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Being a travel journalist isn't all frills and five-star hotels. Telegraph Travel's regular contributors reveal their worst holiday experiences.
Mauled by a lion in South Africa
Charles Starmer-Smith
"You'd better put on an old jumper as you might get some blood on it," said our driver, with a grin, as we clambered into the Land Rover to visit the lion sanctuary at Legends resort, deep in Limpopo Province, in the far north of South Africa. I laughed it off, before slipping on the most padded jacket I had. This was a date with a lion after all.
I took solace from the fact that the lion I was going to visit was called Mapimpan, which means “little baby” in Shangaan, and it was little more than a year old. The lion was just a few days old when Arrie, the sanctuary’s resident lion expert, found it wandering the roadside, injured and malnourished. It had been raised with a view to being released back into the wild. It was made clear that if I wanted to go into the lion’s enclosure it would be entirely at my own risk. It was a chance I was prepared to take.
"You cannot show him any fear. And, above all, don’t turn and run. He’ll think you’re prey," said Arrie as we approached Mapimpan’s enclosure. I gulped and nodded.
Arrie entered the pen. Heart surging, I slipped inside and the gate locked behind me. I approached slowly and bent down to stroke Mapimpan’s wiry underbelly. It pawed at my shoes, rolling on to its back. "He likes you," said Arrie with a smile.
I began to relax, chuckling with disbelief. Then Mapimpan emitted a low growl as it circled around me. "Remember it just wants to play," said Arrie, sensing my fear.
That was when the lion clamped its jaws around my calf, its teeth sinking into my flesh.
It rose on to its haunches, towering above me and I was spun into a waltz with a 300lb predator – as I pushed desperately at its throat to keep away its jaws. This did not feel like playing.
With a series of fierce clips to Mapimpan’s nose Arrie managed to get it to release me. I had to fight the overwhelming urge to run. But I remembered Arrie’s warning. So I stood there motionless, my heart thudding, my lungs gasping for air.
Mapimpan seemed to be more docile now. I exhaled with relief. But then it slipped back through Arrie’s legs, and was on me again, its teeth bared as it lunged towards my neck. I raised my forearm to divert its jaws from my face, then felt razor-sharp teeth ripping into my shoulder.
The next few seconds were a blur of claws, teeth and shouts as I stumbled around, helpless against the power of this animal.
Not a moment too soon, Arrie managed to free me from Mapimpan’s clutches, cornering it on the far side of the enclosure. It was my cue to leave.
People ask whether I blame Arrie for putting me in that predicament, and my answer is still no. It was my choice to go in and it is an experience I will never forget, despite the stitches I needed after "playing" with Mapimpan.
An unwanted houseguest in Croatia
Peter Hardy
It was the stink of fried goat and onions at breakfast time, wafting up to our sun terrace, that first alerted us.
"I think someone's living in the garage beneath us," said our 11-year-old daughter. Someone was - the owner of our holiday villa on the Croatian island of Brac, plus five members of his family. When he wasn't not cooking pungent food, he sat outside in his dirty string vest and shorts watching our every move with a scowl of suspicion. It seemed he'd not taken the "vacant possession" clause - and several others - far too literally in his contract with a long-established British villa company. The family's clothes were still in the bedroom cupboards, and other belongings were scattered everywhere. Our young children were intrigued to discover a dresser drawer stuffed with sex aids and porno films. Whenever we left the villa, the owner would leg it up from the garage and return to his home upstairs. He decided we were using too much air conditioning in August heat, so he removed the remote control and refused to return it. Washing facilities in his sweatbox of a garage were presumably non-existent, so we always knew when he'd been snooping.
"You can swim from the door," stated the brochure. Not quite. First you had to cross a road to reach the harbour wall of the busy little port. Yes you could swim here, but it took us a morning to discover that the water was heavily polluted with sewage. Our 14-year-old son immediately developed a serious skin infection and we spent much of our two weeks queuing outside the (excellent) doctor's surgery. At the end of our fortnight, home never felt so welcoming.
