit reset on the vacation. When we left the hotel, the car battery was dead. All we could do was laugh in the parking lot. This was our first vacation together after a long distance friendship of nearly twenty years, separated by a large pond — him in the U.K. and me in the U.S. We barely survived the first four days together and had two weeks left.
We arrived at our house rental broken people only to realize the house faced the church bells and the bells would ring every fifteen minutes to tell time with special extended medley at 5:45 a.m. and 6:17 p.m. If nothing else, we laughed on this very memorable holiday.
My Host Was a Criminal
A story from: Ross The Explorer
One of the many mistakes travel bloggers make: taking odd jobs because they ran out of money. This is my epic travel fail story about ending up working for a boss who could genuinely be described as criminal.
My week in Sydney was nearing the end, I had seen the popular sites and caught up with friends. Now it was back to the painful reality that I was low on money, unemployed and living in a very expensive country. Just the essentials were setting me back $30-40 a day.
My friend was coming out in a few weeks time and I had agreed to do the East Coast with him. After hopping from odd job to odd job and vaguely getting by I had to find somewhere which would give me 40 hours a week but only needed me for a few weeks.
I saw a post on Facebook about working at a Carnival on Philip Island. The job came with free accomodation, needed people to work full time and the dates lined up perfectly with my friend arriving. Somehow despite the slim odds I had found the perfect job.
In hindsight the job was anything but perfect. I was completely oblivious to the thuggish reputation Carnies have. From day one the bosses presented themselves as condescending and mistrusting of their own staff and the campsite where we were staying was absolutely disgusting.
One of the caravans was missing a door. There was a single shower for ten people. We had to buy our own bottled water. On the day I arrived there was garbage everywhere and all the pots, pans and plates were dirty. You could tell none of the longer terms workers had any dignity or pride.
Five other backpackers arrived on the same day as me. 24 hours later four of them quickly bailed, much to the bosses frustration. They had been misled about pay, living conditions and hours. Two new backpackers came and then us four backpackers stuck together over the next 13 days. We were all fed up. We were doing 50 hour weeks and the amount we were going to be paid at the end was below minimum wage.
On the final night there was a row between the boss and the two girls. Everyone departed ways in a rage and it had been agreed the next morning we would be paid and leave. The boss deliberately miscalculated the amount of the days we had worked and then threatened to punch one of the backpackers who was arguing the case. The situation got more heated and we knew we had to just jump in the car and leave. We never did get paid in full.
It is essential you never let your money get too low when you are backpacking. The poorer you are the more vulnerable to exploitation you are. I reported the experience to Fair Work Commission but the bosses seemed to be able to brush my concerns aside by simply lying to the government department and saying I had never worked for them. I was able to provide an array of evidence to suggest otherwise but it all fell on death ears.
You know a job isn’t great when you have to pay for your own water!
We Got Scammed
A story from: Asher & Lyric
A common travel mistake is staying in dismal rooms. In September 2017 my wife, 10-month-old son and I went to Paris and had our expensive trip ruined because of major Airbnb fails. Our first place was unbearably moldy and didn’t match the pictures at all yet the listing had 42 reviews with a 4.5-star average. Our second place (which we booked because we couldn’t stay at the moldy place) was a fake listing by a fake person who demanded cash on arrival.
When we called Airbnb customer service, they suggested we stay a new place but the first option they gave us was hosted by the same guy who had just scammed us! We promptly found a nice hotel to get out of this horrible situation. It then took 6 months of emails, phone calls and our Airbnb research study getting a lot of press in order for us to get our refunds.
I’ll spare you the grotesque pictures of moldy, dirty Airbnb’s, and instead give you this beautiful picture of Paris!
“There’s a Train Behind Us!”
A story from: Wandering Rose Travels
Knock, knock, knock. The old man’s cane rapped on my car window. I eased down the window, hearing these stern words, “Sir, you can’t be here in that car.”
This was day 8 of our trip to Germany and Switzerland. We booked rooms in Munich for Oktoberfest, but otherwise opted to follow our bliss and find hotels as we went. Our unscripted travels were pure joy until this day, when we found that ALL the rooms in Freiburg were booked for a festival. So we journeyed down the road to find a room. Cute hotels in small towns? Booked up. Dingy places outside larger cities? No dice. We went across the border into Switzerland to Basel — large city, gotta have vacancies? Not when the G8 is in town.
It was in Basel our mishap began. Arriving at a stop sign, the GPS said turn left. I looked at the road symbols, scratched my head that something did not seem right, but obediently followed my GPS pilot.
Quickly it was clear we had turned onto tram tracks. Calm down, I told my family. This calm was short lived as son Mitch noted, “Dad, there’s a train behind us.” While processing this info, another appeared in the windshield.
I slowly eased the car off the tracks onto a crowded pedestrian-only plaza. We were safe, but obviously not where cars are allowed. Sitting there with no idea what to do, an elderly gentlemen tapped on the window with his cane and explained where to go.
“Make your way CAREFULLY to that alley,” he said, pointing to an opening 100 yards away. We SLOWLY made our way thru the crowd. We got many dumb tourist glares. But we made it out.
Mitch got on his phone, desperate because tension levels in the car were code red. Thru broken German and frazzled English, he found a room nearby. He failed to note the room was a junior suite costing $$$$. I balked, causing Mitch to hit his breaking point.
“Fine, whatever. No more driving!” he exclaimed, plunking down his credit card and telling the staff to ignore my protests.
This is definitely not a sight you want to see out of your rear view mirror!
For more travel mishaps from travel bloggers, check out Language Barriers and Cultural Misunderstandings, Medical Misadventures, Attention Errors, or My Personal Travel Mishaps.
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