The many misadventures of Adelaide’s most incompetent traveller | Tim Williams

He spun out on the Yorke Peninsula and had a bad South African trip before he crashed into German porn. And then Tim Williams’ holidays really started going south.

One second the station wagon was going dead straight down the dirt road.

The next, it wasn’t.

The steering wheel swung violently one way, then the other, and I had no idea how to wrest back control.

The vehicle snaked along the road for a while before flinging itself into a 270 degree turn and reverse parking neatly into a ditch. But not without significant damage.

To that point, it had been a great little getaway with my mate Jon, a couple of uni students gone squidding at secluded Wool Bay on the Yorke Peninsula.

Suddenly it was a nightmare. It was not even my station wagon. It was Jon’s parents’ car. Thankfully we nursed it the next morning to a wonderful old bloke, a friend of Jon’s family, who had the biggest and best shed I’ve ever seen.

He did a temporary fix that allowed us to get as far as a mechanic in Yorketown, who did another temporary fix that should have got us back to Adelaide without incident.

Except that in the state we were in, a mix of relief and lingering panic, we forgot to put petrol in the thing.

Halfway up the peninsula the fuel gauge hit zero. We had to walk into Ardrossan and sheepishly knock on the door of the local copper, a lovely chap who took pity on us and drove us back to the car with some petrol.

It was clear that driving holidays were not going to be my forte.

In fact I’m not sure any type of travel is my forte given the many and varied ways I’ve found to embarrass and disgrace myself, from Yorkes to New York City.

The first actually predated the Wool Bay fiasco when I was extremely privileged to go on a schoolboy cricket trip to South Africa. I abused that privilege.

The world is a dangerous place for an incompetent traveller. Picture: iStock

One night we stayed at one of the most prestigious boarding schools in the country.

In a sign of great trust from the staff involved, kids from both schools were allowed out on the town together. I thought it would be a good idea to try cannabis for the first time and combine it with alcohol.

The result was me, in a drunk stupor later that night, somehow finding my way into the boarding house master’s private bathroom – thank goodness he wasn’t there – and throwing up in his loo. And then doing so again out the upstairs dormitory window, so the evidence was there all down the outside wall in the morning.

The other notable aspect of that trip was my failure to score more than a handful of runs. Some years later I would get runs of a different kind in Africa, halfway up Mt Kilimanjaro to be precise, despite the altitude robbing me of an appetite. Go figure.

The other time I desperately needed the Imodium was definitely my fault. Despite warnings from the woman running the B&B where I was staying in Naples, I just had to try some of the cheap and delicious street food on offer one evening.

The next day I took the train to the archaeological marvel of Pompeii and soon felt unwell. How disrespectful I must have looked running through the ancient streets in desperate need of a modern toilet.

Days later, I was delighted to find a carriage all to myself for another train trip, this time from Pisa to the Cinque Terre. It started promisingly enough, but after tootling a few hundred metres down the track it pulled into a siding and stopped. Wrong train.

Go back. Picture: iStock

By the time I trudged back to the station, I’d missed the right one.

I don’t always pick the right doors either.

In the gemstone section of New York’s Museum of Natural History I blithely pushed one open thinking it would lead to the next part of the exhibit. It didn’t and locked behind me.

I found myself stuck in a never-ending stairwell for what felt like forever, eventually finding an emergency phone on the basement level and having to explain to security guards how on earth I’d got there.

At Lisbon’s Estufa Fria greenhouse gardens I mistakenly wandered into a staff work zone. Upon turning around I was confronted by two big and very angry men yelling at me in Portuguese.

Having been too lazy to learn more than a few words of their language, several minutes of heated confusion ensued. Then it dawned on me they were accusing me of trying to enter without a ticket.

Just days earlier I’d fallen ill in Granada. A doctor in a hospital clinic lectured me, through an interpreter, for being so lazy as to come to her country without learning any Spanish.

That was almost as humiliating as the time I knocked over an entire shelf of pornographic magazines in a busy Berlin newsagency. Naturally I felt obliged to buy one (for the articles, of course, in yet another language I hadn’t mastered).

The list goes on. Why did I aimlessly follow a crowd in Prague into a closed-off square, having no idea what was going on, to nearly get crushed in what soon became clear was a protest against police violence at music festivals?

Why on earth did I use Viagogo to buy a ticket to a Euroleague basketball Istanbul derby, to be predictably denied entry at first, then shoved into highly policed pen of aggressive “away” fans?

Why was I the one who kept losing all sense of direction in Greece and repeatedly failing to find the way back to the tour bus?

For the record, not ALL the mishaps on my travels have been my fault.

I once turned up late at night at a hostel I’d booked in Florence to find a note on the door saying it had been shut down by the police with no further explanation.

And it was absolutely British Airways’ fault that I missed a connecting flight to Glasgow ahead of my friend Ben’s wedding. The airline then lost my luggage on the replacement flight the next morning. I very nearly had to wear a T-shirt and shorts to the most elaborate nuptials I’ve ever been invited to.

Not that anybody invites me anywhere anymore. Fair enough.

They know I’m probably too incompetent a traveller to get there.