In this ’new normal' where everything is overshadowed by fear and the looming threat of Coronavirus, I started thinking about all the times I found myself - or was placed - in extreme danger… and survived to tell the tale. I'm not brave, not a war journalist, and I never chose to put myself in harm’s way: I just found myself in the wrong place a few times.
The world is a dangerous place: so dangerous you really shouldn't venture outside your front door, unless you google the statistics of those who die inside their front doors: in America, more than a thousand people fall down the stairs and kill themselves every year; about four hundred and fifty die from falling out of bed. If you thought about that too much, you’d never get out of bed. And remember, Elvis Presley died just having a strenuous shite.
For many years my work has involved travel, but usually to safe places and always with other people. I’ve never been on the roof of a bombed out hospital in Yemen, or got caught up in a gang shootout in East LA. I’m neither brave, nor foolhardy: I quite like not dying. And that’s the point here I guess: hair-raising travel anecdotes are the stories told by the people who didn’t die. So here's a brief map of my slightly dangerous world so far - some of the places where I didn’t die.
Romblon is an island 300km south of the Philippines capital, Manila. To get there, three of us spent a day on a massive container & passenger ferry, which played the Catholic rosary at full volume on a constant loop across the ship’s PA system, perhaps in expectation of us all meeting our maker - in the past few decades, more than six thousand people have lost their lives in Filipino ferry accidents. That first leg was followed by a five-hour journey along dirt roads in total darkness, packed with thirty others into the back of a ‘Jeepney’ (a Filipino adaptation of old American GI army trucks); finally, we waited at dawn on a beach to pile onto a local ‘Banca’ boat - a long, thin, covered canoe with flimsy stabiliser arms on either side. It was called 'Sweet Glory II'. We didn’t think to ask what happened to 'Sweet Glory I', but we re-christened it “Anne Doyle’s Ferry”: imagining that the next time our families would hear our names would be on the RTÉ Nine O’Clock News, as part of a sentence with the words “… Filipino ferry tragedy”.
Gjirokaster is a stunning UNESCO World Heritage city in southern Albania. But not when you’re lying on the floor of your hotel room with bullets whizzing around outside in the main square. In the late 1990’s the country was on the verge of civil war after the collapse of a Government-endorsed pyramid saving scheme; many Albanian towns were effectively lawless, with control being fought over by local gangs and warlords. The hail of bullets was a nightly occurrence: specialist doctors were being drafted in from across Europe to treat the unique type of head wound that happens when a bullet fired straight up into the air in a show of bravado comes straight back down again somewhere else. I remember being on the phone to my girlfriend (now wife): “Can I hear gunfire?” she worriedly asked; “Oh no no no, that’s just fireworks, don’t worry, it’s a national holiday…”
A few days later, in the coastal town of Vlora, we arrived into the central square as part of a convoy of charity and aid organisations, hoping to get teachers back to work and the education system up and running. Our long line of vehicles was guarded front and rear by an armed EU protection force in their military jeeps. As the aid workers retired to the town hall for discussions with the local elders and our army minders took time out for a quick smoke, a sudden cacophony of engines and burning rubber heralded the arrival of the local crime lords, in their own convoy of stolen Mercedes with German number plates. The gang leader got out of the lead car, approached the Italian captain of our EU protection force, and told him in no uncertain terms to get the fuck out of town. I still remember the Italian officer taking off his sunglasses and eyeballing the tracksuited thug, refusing to budge: he said that we were there to help local families. After what seemed like an endless face-off, the gang leader turned and nodded at one of his henchmen. The man opened his leather jacket - he was very obviously wired with a suicide vest.
What happened next was a blur, but I do remember being whisked back into our van, while the aid workers were hustled out of the town hall and into their vehicles, the lunch being laid on for us was scooped into tablecloths and bundled onto our laps, and our entire convoy sped out of town at full tilt and didn’t stop until we were 100km away. The Italian captain had decided that discretion was the better part of valour, and got us the hell out of Dodge. While everyone reflected and nervously ate their food by side of the road in the middle of nowhere, for the first and only time in my life I went for a piss in a ditch guarded on all sides by armed soldiers with weapons drawn, scouring the horizon.
Once you realise that they’re real (and loaded), guns are an unavoidable reminder that you’re out of your comfort zone. In an Israeli kibbutz overlooking the Golan Heights, we filmed their prosperous community: a 50m outdoor pool and diving platform, an incongruous Irish bar and restaurant, perfectly-tended gardens and spotless pathways. But every house had a bomb shelter, and at the very heart of the kibbutz we were given a tour of the fortified shed that stored row upon row of loaded assault rifles for each household.
In Egypt, just weeks after an attack on tourists in Luxor, we filmed a story for a travel show. Normally we’d have a local driver and fixer, but this time we had three extra ’tour guides’. None of them spoke much English, nor knew anything about Tutenkhamun or the Valley of the Kings, but they escorted us everywhere; each time we sat back into the van, we could see the gleam & bulge of the pistols in the waistbands of their trousers. And when we joined a Nile cruise for a few hours, an army rib with a mounted machine gun circled our boat. The Ministry of Tourism was taking no chances with a foreign camera crew about.
Sometimes ignorance is bliss: moments when you end up being incredibly foolhardy without even noticing it. On a night trip in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, we drove in darkness through mountains and valleys to Muzzafarabad, a town devastated by an earthquake in 2005. More than 80,000 died in this region alone. On the return journey two days later in daytime, we finally got to see the road we’d driven in on. It was so horrifyingly perilous, we all agreed we’d have turned back had we seen what was ahead of us.
On our way out of Kashmir, we spent a day in the garrison town of Abbotobad. We visited a small factory making prosthetic limbs for earthquake survivors; we played cricket; we complained about being hot and hungry because it was the middle of Ramadan; we were blissfully unaware until a few years later that we were just across the road from Osama Bin Laden, hiding in the compound he would finally die in…
The next evening, we bribed a doorman in a fancy Islamabad hotel, went down a dark staircase and knocked quietly on a sealed door - inside was a haze of cigarette smoke, an illicit pool table and cans of warm Heineken for $10 a pop. Ten days later the hotel was attacked by a fundamentalist suicide bomber for that very reason.
In hindsight, perhaps the most terrifying situations are the ones you narrowly avoid: grabbing the steering wheel when the driver has nodded off; having a shouting match in an unknown language with locals only to discover later that they were ruthless Maoist rebels responsible for wiping out entire villages. We came across them in the foothills of the Himalayas in Nepal, where it’s common in rainy season for entire stretches of mountain road to collapse or get washed away. Turning a corner to find yourself on the brink of such a void was bad enough, but seeing the bus that had been in front of you smouldering at the bottom of the ravine was truly shocking.
So, Carpe that Diem. Perhaps when you’re travelling, at the end of every day you should celebrate simply not having died. I remember when it was a regular occurrence for relieved passengers to burst into a spontaneous round of applause when their flight landed safely back in Ireland. But once, on a very elderly plane in a remote part of Russia, the passengers applauded when it took off. Now, that can’t have been a good sign.
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