Brooke and Radha’s worst travel tribulations
It happened in Sri Lanka. It’s the kind of moment you hope nobody will ever find out about, let alone one day write about. It’s my lowest moment. But today, I’m putting myself on trial. Yes, like a court case. You’re the judge: I’m going to tell you the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, and you can figure out whether the life of a fulltime traveller is all that it’s cracked up to be.
So, 21⁄2 years ago my partner Radha and I quit our jobs to try something a bit different.
We wanted to put happiness at the centre of what we did and we’d try to build a business model around it. We both love travel, so we decided to try to make it pay.
Since then, we’ve managed to go from the Himalayas to an underwater restaurant in the Maldives. And each week, we’ve been telling you about our adventures here.
But we spend most of the time writing about the good bits and what we recommend.
I thought it was time to tell you what happens when it doesn’t go right.
Travel is great because it forces you outside your comfort zone. And I naively thought I’d eliminated most risk by injecting myself against it. The travel doctor could have retired after he’d seen me.
Fast-forward about a year, and I’m in the far reaches of northern Sri Lanka, a place where very few tourists venture. And I need a seatbelt. Why, you ask? Because I have the most explosive diarrhoea possible; so violent I feel like I need to be strapped down.
I’m in a thatched hut, with no air conditioning. My temperature is knocking on 40C, but I’m cold; I’m wrapped up in three layers of blankets. I’m also very confused. My veins are full of expensive antibodies courtesy of my mortgage-inducing visit to the travel doctor, but it seems all they’re doing is watching the bacterial war wage on, with a bag of popcorn. The owner of the hut has seen me, and urged a visit to hospital. Trouble is, the hospital in this part of the world is also a thatched hut where nobody speaks English. The needles are apparently reused. Sanitised, I’m sure, but no thanks. The ambulance is a tuk-tuk run by the cleaner.
Then it happened – my low point. Wrapped up in my three layers lying horizontal, I felt another apocalypse approaching. This one: nuclear. I raced to the toilet and arrived just in time. Well, that’s what didn’t happen. I was about two steps in, when the jet engines started without warning. We had liftoff. I won’t go into details, but let’s just say the force would impress somebody that studies propulsion at Nasa.
It was so farcical, I burst into laughter. Then tears. Now they say laughter is the best medicine, but I’ll let you know a bit of fine print about that old saying. Laughter is the best medicine: unless you have Delhi belly, then it’s your enemy.
Yes, of course, you get sick if you’re constantly travelling the world: but it’s not always that serious. Also in Sri Lanka, I got conjunctivitis. I asked the hotel manager to arrange a doctor’s visit to get some eye drops. I think the receptionist panicked, perhaps having never seen pink eye. Ten minutes later, we heard a siren, an ambulance pulled up with a doctor and two nurses. I may hold a world record for the world’s first ambulance callout for conjunctivitis.
The same happened in Cambodia. Radha had a weird brown patch – about 2 centimetres wide – on her leg, and we asked the hotel to arrange a doctor. To our surprise, an ambulance arrived, they took her blood pressure, pulse, temperature and diagnosed a ‘‘very small rash’’. Then there was the time of an urgent colonoscopy in Singapore, which turned out to be nothing more than a big helping of bright red dragon fruit we’d eaten. We sound like hypochondriacs, but when you’re in a foreign country – and you can’t just pop home to see the doctor – it’s a lot harder to get things checked out.
In India, I decided to get a picture of a frothing camel – their mouths foam during mating season. He decided to sneeze while I was up close, and I got camel-goo all in my mouth, up my nose and in my eyeballs. Then my mind raced: was this really a camel in lust, or did it have rabies? Yes, camel rabies is a thing. I had a nervous month waiting to see if I was going to start frothing too.
Part of our job is getting invited to capture amazing experiences – but that sometimes ends spectacularly wrong. I crashed a drone filming a little hobbit escape in Hamilton, and sunk a $6700 camera in French Polynesia while snorkelling with sharks and stingrays. I don’t mind the sharks, it’s the dozens of stingrays (literally more than you can count) around your feet that really gets my heart racing, and after a barb brushed up against my leg I accidentally dropped our main camera into the sea.
If that wasn’t frustrating enough – I was on a rather expensive cruise, documenting the trip, and I needed to take pictures and video for the article. Without my main camera, I was a bit like a pilot without a plane. I had to improvise: my new drone had a really good camera, so I just ended up whipping it out and walking it around – like a kid pretending it was flying – when I needed a few shots. It looked ridiculous, but it did the job.
So while things go wrong, it’s taught me a valuable lesson: learn from it and grow, rather than waste energy getting frustrated.
We’re incredibly lucky to call travelling our job: this year alone we’ve skied in northern Japan, cruised to the most remote islands on earth, been to an ice village, stayed in a 1000-year-old German castle, hot air ballooned over Melbourne, and stayed at an overwater villa in Samoa. And there were 42 other trips on top of that.
It’s been the most exhausting, yet fulfilling, year of our life. Yes, it’s a challenge: but when was the last time something great happened in a comfort zone?