What is your unforgettable experience in a foreign country?

When I lived in San Diego a few years ago, I had a doctor in Tijuana, Mexico, who used to prescribe my medicines.  I knew to carry the prescriptions with me as I'd read that buying or carrying prescription-type medicine in Mexico without a scrip was a crime.

I had just bought my meds at a Tijuana pharmacy one evening when I made the mistake of crossing a busy street on foot after the traffic light had turned red against me.

From the corner of my eye, I thought I saw a policeman waving at me, and I could clearly hear him telling me to stop.

For a few seconds I pretended not to hear him, but he was persistent and caught up with me. He insisted on searching the computer-size bag I was carrying which contained my meds.  When he saw the boxed pills, he demanded to see my prescription papers.

I was aware that U.S. Constitutional protections against unwarranted searches were irrelevant in this drug-challenged border town.

I searched for but couldn't immediately find the prescriptions among the various receipts and other papers In the bag and in my pockets.

"Do you know what it is like to live in a Mexican jail?" he asked me in accented but perfectly understandable English.

I couldn't even consider visualizing that scenario as I continued to rummage through my papers.

He was patient enough to allow me to go through all my stuff, until finally I was able to locate and produce the prescriptions.  He looked them over.

Then he handed the scrips back to me, nodded his head once, and silently and quickly turned and disappeared into the evening crowds on the Tijuana streets, not saying another word.

Whew!

cccmedia in Ecuador

I'll choose "thrilling", Mal.

Towards the end of nine months of budget-travelling through the Middle East (backpacking) and Eastern Europe (in a VW Beetle) with a girl I'd picked up at a Greek Youth Hostel, way back in the 1960s, I talked our way out of Communist East Germany at an illegal crossing point. I won't post the whole story here, but anybody who's interested can find it by Googling "Barlow Cayman Checkpoint Charlie". Or I guess they could go directly to my website's archives for December 2011.

It was the first time I had blogged about my old travelling days, but that little adventure at the border, brief as it was, stays in my mind as the most satisfying of them all.

Not in a million years would I have challenged those gun-toting German border guards.

I had no idea Gordon had that kind of chutzpah!

Ah, the rashness of youth, CCC! And it must be admitted that not every attempt to cross borders illegally was successful. My blog "Stoned in Alexandria", posted in June 2012, tells of one notable failure - being flagged down by guards toting machine guns while heading for the border at high speed near midnight. (We weren't in any real danger, but it makes for a good story!) The travel tales were fun to write, and it was fun remembering the incidents. As long as one comes out alive, right?

Sitting on the rim of an active volcano on Tanna Island Vanuatu and watching the rocks fly up out of the crater. A few months before we got there a backpacker was killed by a rock.
Have many other experiences like running gun battles in Afghanistan or camping out in the Gobi desert in Mongolia. Walking the Kokoda track in Papua New Guinea.

stumpy wrote:

Sitting on the rim of an active volcano on Tanna Island Vanuatu and watching the rocks fly up out of the crater....before we got there a backpacker was killed by a rock.
Have many other experiences like running gun battles in Afghanistan....

And I thought Gordon was a dare-devil!

stumpy wrote:

Walking the Kokoda track in Papua New Guinea.

Tell us about that one, Stumpy!

Inspite of having valid visa I was stopped by the immigration of Angola in Luanda for 16 hours in the airport..............

aryavrat wrote:

Inspite of having valid visa I was stopped by the immigration of Angola in Luanda for 16 hours in the airport..............

Years ago I arrived at the Quito, Ecuador, airport for a flight to the United States.  My itinerary had a connection in Atlanta.

I had a cold which was getting worse by the minute.

On board the first leg of the trip, I was so overheating while waiting to enter a bathroom in the extreme rear of the plane, that I had to unbutton my shirt (exposing some chest hair, I'm sure).

When we arrived at ATL, Homeland Security had been called to stop me, and they refused to let me board my connecting flight.  So I spent the night at a hotel near the Atlanta airport.

IMO Homeland Security did the right thing there.  After getting rest, I was able to get a flight to metro Denver the next day.

However, I learned years later that Homeland Security had misreported my incident.  Their records stated that I had been standing shirtless outside that airliner bathroom.  The truth was that I had only unbuttoned the front of the shirt.

cccmedia in Quito

I'm trying to think of the really odd from the many odd things I've got up to.

An attempted mugging in Semarang, Java was a damp sort of story as I simply turned around and looked at them in a "do you enjoy hospital food" sort of way.
I suppose the wandering around schools with the local intelligence policeman was interesting as we did anti drugs talks, then an anti stealing one at a school where a couple of the kids had been nabbed shoplifting.
I stole the head teacher's wallet, the police arrested me, dragging me away.
I went on to explain how horrible prison food was, and how you had to eat the insects and maggots that were in it.
The same cop told me he was having problems getting photos of the house they were about to raid on a drugs bust - I played tourist, walking up the road snapping photos of everything in sight, including the dealers who all came out of the house to have their photos taken.
They were arrested the next day.

