Travel takes tourists beyond the safety zone
The more you travel, the more likely misadventure will befall you.
The more you travel, the more likely misadventure will befall you. As a leading example of this theory, I can assure you it’s true. As I type, I have a fractured rib from a traffic accident in Singapore. There is something ironic and almost comical about being loaded into an ambulance in a destination where safety is paramount and regulations strictly observed. Singapore is the last place you’d expect to be struck by a runaway vehicle.
I have driven a Vespa in Rome amid traffic that makes the roads of Singapore seem deserted. I have been a pillion passenger on a motorbike in Ho Chi Minh City and sung along with the driver as we weaved in and out of lanes as if pulled by an invisible and unbreakable thread. Heavens, I have driven an F1 car on Abu Dhabi’s Yas Marina Grand Prix circuit and surely set a land speed record for someone of my age. A group of Korean tourists had their photos taken with me as I pulled off my helmet and shook my hair, like Wonder Woman’s mother.
Mosquitoes? Hello, Susan. I was well-known to tropical medicine specialists in Sydney in the early 1990s after contracting malaria in southern India. More recently, my allergic reaction to tsetse fly bites in Kenya has kept various specialists busy. I now have the all-clear, thanks in part to a bush doctor in the Masai Mara. He emerged, in gleaming garments, from a makeshift clinic, and pressed loose tablets into my palm. “Take three a day and do not worry, lady, I am Harvard Medical School returned.” It didn’t seem appropriate to ask to see his diploma but the magic pills stopped the itching for my journey home.
Camels, ostriches? I have been aboard the lot, but never on home soil. Travel takes you out of your comfort zone and, I believe, turns you into a more experimental version of yourself, with a wardrobe to match. Safari-goers arrive in Africa kitted top to toe in khaki clobber, with special shirt pockets for ammunition. They present the illusion of being an equipped adventurer in the wild, as imagined by Abercrombie & Fitch or Banana Republic.
On an estancia outside Santiago, my companions decided putting on ponchos and trotting around on retired champion polo horses would be a grand idea. These were the same people who, three days earlier, had refused to open their eyes in the taxi as we hurtled from the airport.
I have slept in a tent in Botswana that was all but knocked over by a rogue hippo late at night. Later, camp management told me the old bull regularly mistook the canvas bulk for an obliging female. This sort of stuff just doesn’t happen at home and, while it’s silly to take unnecessary risks, surely a whiff of the unknown is why we all get up and go.