Have you ever been lost or stranded while traveling?
>>2737450Picrel happened to me in summer 2021. Fuel pump seized up while driving. No phone service, no passing traffic. Roadside assistance when called with a landline never came. The shop who towed it got me back on the road the next day. This was in Pennsylvania near the Maryland border.
Got blackout drunk in Budapest and woke up in the middle of a field near szentendre with a dead phone and no idea where I was or how to read/speak Hungarian. Also got stranded in the middle of the jungle in koh yai when my bike ran out of juice. Had to trek up a fucking mountain in the july to get to the nearest road and ask for petrol.
>>2737647Same thing happened to me when I was drinking in Prague, regained consciousness at like 6AM on a random street in the old town with a dead phone and going around in circles looking for my bnb
>>2737626did you survive?
>>2737450Yes. Multiple times in high speed traffic. The trick is DO NOT PANIC.
>>2737450I went to Lofoten on October. Didn't know how to drive yet & thinking it'll be easy to navigate on public transport. It wasn't.The weather the whole time I was there was absolute shit. Took a bus that stopped near Haukland to hike up Mannen; couldn't because it was rainy and windy. Walked under the miserable weather for who knows how long and no one stopped when I tried to hitchhike. Ended up in an abandoned house and called a taxi to take me back to my hotel. The taxi ride cost me almost 1000 NOK (around 130 USD) and I still think to this day this was the worst spending I've ever had of all my travels.And yeah, I didn't see the Northern lights at all. Probably my worst travel experience
>>2737843Nice planning bro
>>2737660>>2737647god I hate druggies
>>2737843Let me guess you're an American who thought all of Europe is just a bus or train ride away?
>>2737450In small ways, many times. Most recently, I was on a Greek island last summer and discovered that I’d booked my flight back to Athens (ahead of a connecting flight home) for the wrong f***ing date. Ended up having to get a last-minute “business class” ticket for a ferry late that night, which in practice meant sleeping on the floor of a café in the roped-off business class section of the boat with my wife and kids. It honestly went much better than expected, but it was a frantic scramble and a not-so-comfortable, very late night.Got separated from a friend (who had my guidebook and phrasebook in his backpack) for a little over 24 hours during my first visit to Ho Chi Minh City, decades ago, before smartphones—we got hustled to two different hotels, many districts apart from one another (mine in the middle of nowhere, his in the backpacker ghetto) by enterprising motorcycle taxi drivers at the airport that we mistakenly thought were in league with each other. I found Pham Ngu Lao street the next morning and eventually met back up with him that afternoon at a backpacker cafe where he’d left me a note. I’d been running around like a shithead trying to figure out where the hell I was, and then killing hours in a cafe, while he’d been sightseeing, but it made for a good memory.Other than that, I’ve been stuck for a day or two by weather conditions that closed airports or canceled flights, and once spent most of a day stranded by a roadside, and then in a middle-of-nowhere village garage, waiting for a rental car replacement after an accident. So never anything particularly serious. If you build the flexibility into your travel schedule that God surely intended, and can comfortably throw money at problems that suddenly need solving, unexpected detours and delays can be kind of enjoyable.I don’t think I’ve ever been seriously lost, although I’ve taken plenty of wrong turns in cities and when driving around in mountains. No big deal.
I lost my wallet on a motorbike trip alone in central Vietnam. I had like $5 in Dong left. I booked a hotel on my phone before locking my credit card and I got the manager to give me like $50 for some cryptocurrency. Thank you mr. manager!
>>2737450Yeah, mulitple times. -When I was in Albania my phone died while driving back from Berat to Durrës, where my hotel was. Ended up lost for a couple of hours in the middle of nowhere, got help from a farmer who didnt speak english. Came back feeling like jesse pinkman escaping the slave lab. -Also during the same trip in the balkans, I had a surprise when i discovred at the last minute that I couldnt go to Mostar (Bosnia) from Podgorica (Montenegro) like I planned. I had no shelter and had the absolute necessity to go to Bosnia, since my return flight was in Sarajevo. So I improvised, I slept in a bus that was going to Belgrade, Serbia, and arrived in the middle of the night there. It was scary to me because I was homeless, alone at night in a post-soviet country and without any signal on my phone. Turns out Belgrade was way cleaner and safe than expected (even better than most western cities). Ended up having good time and pursued my travel to Sarajevo without problem.
Rental car got a flat in Rovaniemi. Returned to the rental car desk but the guy had gone home already (I was the sole customer that day) and I was just stuck. Ended up just getting another car but it was odd being stuck north of the arctic circle and just like, stranded.