Charged by an elephant in Zambia
Brian Jackman
Back in the early 1980s when I was still new to Africa I went into Zambia's Kafue National Park on a walking safari with a veteran guide called Cecil Evans. The bush was dense in places and I was relieved to see that he carried a rifle. Suddenly, without warning a very aggressive bull elephant exploded from the trees and came straight for us, head high and screaming like an express train. "Stay where you are and don't run," said Evans, a singularly worthless piece of advice since my legs had already turned to jelly, rendering the option of running impossible. He stepped forward, slapped the butt of his gun and shouted obscenities at the angry tusker, which skidded to a halt just a few metres in front of us, shaking its huge ragged ears as it towered over us.
There followed a nail-biting stand off which ended only when Evans took off his bush hat and hurled it at the elephant, screaming "Bugger off" at the top of his voice, after which the big bull spun round and lumbered off into the bush, ripping a sapling out of the ground as it did so. Had we been subjected to a mock charge or faced down the real thing? "Could have gone either way," said Evans afterwards, "but I sure didn't want to shoot unless I had to."
The long road to Hanoi
Oliver Smith
I've been chased by flying cockroaches in Ko Pha Ngan, robbed in Oruru, and slept through my birthday after drinking several bottles of Bière du Démon (12% ABV) in Paris, but for protracted agony, nothing matched the 27-hour bus ride I endured with an ex-girlfriend from Vientiane in Laos to Hanoi in Vietnam.
Most people take the plane, and our Lonely Planet guidebook said the journey was highly inadvisable, but we would save hundreds of pounds that could be better spent on Chang beer and a trip to Ha Long Bay. We turned up on time, tickets in hand, but of our bus there was no sign. Half an hour later, we figured we'd been scammed and found another travel agent down the road. A service would be leaving shortly, and there were two seats going spare. What luck.
As we boarding the battered old coach, we quickly realised our folly. We were the only tourists on board, and far from the sleeper service of my dreams, our bus was being used to ship every conceivable supply across the border into Vietnam, from George Foreman Grills to wicker furniture. The floor and the footwells were covered with sacks of grain and rice, meaning leg room was non-existent. My feet rested level with my waist and my knees were pressed hard against the chair in front - in this position I remained for more than a day.
As we left Vientiane the light rain became a thunderstorm (this was the rainy season), and we were soon struggling at a snail's pace through muddy, barely finished roads. There was no air conditioning (obviously), and stops were sporadic and unscheduled. We paused for a few hours at a roadside restaurant to allow the driver some respite - I even nodded off myself. But then he went inside for breakfast, leaving the coach door open and all the lights on. I woke with swarms of insects flying around my head. Innumerable hair-raising manoeuvres later, and after a two-hour wait at the border (featuring the obligatory attempt by immigration officials to extort money from the unwitting foreigner), we arrived in Hanoi, bruised, battered, but not quite broken.
A rogue sausage in France
Anthony Peregrine
I've been mugged in Naples, chased from a brothel in Nashville (it looked like a regular bar, honest) and attacked by fleas the size of cats in a King's Cross doss-house - but nothing compared to the suffering caused by a rogue French sausage.
The saucisse-de-Toulouse was bought from a stand inside the ground of Agen Rugby Club. It was too long to fit in its bun, and irresistible in a primal way, as the best-looking sausages always are. It proved an ideal accompaniment to the leathering handed out to local lads by Northampton Saints RFC. ("That Steve Thomson - he's got legs like cooling towers," said an Agen fan, admiringly.)
Following the match, I joined both French and English supporters in moderate celebration and/or drowning of sorrows, before returning to my hotel bed. From which, a couple of hours later, I was obliged to leap before hurtling to the bathroom where I stayed, pretty much full time, for the next three days. My short break in Agen, timed to tie in with the match, turned into the longest comfort stop in recent French history. The hotel called a doctor who proved more interested in talking rugby than my imminent death. "It will just have to work its way through the system," he said. "If any more works its way through my bloody system I'll have to bring in outside supplies," I replied. On the fourth day I emerged - thinner, whiter and wiser. I vowed then and there never again to buy food, hot or cold, from an outdoor vendor anywhere at any time - and I never have. Except once, when I fell for grasshopper gruel in Orizaba, Mexico - but you really don't want to hear about that.
The hotel from hell in Costa Rica
Joanna Symons
One of the best holidays I've ever had with my family was a trip to Costa Rica. We saw a magnificently erupting volcano, a magical quetzal bird in the cloud forest, rainbow-billed toucans and a four-eyed opossum. But there was one black spot - a hotel that still sends shivers down my spine. It was a so-called eco lodge, three miles from the nearest road and even further from any town or village, and we were dropped off there for three days of outdoor adventure.