Fred wrote:

I stole the head teacher's wallet, the police arrested me, dragging me away.

Staged event...or is you just hoaxin' us, bandido?

cccmedia wrote:

Fred wrote:

I stole the head teacher's wallet, the police arrested me, dragging me away.

Staged event...or is you just hoaxin' us, bandido?

Staged - I gave him my wallet for me to steal.
I ran around the group of kids, telling them how I was going to the shop to buy cigarettes with the stolen money then,  to howls of laughter from the students, Mr. Muji (The cop) stuck my arm up my back and arrested me.
I miss the fun we had back there.

One of my unforgettable experiences in Marrakesh was asking an old lady where I could find a toilet. She took me by the hand and said 'come' , I was led down a few alleyways and thru a door, it was her home! while I went to the loo she prepared mint tea and indicated for me to sit down. She spoke very little English - just a few words - and my Darija is awful and limited. She had pictures of her sons and thru mime and gestures I told her about my family. We drank tea and she smiled a lot and after she took me back to the souk right where I had been when I asked her. I went to my purse to offer her some money and she just kissed my cheeks and said 'welcome Marrakech' .
Such a lovely gesture from an elderly lady and one that made me love the city even more

So many of them e good and the 'ooops did I do that'.

Some are just secrets one can take to the grave.

My first trip to Thailand blew my mind.  It was Chiang Mai in 1999.

The remarkable northern Thai food ... the ease of making friends with Expats from the U.K., the U.S. and elsewhere ... being able to stay at a four-star hotel featuring a great pool ("Lake Delicious," we called it) for $35 a night... luxurious $5 and $10 massages several times a week ... and the colorful and exotic culture that is like nowhere else -- it all added up to a daily high I didn't want t leave.  My new Thai girlfriend just added to the buzz.

I ended up staying over three months -- which meant a sizeable overstay fine exiting the country during the Songhkran water-fights celebrations.

I came back to Thailand twice in the following 12 months and was there a total of eight times between '99 and 2012.

However, Ecuador's highlands weather won me over when it was time to expatriate in 2013.

cccmedia in Quito, Ecuador

Did I mention getting my membership of the mile high club on a Malaysian airliner?
A less exciting, but extremely relaxing moment was sitting by a volcanic lake in the south of Thailand, sipping from a fresh coconut.
Quite wonderful.

I had this exact same experience twice, in Indonesia and in India:
Out of curiosity, I wandered into a slum - the kind of place all guidebooks warn you against entering - and was invited into a very modest hut. Inside, instead of being robbed by a gang of thugs, I was treated to a cup of tea and conversation in various bits of broken language by people who obviously owned hardly anything besides the teacups. On leaving, I offered to pay for the tea, which was both times vehemently rejected, because I was a guest not customer.
I will never forget this hospitality (and made a generous donation to a poverty relief charity instead).

Beppi. You will relate to this. It's an extract of a blog-post of mine in the Archives of January 2012 - one of my reports on hitching through Turkey in 1964 with a girl I had met in a Youth Hostel in Greece (and married a few years later, incidentally).

Turkey was immensely kind to us. Someone reckoned that being Australian must have helped, with the Turks feeling superior because their army had beaten back the ANZAC invaders in 1915 at Gallipoli. But most of the people we mixed with would never have heard of the invasion. In a town halfway to Mount Ararat we were intercepted in the street while looking for a cheap hotel, and pressed to stay in a private home. The small children were woken up and brought to meet us, and we slept in a bed still warm from their bodies. (Some things you just can't argue about.)

We were snowed in the whole of the next day, and did what the natives did – sat around in a cafe sipping glasses of sweet black tea. I hate sweet black tea, but what can you do? I stood up to buy my round, only to be confronted by a fierce-looking fellow with red hair who dismissed my money. A futile argument (sign language and shouting) ended by his thumping his chest while roaring “ME TURK!” I glanced at the others, who gave me the slight shifting of eyes and head that says, “Let it go.” His command of English impressed his friends enormously, so he got his money's worth, I guess.

Oh, yes - I met a beautiful lady, got married, left my whole life behind, and had two kids.
I almost forgot until the youngest, at almost 10 months old, just grabbed my keyboard and tried to hit it.
That would have been two this week, but I rescued this one from certain destruction in the nick of time.

I'm sure I will tell many stories when I come back from my first trip to central Europe next September wait for me (: