Here's some of the mishaps I've encountered on my travels over the past five years...
Goodbye baggage!
So the third time I went out to South Africa which was back in Febuary 2012 I ended up in a spot of bother when I reached the end of the first part of the mammoth journey at Johannesberg airport. To get to mpumalanga from the UK I had to get two flights, London to Joberg, Joberg to Nelspruit. Now from what I can remember I had to collect my luggage and check it in again for the second flight which usually you don't have to do but I had to which I'm guessing was just because the second airplane to nelspruit was a very small plane that quite frankly looked a little dodge that only seated about 15/20 people. So I was there at Joberg (for anyone that's been there knows how intimidating it is, especially as a little 19 year old girl on her own) and I was waiting for my luggage to come passed on the belt so I could check it in for my little dodgey plane. I waited... And waited.. Until I was the only soul in the room. Thankfully I had a little while to wait for the next flight. So I went over to this luggage desk where an African lady was stood. I asked her if she could help me and that I think my luggage had been left in London Heathrow. For anyone that's been to South Africa you might have experienced that there's still a divide between the white people of South African and the black people of South Africa and it was as if she didn't want to help me or maybe she just didn't understand me well. I was panicking, by this point almost in tears and decided to ring my mum. £50 phone bill later and mum tried her hardest to calm me down as for her it was the middle of the night. I glanced back at the belt and realised after taking a real good look at it that it was the exact same bag as mine except mine was a 100L and this one was a 90L. SOMEONE HAD TAKEN MY BAG! I went back to the luggage desk to say that someone must've taken my bag and I handed them the bag that was left over. I asked if they could get in touch with the person but I don't think there was a name or contact number on it. By this time I had to go get onto my next
connecting flight.
When I reached nelspruit I was met by my friends Ashley, Kyle and Tyron and after huge hugs I told them what had happened. Ashley said that when we get back to hers she will ring the airport and try an get some answers. In the mean time I had no clothes. Just some baggy hippie pants and a thin jumper and I wasn't going to be able to ride horses in those so we made a stop at Mr Price which is like South Africa's primark and I got myself some jeans and tee's.
Couple days later we heard back that someone had taken my bag accidently thinking it was his and he had taken it back to Joberg. He must've had a right surprise when opening my bag to find a riding helmet and girly underwear! Someone ended up personally delivering my luggage all the way from
Joberg to Hazyview which is a good 5/6 hour drive or something ridiculous. I went a week in total without my bag, fair to say I was happy to see it again.
What have I learnt? Put something on your bag to make it stand out.
Camping out in JFK
This was when I went to America in the summer of 2012 to work on a summer camp. Oh it was amazing, Long Lake Adventure Camp is incredible. After the camp, myself and the other two horse girls who became real good friends of mine decided to travel to Miami after a going to New York for a while after camp. We had a blast! Beach, nights out, hostels, party's, bagels. We ended up meeting Amy's man friend Daryl (dazzle) from camp too as he came and joined us for a few days. On one of the last days we went to the Miami Ink shop which I was totally fan girling in as I watched their tv show all the time. I like to add that I met Chris Garver 😏
Anyway shortly after that we were walking through the town and I realised that my purse had gone missing, I had it in the Miami ink store and then about half hour later it was gone. I was pretty sure I was pickpocketed or maybe it fell out my bag, no idea. But it had my ID, bank cards and all my money I had for the last couple of days before I flew back to England. My mum managed to transfer some money into my friends account so I could pay for a taxi to the airport and get some food. The taxi ended up being a lot more than expected and left me with about 6 bucks til I got home. I had to fly from Miami to New York JFK and then to Heathrow and I had about 30 odd hours in JFK before my flight home, I was going to check in somewhere close by before I lost all my money but I had no choice but to just camp out in the airport for 30 hours, how hard could it have been, they usually have seats you can lay on. Well not where I was! In the whole terminal there were no seats so I ended up finding a corner of an arcade and camped out there. I laid my towel down and a layer of clothes for a bed, found a plug socket and that was that. I had about 6 bucks left over to last me til I got home so I went to KFC cos I was starving and bought a coke and a mini fillet meal type thing. The cheapest meal anyway. I tried to make that last a good 8/9 hours and then got some sleep, kinda.
I woke up to find a nice American couple that we're sat near me also in the arcade looking at photos of their honeymoon they had just had in Ireland and they were headed back home to somewhere in America but had a stop over in JFK for a while too. We got chatting, I told them what had happened and they ended up buying me a large meal from macdonalds to keep me going. It was lovely of them and they were so nice and let me watch an episode of the office on their iPad with them, more hours passed and I fell asleep again. By the time I woke up the couple had already left to catch their early hours flight and had left me with a pile of girly magazines and a macdonalds breakfast next to me. I never managed to get their names, they were so kind.
It's fair to say I was very happy to see my mum after that long couple of days getting home. I wish I had their names so I could thank them again for being so nice.
Death by street food
This one was a recent one, about 4 weeks ago in Pai. The prettiest little bohemian town hidden in the mountains in north Thailand.
One evening me and Callum decided to get a mix of street food down the walking street instead of going to a restaurant. That way for the same price as a meal we could get a mixture of different foods. I ended up getting a spinich and cheese bread thing and a couple of chicken skewer things and Callum got a skewer and, a chicken leg and a crepe and then we both had a fruit smoothie afterwards. Oh what a bad idea that was.
We got back to our little cabin and we were just chilling in bed on our phone when I felt the sudden urge to be sick. I have a problemed tummy so I'm used to getting stomach aches pretty much everyday but I don't usually feel sick to the point I have to be.