If I'd seen our room before our driver left us, I'd have leapt on the bonnet to stop him. A cheerless, cramped little box in the grounds, with just enough room for two double beds. One wall was composed entirely of flimsy, wafer-thin glass, held in place by a DIY-looking wooden frame - potentially lethal for two jack-in-the-box boys aged nine and 11. Things didn't get any better when we walked to the main hotel building where a dinner buffet was laid out on grubby tablecloths crawling with flies. The food looked as though it was left-overs from a party the night before, so we made do with some slices of stale bread and joined the entire hotel staff by the television (unsurprisingly there didn't seem to be any other resident guests) to watch Costa Rica play a World Cup football match. By half time the boys were nearly asleep so I took them back through the now lamplit grounds while my husband, beer and Costa Rica flag in hand, settled down for the second half. As we passed some bushes I heard a rustle and glanced down to see a large snake flex and whip across the path between me and the two boys - who were just a few yards ahead. In the dim light it looked horribly like a deadly Fer de Lance viper. The boys were oblivious, thank heavens, but that was only because they were preoccupied by the ferocious barking of a large dog - which seemed to be getting closer and closer... We were nearly back to our room and as the dog closed in, the boys began to run. I fumbled for the key as an enormous mastiff-cum-werewolf bounded towards us. The nine year old panicked and fell headlong, the 11 year-old yelled blue murder, I prepared to throw myself in front of the fangs and then - miraculously - a hotel security guard burst out of the darkness and grabbed the dog just as it was about to leap. Apologising profusely in Spanish, he clipped it to a thick chain and - with difficulty - dragged it away.
We had no car, no mobile reception and it was miles to the nearest town, so we had to stick it out for the night. But the next morning I borrowed the hotel phone and - in a stage whisper because the manager was hovering nearby - begged our local tour operator to rescue us. By lunchtime we were in a clean, safe hotel in a nearby town. It was only £50 a night for the four of us, but it felt like the Ritz.
Bitten in Paris – and compared to Thatcher
Hannah Meltzer
It was the summer after A-Levels, so three friends and I decided to reward our hard work in French class with a holiday in Paris. With a budget of £10 per person per night for accomodation, we checked into a four-person room in a two-star hotel. A couple of days in, one of our number woke up with itchy pink spots all over her arm; we went directly to the local pharmacy, who, though unsure what they were dealing, prescribed - in true Gallic style - a vast range of potions and ointments, including a throat spray (I'm still not sure why).
As the days passed, two more of the group were afflicted with horrible, itchy marks. After another trip to the pharmacy, we realised they were bed bug bites. We complained to the hotel owner - a deeply jaded man, who seemed to have given up on life around the same time he gave up on his hotel. He told us: “These are not bed bug bites! You’ve all been running around Paris doing God know’s what - you probably picked up some fleas off a dog.” Charming.
Not to be deterred, we located our nearest internet cafe (these were the days before smartphones) and printed out images of bed bug bites. We brought them back to our unsympathetic friend and used a mixture of hand gestures and shaky French to hammer home the point that our afflictions were indeed caused by critters residing in our hotel. After some tough negotiations, he offered us a refund of 50 euros each and the right to leave early without paying the bill, as well as - bafflingly - a bottle of Champagne (to toast the bugs, perhaps). He didn’t let us leave, however, without a parting word communicating his reluctant respect for our bargaining skills: “Vous êtes strong English women... like Margaret Thatcher.”
Struck down in Magaluf
Charles Starmer-Smith
I was a fresh-faced 18-year-old, high on post-A-level euphoria and numerous cut-price cocktails, when I stepped out of a bar in Magaluf in June 1997. After six sheltered years in public school, my friends and I were revelling in being on our first holiday away from our parents. It took three seconds for that feeling to vanish. As I opened the door I took a sledgehammer punch in the stomach. Doubled over and gasping for air, I managed to raise my head and catch a glimpse of three or four football shirts: the blue and claret of West Ham, or was it Aston Villa? A second blow to the back of my head was the last I remember. The next thing I knew I was lying face down in the gutter, covered in my own vomit and blood, nursing bruised ribs, and with boot marks across my stomach and a gash on my head. My watch, wallet and shoes were all gone, along with one of my eyebrows. It had been shaved off.
