This is a revision of an older article I wrote: more or less the same stories, but not focused on “traveling along vs. going solo” which seemed kinda forced even at the time. Also, above you’ll find the actual video of the grizzly bear, instead of just a still. Reminder: I took this myself, with a normal focal-length lens.
When Something Goes Wrong
Accidents do happen on a trip. Now I’m going to tell you about some that happened to me and how they turned out. These are not your stereotypical “our car got broken into in Oahu” or “I got pickpocketed in Rome” stories. I was never a victim of crime, never got arrested, and never lost my passport (those are terrible things, of course, just to be clear).
Air Rage Before There Was Air Rage
During the pandemic, incidents of “air rage” skyrocketed. People refused to put on masks, and things sometimes got violent. Maybe you’ve seen that photo of the passenger duct-taped to the seat?
People got unruly even before the pandemic. In June 2014 I was on a flight from San Francisco to Toronto, connecting to another flight to Iceland. A man stood in the aisle facing the passengers and began screaming. Terrorists had stolen his luggage in LAX, he yelled. “You people… [expletive] [expletive] don’t know what’s going on [expletive]!”
I’d never seen anything like this. What happens now? I wondered. A voice came over the intercom: “Are there any off-duty policemen on board?” There were two, who volunteered to help. They came and quietly grabbed the guy and tried to lead him back to a window seat. The person who had been in that seat was relocated.
I didn’t look at Crazy Guy. When he’s a few feet away, the last thing you want is to make eye contact. He might lunge at you and say,“What the f**k are you looking at, asshole?” I avoided his gaze. Most of the other passengers did as well.
He sat for a second in the row behind me and said to one of the cops, “Do you understand what I’m telling you?” I guess he meant about the terrorists at LAX. The cop said, “Do you understand what I’m telling you?”
What the cop meant was, “Come on, big boy, you’re going to sit in a window seat.” He did, and the two cops took the other seats so he couldn’t get out. The crew announced that we’d be making an emergency landing in Denver. I had plenty of time to get my camera out, so I could video the struggle when the police took him off.
When we landed, a police vehicle was waiting on the tarmac, and the police came to take him off. He went meekly without any fuss. No viral video for me!
We were two hours late getting into Toronto. I still made my flight to Reykjavik but my luggage didn’t. It came to my hotel the next day (in fact, the airlines have lost my luggage at least three times, and it was always delivered the next day).
Beautiful country, Iceland.
Mama Grizzly Rears Up
Note: I will be obscuring or changing some details about this trip, out of respect for the trip operators.
I went on a 4-day grizzly watching trip on Kodiak Island, Alaska with five other people. We joined the trip at Kodiak Airport. We flew on a float plane to the tour group’s off-the-grid camp, where they had cabins. No hot showers, but they did have a sauna where you could get clean.
We got into a couple boats and went even deeper into the bush, to a spot where Dave and Margaret, the operators, had a tent camp.
Kodiak has many, many grizzly bears (3,500 according to one survey), very few people or roads, and plenty of salmon for the bears. So they’re not looking to eat you or your food, as a rule, and they’re not afraid of you. Most of the time. (This photo was with a zoom lens; he’s not charging at us.)
It’s very different from Yellowstone, where tourists get attacked all the time because the bears don’t like them being there, or because they smell their food. The licensed tour operators on Kodiak know what they’re doing, and they carry rifles if things really go south. They go out of their way not to shoot a bear, since that could land them in big trouble.
When I say the guides know what they’re doing, they really do. We got within 10 feet of the bears, usually when we sat still and they came near us. They never came close enough to touch (which is a very big no-no), and if they had, Dave and Margaret would have chased them away. More on that later.
In the tent camp, we were sternly warned not to go wandering around in the forest if we got up in the middle of the night. The next day we set off with Dave and Margaret and their Labrador. I asked Dave if the dog was going to get excited if he saw a bear, and he laughed, “No, he’s seen so many bears he doesn’t even notice them!”
There were several close encounters with bears, and I do mean “close.” This one was filmed with a normal lens (not a zoom), with the camera on my chest while I was lying on my back:
That’s the video at the top of this article.
Did the bear know we were there? Of course he did. Bears can smell way better than we can. But as I said, they don’t care.
We were lying on a small ridge up from the beach where Mr. Bear was walking. After he passed, I put my camera away. Just then, Dave gave an order: “Get up the hill, get down, and don’t move!” A mama grizzly came along, trailed by her two cubs. We watched, motionless. A mother defending her cubs is just about the most dangerous bear you can encounter. But Mama Bear ignored us, just like the male bear had earlier.
Suddenly the dog jerked, caught the bear’s attention, and the bear turned towards us and started walking. It didn’t rear up and roar, like you might see on TV. None of us moved. Since this is one of those heart-in-your-mouth moments, it’s worth an aside to tell you what I felt right then:
“I wonder what happens next?” Honestly, I felt as if I was watching a Nature show on TV and David Attenborough was going to explain it all. I really didn’t feel like I was going to die. With hindsight, that could easily have been the outcome. Of course, there would have been nothing I could do in that case anyway. No one can outrun a bear, or actually anything sizable in the forest.