I was really quite violently sick for a couple hours before Callum started feeling unwell himself. Because I get myself in such a state if I'm sick, Callum had to be there with me to hold me up because I usually end up passing out. Callum ended up passing out for the first time that night after seeing me so sick. After that he started having an upset tummy to and eventually was sick aswell.
I was being sick on average every 10 minutes for about 11 hours straight. Callum ended up passing out a second time where he fell on his face on the tiles of the bathroom floor and cut open his nose and bashed his head. At the point I was really worried so I ended up face timing Callum's dad because he's a nurse. He told us to get some dioralite sachets down us to replace the sugars and salts our bodies lost while we were sick and to keep drinking water although it was coming back up fasting than it was going down. We were running really low on water and we knew we had to drink so much to keep ourselves hydrated but by this time it was 2am and neither of us could hardly stand up right. We knew we had to find water somehow (as you can't drink the tap water in asia) or we were going to get in a seriously bad shape. Worse than we already were. Callum wasn't as sick as I was so he managed to walk/crawl to the resort down the road where he came across the desk but no one was there, only an American couple that after cal had explained what was happening to us they said to just take a bottle out of the fridge. Cal took some water, we had no choice but he went back the next day to explain to the person on the desk and pay them back for the water he took earlier in the morning. They ended up not charging him for the bottle he took and cal just bought another bottle off them.
Even the owner of our hostel heard us being sick all night and came to give us some free water also.
We were stuck in bed for 2 days after, watching the animal channels in Thai to keep our spirits up. It took 4 days to start being able to eat a meal and walk around and about 10 days for our Tummys to feel relatively normal again.
Since then we've not touched street food or anything that might be dodgey, so far so good.
But the word crepe makes Callum shudder.. Ha!
If in doubt, back to Kwa! (Plus lion story)
My first ever trip to South Africa was back in 2010 when I was just 17. That was the trip that lit something in me about travelling that keeps on burning. I did a 6 week project on a beautiful game reserve called Kwa Madwala that was organised by the amazing company The Leap (check them out!)
It was the time of my life.. But after that, the following year I went back to help a friend who once ran the horse safaris at Kwa Madwala. The second trip went great. I went back for a third time in 2012 (the baggage incident trip) which was also going well until maybe a few weeks in. My friend was in a relationship where there was so much arguing and it just wasn't a nice environment to be in, couple long stories short I decided to go my own way. I didn't really know what to do. I had a lovely group of friends in Hazyview which would spend time with me when they weren't working but I was still in South Africa for a while and I didn't want to catch an early flight home. I got back in touch through Facebook with the ranger that ran our programme at Kwa Madwala 2 years earlier and I told him my situation and asked if there was anyway I could come back to Kwa and help out and work. He got back to me and said he would ask the big boss and try and help me out as much as he could. Turned out I could come back and join onto a programme which was the same as what I did in 2010 but where people could've stayed for 10 weeks. It was towards the end of their programme and there was about 10 leapers still there. I was able to have a spare bunk in the new accomodation the leapers had and I just chipped in for food and helped out with the other volunteers and got to help on a lot of the horse safaris and other tasks like rounding up a rhino on horseback and replacing a tracking colar on one of the lions and got to help with the 2 tame elephants. It was so good to be back at Kwa, different and also a little sad at times. At the time I was in a relationship with someone I had met on my first trip in 2010, and he was back in England, so being back at Kwa with all the memories but without him and the leapers from my trip was hard at times, but I met some really nice people from the 2012 leapers.
Kwa Madwala to me is a magical place that I'll always keep close to my heart, wonderful people and animals. It was my African dream.
For those that haven't heard the lion story I thought id add that in this bit too as it was the same trip.
One of the days we went out on a riverbed picnic ride in the late avo on the horses. It was great, galloping through the bush. We set up in the dried river bed and made a tempary paddock for the horses so we could let them graze without them being tied up while we hung out and had a picnic. A horse one of the guides rode (apache) was very nervous around people on foot and actually managed to break out of the make shift paddock and take himself for a little run. We saddled up and tried to find apache with Wade, his rider sat on the back of me whilst I rode my horse spirit. We decided to head back to base and hope that Apache would've found his way back alright. Now this isn't just in a big field, this was a game reserve with dangerous animals living in it. We found this out the hard way when it got to the early evening as we were riding home as a ride and 3 of the lions jumped out of nowhere at us. We walked straight into where they were. It was around the time lions became active and went out to hunt as most of the day time they're asleep. I didn't even pick up a clue from the horses that something was there in the bushes but there was.. Most of the ride managed to ride back to the river bed apart from myself with wade on the back of me with my friend Alex on her horse.
I had it in my head that was it. I was petrified and genuinly thought this was my time to die. All sorts of things run through your head. You couldn't run away because the lions would see you as prey and go after you. So trying to keep a horse calm and still with not 1 but 2 riders on it whilst you're completely loosing your shit was hard.
Tommy, another ranger ended up there on the scene In a vehicle and by that time I was in a state, I couldn't really control my horse because of the fear so they managed to get me on the car and wade rode my horse while we positioned ourselves between the horses and lions. It all went a little blurry from there. I was freaked. We got back to base to find apache just grazing outside the gate, not fazed atall and everyone got back safely.
What a ride.
The text I sent my mum afterwards was interesting as I could only afford a one page text to her.. Read something like..
"Hi mum. All is good, went on a ride today and ran into some lions, almost died but didn't, miss you, hope you're well. Laurie x"
She was a little freaked out after that. Whoops!
So there you have some memorable mishaps that I've had in my travels. Travelling isn't always smooth sailing and happy days, it leaves you with marks on your body and things missing but it sure is worth every second and it always works out somehow.
Featherhead.