The bald Alsatian of Andalusia
Johnny Morris
I was studying in Granada, Spain and very keen to show off the "real" Andalusia to my much missed girlfriend visiting from London. My sketchy research took us to the outskirts of Malaga where I had been told that we could find authentic and cheap accommodation for the start of our holiday. With no TripAdvisor, no smartphone and not a lot of common sense, I knocked on the first door of a dilapidated row of cottages next to the busy docks road.
The family who were in the middle of supper (fish bones, white bread and industrial brandy) looked a little annoyed when I cheerfully trotted out my well rehearsed "Habitacion doble, por favor?" With a shrug the eldest son took us inside and pointed us to what can be only be described as Wild West jail cell complete with a straw strewn floor. Looking for a bed in the tatty gloom I was surprised to find that the room was already occupied by large dog. The boy whistled and out of the darkness came an Alsatian with a huge hairy head and a completely shaved body. The bizarre combination made the evicted beast look both terrifying and pathetic at the same time. Open mouthed we stumbled out an excuse and escaped to a place down the road that offered the relative comfort of a neon 'Hostal' sign. We then spent a sleepless night trying to forget the bald Alastian while listening to neighbouring guests energetically entertaining passing lorry drivers on an hourly paid basis.
'Authentic' Andalusia lost some of its appeal that evening and unsurprisingly my girlfriend never visited me in Spain again.
Stuck in the mud of Iceland
Hugh Morris
I got my camper van stuck in silt on the first evening of an Icelandic road trip and had to call the police only to be told, rather unsympathetically, my girlfriend and I would have to call out a tow truck. Deciding I did not want to do that - and pay for it - I attempted to flag down a saviour on the three-cars-an-hour roadside. I was eventually rescued by a man returning home from a midnight fishing trip on his quad bike who eyed up the situation, drove home, and returned with his 4x4, pulled the van out and give us the head of a freshly-caught salmon as way of recompense for his country's pesky and deceptively unstable river banks.
Skiing hell in Slovenia
Adrian Bridge
There are moments when you know almost immediately as your plane touches down that something is wrong, very wrong.
I had one as soon as we landed in Ljubljana for the start of what was going to be the annual Bridge brothers ski escape.
The sky looked ominously grey, the temperature was ominously warm. And almost immediately it started raining.
We tried to cheer ourselves. It might be dull and wet here in downtown Ljubljana, but up in those mountains it was all going to be pristine snow and breathtaking views and and lung-cleansingly clear air, right?
Wrong. As we drove north the following morning we had a sinking feeling that all was not well. True, we did ski in Krvavec - if you can call spending two hours repeatedly going down pure sludge on the sole slope that was open skiing.
Surely higher up it would be better?
Our plan had been to base ourselves on the beautiful lake of Bohinj and from there to strike out to the resorts of Vogel, Kanin and Kranjska Gora, all of which looked stunning (or so the pictures indicated). But it was not to be: just as the insistent rain lower down had reduced the slopes of Krvavec to a miserable mush, a dramatic downpour of snow at altitude had resulted in the complete closure for safety reasons of the resorts higher up.
For four days we comforted ourselves with touristy trips to the picturesque Lake Bled and games of backgammon. We visited Kobarid and learnt about the extraordinary First World War front that had been carved into the ice ridges of the mountains. We ate cream cakes and drank lots of Slovenian wine. (On our final night we ended up having a rather splendid evening with the mayor of Bled, but that’s another story.)
Sure we were upset that we had been denied the surge of energy and the health-restoring excitement that comes from hurtling down the slopes at speed, but there had been some compensations.
And needless to say, when the time came to board the plane back from Ljubljana, the skies had cleared, the temperatures had dropped and we got our first (and only) glimpse of the spectacular Julian Alps.
Dogged by suspicion in Colombia
Michael Kerr
Colombia's fascinating, but it's not a country where you want to be suspected of drug smuggling. It happened to me twice. The first time, en route from Cartagena to Bogotá, I was told that my checked-in suitcase had excited a sniffer dog. Two policemen took me back through security and went through everything, sniffing at clothes, books and toiletries and jabbing a penknife through the soles of my walking boots. I worried that something might have been planted on me. I had visions of a night in a cell and a visit from a sceptical British consul. Then one of the officers twisted the lid off a bottle of handwash gel, sniffed deeply, and said, "It must have been this." Both of them apologised and one escorted me back through security to ensure I didn't miss my flight.
