Triphap - Funny Travel Stories and Travel Horror Stories

Nine years ago, when I was new to Delhi, I didn't know the bus routes very well. Many-a-times, I would hop on a wrong bus, realize my mistake and then get off at this point or that, after posing inane questions to the bus drivers or the conductor, which sometimes irritated them.

On numerous occasions, I got reprimanded by the irate passengers as well, but then, it always takes me an inordinate amount of time to find my bearings at a new place. No matter, how many times, I may have gone down the same lane, it always appears new to me. I don’t think I like most people, take in a road scene all at once...It goes in, in bits and pieces, that quite explains why, I don’t get the complete picture and keep losing my way on the same road!

Once tired from a morning row with my old landlady (for not paying the rent on time) and late night at the office the night before, I fell asleep on the bus. I was comfortably settled in the 'Ladies only' section, after making a young man give it up for me, a cool breeze was blowing, the bus was... read more >>

When most people travel, they take the time to book hotel reservations. However, my friend Ashley and I were not most people many years ago, when we decided that backpacking through Ireland would be more fun if we "winged it."

Winging it, of course, meant that we'd each buy a one-way ticket to Dublin, and give ourselves ten days to get back to Bath, England, where we were enrolled in a study-abroad program. The plan was to visit Dublin, Galway, Cong (where they filmed “The Quiet Man” with John Wayne) and finally end things in Belfast, where we figured we could catch a flight back to England.

Unfortunately, Ireland had other plans for us, as nothing worked out the way we thought it would.

After getting stuck in Galway and Cong for about seven days (thanks to an erratic bus schedule that we couldn't figure out), we finally managed to nab a bus trip from Cong to Belfast via Dublin. The twelve hour bus ride started at ten in the morning, which means that we’d arrive in the heart of Belfast around ten at night.

Of course, like with all transport, the bus ran late, and we ended... read more >>

"You want to take a holiday in Arequipa?" our friends in Lima said, sounding slightly bemused. "You want to be careful if you go there – they say that that’s the City of Thieves."

This didn’t put me and my family off. During the late 1980s when my father was a missionary working in Peru, the Sendero Luminoso terrorist group had an iron grip on a large chunk of the mountain country and it wasn't safe for gringos (white people) to visit anywhere in the Andes apart from Cuzco and Macchu Picchu. The other alternatives for our annual holiday were Iquitos in the Amazon jungle, and Arequipa. My mother can't stand humidity, so Arequipa it was.

We decided to take the bus rather than flying, as this would allow us to spend a day or so in Nazca, seeing those famous mystery lines in the desert. And the visit to Nazca was well worth the endless travel along the Pan-American Highway through the Atacama Desert with comfort stops only occurring every three hours.

The bus from Nazca to Arequipa was supposed to roll through late in the evening, so we only checked into the hotel for one night. ... read more >>