None of us moved, but Dave and Margaret stood up suddenly, raised their hands over their heads, and they both yelled at the tops of their lungs, “Enough!” I don’t know why they yelled that word in particular, but that was what they yelled. Mama Bear turned and ran away, followed by her cubs. Margaret said to me, “So did you get that on video?” I shook my head.
We collected our things and walked up the beach, all of us a little shook, no one saying anything. I finally said to Dave, “You didn’t even load your rifle for that, did you?” Dave said, “No, I wasn’t going to kill a bear for that stupid dog. He shouldn’t even have been there.” So the dog was expendable. Dave said that in 17 years of guiding, he’d only even chambered a round in his gun once.
If Dave had killed the bear, he would have had to file a report, and maybe lost his license or had it suspended. So losing the dog would be regrettable, but life is cheap in the Arctic.
Since that trip, I’ve seen several shows on Nature (none with David Attenborough, though) where they get extremely close to grizzlies, like this show. The narrator talks about how they do it (which is, very carefully).
On some Alaskan islands with a lot of bears but not a lot of tourists, one can do this, if one is licensed and trained. Don’t try it yourself.
Getting Sick in Paris
In 1996 or so, I had a business trip to Paris, and I stayed over for a week to be a tourist. One particular French dish I thought I wanted to try was pot au feu. It was Friday night and I was flying out on Saturday morning, so I went to a restaurant that was famous for it. This was my last chance to try it.
Uh-oh! I should have thought more about that. I hate boiled beef, or indeed any kind of stewed red meat. The squishy, stringy texture: hate, hate, hate. I’d literally rather go hungry than eat that stuff. I would make a rotten prisoner-of-war, or maybe the enemy would consider me a good POW, since I’d starve to death in short order.
Why? Who knows why we have those food phobias? Something in my childhood, undoubtedly. Anyway, here I was with a whole plate of it. What was I going to do: send it back? “Monsieur has ordered it! Is it not to Monsieur’s satisfaction?” What in God’s name was I thinking when I ordered this?
I choked down a bunch of it, I’m sure not even making a dent in the total volume of food.
Around 4:00 am, I woke up with diarrhea. I mean, I had to go over and over again, maybe a dozen times. I’m not blaming the restaurant for this at all: I think that when you have a physical loathing for something and you eat it anyway, it’s going to come back out one way or the other, if you get my drift.
Europeans are always telling us how great their universal health care system is, and I gave serious thought to cancelling the flight and calling a doctor. I’m pretty sure they’d have come to my hotel room.
The logistical details of this, staying over an extra day in the hotel, etc. seemed daunting, and finally I took a cab to the airport and got on the plane for the 8-hour flight to San Francisco. I didn’t eat anything, just drank some tea, and had to go to the bathroom twice. I got home, felt terrible, started eating again the next day, and eventually felt fine again.
A Disaster Back Home When You’re Away
In October, 1989, I was in Australia, on my 7-week sabbatical from 3Com. Companies used to give sabbaticals after you’d been there some length of time, usually 4 or 5 years. I don’t know if any still do now.
I’d gotten another 3Com employee to house sit for me (this part actually appears in my book, The Big Bucks). Thus I didn’t need a stranger to drop by every day and feed the cat, and the house didn’t have that “unoccupied” look. She could call my parents in LA if she really needed to get in touch with me (because of course we didn’t all carry cell phones back then).
I was in Melbourne in the late morning, and suddenly I heard the news “Major earthquake in the Bay Area!” This was we now call the Loma Prieta Quake, for its epicenter near Santa Cruz.
You have to remember, this was before the Internet. In Australia, it was certainly a news story but it wasn’t a major emergency. Normal TV programming was not interrupted, and on the hourly radio news they’d just mention it.
There was no news. I had almost no idea how bad it was, or whether I needed to cut my trip short and fly home. You couldn’t call into the Bay Area because that was impossible. Everyone was trying to do that and the lines were jammed.
I was staying in a bed-and-breakfast in the suburbs. The lady running it let me call my parents, who didn’t know anything either. I waited for the 6:00 pm news, and the earthquake received about 5 minutes of coverage. Of course they showed the freeway in Oakland collapsed
and the Marina in ruins:
over and over.
“The whole Bay Area is in flames! And now, the sports.”
That night, the landlady woke me up after the phone rang. My parents were on the phone. The house sitter had called them and told them the house was OK. Although you couldn’t call into the Bay Area, people inside could call out.
So I didn’t cut the trip short, and continued on to Thailand and Hong Kong.
A Teaser
Next week I’ll write about some “interesting” but not “disastrous” travel adventures I’ve had. I promise, no boring “rental car broken into” stories.
Travel Disasters