Whether it was a cross country trip, a bike ride or on your commute to work, what is the creepiest thing you’ve seen while traveling?
I had to smuggle myself into my own country through an illegal dirt road with sketchy people, in a zone that is very well known for being controlled by Guerrilla and they just had a lethal confrontation with the Colombian military the day before.
For me it was a really scarry experience, but for the people living there, is just tuesday.
Why did you have to do that? What happened?
I was in the Colombian side of the border when the Venezuela AID 2019 happened. It’s a long story that someday I’ll write into a book, but I was left stranded in Colombia for about a week until I finally managed to go back to Venezuela.
Hmm, creepy…
Not really creepy, but the scariest thing to happen to me was traveling through Europe with two friends, we’re all women. We arrive in Paris and exit the metro and ride the escalator up to the street, and froze. It was, according to the directions on the hostel website, the correct metro stop, but the area immediately felt dangerous to the three of us. The space surrounding the elevators were encased by chain-link fencing, and bodies were pressed against them all up and down the sides. There were fights breaking out, yelling, etc, and it was mostly men. I don’t have problems with men or anything, but… yeah, it was scary.
So we stand there for a bit trying to figure out what to do. The directions on the website said to exit the metro and follow the building numbers “up” to get to the hostel, which was a good 15 minute walk for us. So we decide, okay, no biggie, we’ll exit the fence area and just start heading in a direction and follow the numbers on the buildings, figure out which way is which and just bolt ahead without stopping to talk with anyone.
And that’s what we do. Except every single number on the side of every building is 18. Over and over again as we walk, it’s all 18. And we can’t see any other numbers. So we pause, because there was no other direction on the website, just “follow the numbers up”, but there was no “up” or “down”, just 18.
We stand there for a few minutes trying to figure out what to do. I was the only one who had traveled overseas before, and the other two started to seriously panic, and I know I had to make some kind of decision, because we didn’t feel safe just standing there and if the panic really set in for them this would become much harder.
These two men walk by, and one of them catches the terrified look of one of my friends, and asks in perfect (but british-accented) English: “Are you ladies okay? Are you lost?” And we’re like: “Yes! Do you know how to get to this hostel?” And he looks at the name and says: “Yes, I know where this is, and you’re going in the wrong direction.” Then he pauses and says: “This area is pretty dangerous, its on our way, we can show you.” Then, he points down this particularly dark (it was daytime), narrow alley and says: “we’re just stopping by a place to eat this way, would you like to come?”
And this was where a decision had to come in. On one hand, the area we were in wasn’t good, and even though we knew which direction to head in now, I didn’t feel safe walking there. I didn’t feel very safe walking back to the metro we’d just left 3 or so blocks down. On the other hand, I didn’t really feel much better following a random guy and his friend down a dark alley in hope he might be telling the truth and escort us to our hostel after eating.
Literally, in my head I’m running the chance of us fighting these two guys off if they attack. I could get in a good hit, and my one friend is perry strong and capable, but my other friend would be useless. So I’m thinking of some sort of defence plan where I both help my one friend fight but also pull my other friend out if the way, because yeah, we decided to follow these guys into the dark alleyway of Paris and hope he was as kind and harmless as he seemed.
We got to the Caffe and sit down for a nice lunch and his friend goes to the restroom. And the guy tells us how they’re artists and paint giant murals on the sides of large buildings, and he was super nice. Eventually I asked if his friend was okay cause he was in the bathroom for a while and he told me yeah, that he’s just shooting up in there.
Oh, okay.
We ate lunch and they escorted us to the hostel and we give him some snacks we brought from home as a thank you and they were off.
And there was a fucking metro station right in front of the hostel! One that was NOT listed anywhere on the hostel website. Fuck that hostel, never again!
I’d go back to Paris though, 9/10, it was a good time.
What was the deal with the fights outside the chain link fencing?
I don’t know, it was weird. Lots of people had towels on the ground with a bunch of random items on them, trying to sell the stuff I think, but it wasn’t in an arranged way that a flea market would be. At one point a huge fight broke out and a group of people scattered about just picked up all their stuff in one big scoop and ran off, but others stayed and it was kind of chaotic. The fights were like heavy pushing and shouting back snd forth and stuff. No knife fights that I saw or anything.
Still, it was scary!
Did you ever find out what was up with the 18s? That´s some twilight zone shit!
I think we asked, but I don’t remember what the explanation was. I’ll reach out to my friend to see if she remembers.
To this day, the hostel we stayed at in Paris is the worst of all that I’ve stayed at before, and I’ve stayed in a lot! The employees weren’t very friendly, and I found most of the people in the city friendly in general, so… it was an off trip, lol.