I was at a Starbucks in Jeju, South Korea once. Thousands of miles from home, and I barely spoke the language. Suddenly my friend stood up and left, without telling me where she was going. I waited like 25 minutes for her to come back, but she didn't, so I decided to leave and search for her. I was panicking and looking as fast as I could, but I didn't see her anywhere. I came back only 3 minutes or so after I left the restaurant, and there she was. Apparently she wanted to use a phone at a nearby post office.
>>2738498Live and let live bro
Fucking hate Krakow, place is like a labyrinth with all the back streets around the old town. Everything looks the same. Swear I got lost like 500 times every night. Phone was dead and couldn't find the fucking airbnb either, so had to book into an expensive hotel as nobody speaks English to help.Nightmare. Impossible to get to the airport, too, without being robbed by taxi drivers.
On a motorcycle trip with a friend, we had to get from Conakry in Guinée to Freetown in Sierra Leone. He didn't know the way out of town, so I went first. He lost me at the first intersection. Went back to the hotel where I had wifi - I didn't have a sim card - and learned that he was way out of town. Fuck.Bolted and stashed my phone in one of my pockets - poorly. Crashed into a car doing very African shenanigans because wet roads, high speeds and brakes don't go together. Bike still worked but I found out I had lost my phone well before the crash. Didn't have any maps, had to get to another country and had to catch up with someone I couldn't contact. Luckily I had memorized the most important turns - there's zero road signs - and only got on the wrong road once, which I realized within minutes. Found a local to show me the road, picked up my friend's trail at the police checkpoints and caught up with him shortly before the border.
>>2740471How fucking hard is it to show your passport, point up one finger or fucking use the translate function on your phone. People manage to book rooms without knowing the language all the time.
>>2737450I passed by a gas station, figured I had plenty, and kept going. Through a deserted highway. With no signal (This was two decades ago not every place had a cellphone tower). Almost ran out of gas and arrived to the next gas station literally running on fumes, everyone on the car was pissed off at me.tl;dr - Don't miss the chance to top up
i've been stranded by missing flights or having flights cancelled for various reasons, if that countsbut it doesn't usually bother me, sometimes the solution to the problem is like a bonus missionlike when that volcano erupted in iceland a few years ago. practically every flight in europe was grounded. i was on a work trip and i had to get trains from one side of europe to the other to get home. it was pretty interesting though, i saw several places that i normally wouldn't have been to and it was cool just sitting on the train with a beer watching the world go by
A few years ago my girlfriend and I were driving through France near Nimes on some small backroad in a rental car. We put the wrong gas in the rental and the car stopped running. I saw two types of gas "Plomb" and "Gazole"at the gas station. I knew Plomb was leaded, so I assumed Gazole was unleaded. Nope. We got a mile down the road and I knew immediately that the wrong gas was in the car. The service station was closing and they said that they wouldn't drain the tank because it was a rental car and they didn't want to mess with it. So we hung out in a little bar where no one spoke English and drank a couple beers with some nice locals while we waited for a tow truck. About 90 minutes later, the tow truck showed up and towed us to Nimes. He was awesome and gave us a bunch of food recommendations in Nimes. We gave the guy a bag of apples as a tip. The lady who ran our Airbnb waited up for us and bought us some wine because she felt bad that we had been stranded. We drank wine with her and one of the neighbors and had a little party. The rental place got us a new car and didn't charge us anything extra. I definitely did not tell them that it was our fault. The moral of the story is that getting stranded in southern France is pretty awesome.
>>2742458>or fucking use the translate function on your phone>Phone was deadLearn to fucking read. NTA.
>>2742608Learn to bring a power bank, ask somebody to charge a phone, or charge where there's an outlet
>>2737843How did you get so far away from the bus stop that you couldn't come back? Even if the weather was good you would have had to do the hike plus walk back to the stop anyway
All the time. Rural areas where public transport isn't reliable, locals don't rely on it, tourist's are told it's reliable then get stranded in the middle of nowhere. I've had whole airports shut down on me with no notice. Customs, visas, borders. Held up in transit due to bad paperwork or fines or whatever. Bus caught fire, bus crashed, taxi broke down. Abducted by bandits, mafias, bored local officials, military, just detained for no reason by sex pests with guns. Getting lost on trails that are poorly marked and criss crossed by local walking tracks. So you know where you are and you orientation but just can't find the right trail. And this is something that happens far more in rural areas than actual wilderness.
Oh also when local villagers Judy don't want you to go, so refuse to run any transport out of the area. Whole spectrum of hospitality/ kidnapping/abduction. Usually has a strong cultural basis