A few hours later, waiting in Bogotá for a flight to Madrid, I heard my name called again. Once more, my case was turned inside out. The pages of books were fanned - including those of Rosario Tijeras, a novel by the Colombian writer Jorge Franco about a young woman who gets mixed up with the drug cartels. Finding nothing of interest, the officers stuffed everything back in and I did my best to tidy it up. This time they had been brusquer and there was no apology. Yes, I should have dumped the bottle of gel after the cop's guess that that was what had excited the dog in Cartagena. But I was rattled and in a rush. The label on the gel said "it kills 99 per cent of bacteria". Maybe. But if sniffer dogs take it for drogas, I won't be carrying it again.
Snowed in at Stansted
Nick Trend
December 2010. Stansted Airport. Booked on an EasyJet flight to Geneva for a long-anticipated family ski holiday in Val Thorens. Standing at the terminal gate looking at the heavy grey snow clouds creeping towards us. "We'd better board soon," I think, or the snow will close the airport. A few flurries. "Your flight has been delayed for half an hour because of the late arrival of the incoming plane". Snow settling. "Please board and take your seats as quickly as possible". View from the plane window - tarmac covered in snow. Half an hour later, still at the gate - six inches of snow. An hour later. "I'm sorry to say the airport has been closed, please disembark from the forward exit". No affordable alternative flights for four days. A skiing holiday cancelled because of snow.
A campervan catastrophe in New Zealand
Belinda Maude
I attempted to drive a rather tall camper van into a multi-storey car park after my trusty passenger assured me we'd fit. The shower of fiber glass from above was the first indication that this might not be the case. After reversing back out onto the street and causing a minor traffic jam in the city of Dunedin we drove three-and-a-half hours up the NZ coast with a gaping whole in the roof. It rained the entire way. Tears were shed as my Mum has loaned us the money for the (hefty) insurance fee.
Feeling sheepish in Santiago
Jolyon Attwooll
I was feeling exhausted but smug as I strutted down the arrivals corridor at Santiago Airport in Chile. Having negotiated a night marooned in indecent hours in a lonely terminal in Buenos Aires, I was ready launch myself into my first project as a guidebook writer. Oh yes, it was a globe-trotting life of glamour for me, always on the road, in the know, and assured in foreign places... except now I couldn't find my passport for the life of me. I delved into every pocket, unpacked and repacked my bag, then unpacked again. Suffice to say, it wasn't there. My first act on Chilean soil (airports don't count) as an all-knowing guidebook writer was a sheepish visit to airport police to report a lost passport.
I would love to tell you how much better it got travelling around Chile, and in a way it did. Although I had to shift my schedule around as the British Consulate sorted out my travel documents, I still covered a lot of ground, painstakingly filing away reams of colourful descriptions, phone numbers and opening hours. I certainly felt more fortunate than the poor bugger posted to Patagonia, who found much of the area shut down for winter, and ended up whiling away most of his trip chatting to fishermen. But then there was my trip home. Oh, I made it back in timely fashion, tightly clutching my fresh maroon passport. However, those documents, notes and brochures, all carefully stashed into my rucksack and dropped off trustingly at the airport check-in... well, they weren't quite so lucky.
Robbed on Christmas Day
Henry Druce
Disaster struck in the early hours. I was in a brand new rented campervan with my wife and another couple on what was planned as a budget ski trip to the Alps. We set off early in the morning from London, caught our ferry to Calais in good time, and then started the long journey to Chamonix.
By 2am we were exhausted, and decided to stop at a service station for a nap. The next thing I knew it was morning with light streaming through the windows and I heard my wife say: “Where’s my purse?” Half asleep, I looked around and realised I didn’t have my wallet either. Next thing I heard the couple, sleeping in the back, exclaim: “Where’s all our ski gear?”
It soon became clear we had been robbed of almost everything of value, including cash, credit cards, iPods, skis and even our winter clothing. We couldn’t fathom how the robbers did it without us hearing. We lost more than £3,000 worth of kit. So much for a budget holiday! And just to add insult to injury, it was Christmas Day.
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