SEC-S18W4 | My worst holiday travel memory | I have a plenty of them

I consider ideal tourism as a situation where travelers benefit and enjoy by their outings however, I have seen destinations in my life where I was not happy. Being a marketing professional and traveler to the core, I have traveled long and short destinations and while I have experienced wonderful trips in my life I have a fair quota of bad ones as well.

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I have had my quota of such travelers but most of them are from the pre-camera era as now the conditions have improved a lot. I would love to share my memories even if they were not pleasant to enter my experience for SEC-S18W4 | My worst holiday travel memory. I invite my friends @josepha, @sahmie, and @jyoti-thelight to share their experiences.

Bad tourism refers to a situation in which a traveler feels that the destination is too busy and too crowded. And this happens not only in cities but also around natural areas or historical sites. Some destinations are so busy that they are overcrowded. Busy shopping streets or historical places where we have to pass through the crowds reduce our travel experience.

When was your worst trip that you would like to forget?

I will give you a couple of bad experiences out of hundreds that I have faced due to delayed trains or planes but I consider them as normal even if I had to wait for hours on the railway platforms, airports, and bus stands.

In one of my worst experiences, my problem was water scarcity, which is a common negative impact but is becoming more relevant daily. Travelers use a lot of water at the destination, not only for bathing but also for swimming pools. When this is not managed properly, it makes water availability difficult for travelers.

I had this experience when I was posted in Dehradun. My sister-in-law visited us with her husband and daughter, and we took a taxi to Mussoorie. As some of you know, my wife can't travel by car, and if it happens to be a spiraling hilly road, she vomits like anything.

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The situation was this: I was sitting in between my wife and her sister so both of them could sit in the window seat. My wife's sister had her daughter in her lap, and all three of them were vomiting. I tried my best, but during the distance between Dehradun and Missouri, a one and a half hour's drive, I was almost soaked by what these three were vomiting.

We stopped at the taxi stand in Mussoorie and found no water at any public tap. Then I saw a stable where they stand horses for tourists, I thought that place should have water, but to my surprise, there was no water.

I saw a few Tibetan shops on the footpath selling clothes. I bought a shorts and a tee and took my shirt and pants off and wore them. We stayed in that hill station, Mussoorie, for 3–4 hours, walking on the mall road, and came back to Dehradun. I didn't feel like eating anything because I was smelling lousy.

Then I had another incident in 2008, we had gone to Goa and reached late in the evening so we stayed at Bogmalo Beach which is close to Dabolim airport. It was our first evening in Goa when five people drowned within a few hours on the Arabian Sea coast.

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We were on a seashore drinking beer when we heard that five medical students were missing. These tourists, aged 20–22, died due to drowning because they were so careless that as soon as they embarked on their buses they entered the sea without caring for the warning sign. Local divers tried their best efforts to save them, and they saved four students, but five students could not be traced.

The search was carried out by the coastguard team with helicopters, but they could not rescue them. We went back to our hotel and slept, but I got up at five and heard the sound of choppers searching for them. The entire group of medical students was sitting on the beach, hoping to see their friends, but the rescue team could not find their friends alive. They found their dead bodies not far off from the beach.

This was a bad experience that forced us to leave that beach, and we moved to Calangute Beach our main destination immediately after this incident.

What problems have you faced and who was with you?

I was on a trip to Patna while posted in Kolkata as a regional marketing manager and then I was scheduled to go to Gauhati (now Guwahati) in Assam. I had once before traveled by Awadh Assam train which had a longer route via Tezpur but I had a day spare so I booked my seat for the thrill of traveling old style in First class compartment on a meter Gauge route which is rare now.

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Let me make it clear that the distance between the station where I boarded the train in Bihar, Muzaffarpur, and Guwahati is less than 1000 km which can be covered in 12 hours max but this train takes over 30 hours but as I said I had spare time so I wanted to relive my memories by traveling by this train.

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The train left the starting point and reached Siliguri in about 12 hours then crossed through New Jalpaiguri and Jalpaiguri and then stopped at three in the morning. That was Naxalite affected area so I thought as if Naxalites had attacked the train but nothing happened. There was just one more passenger in the compartment so we started talking until 5 am when it was daylight outside.

To my surprise, I saw several local Wenders selling tea, water, and breakfast sitting in the fields. I came out of the compartment and was told that Bodo revolutionaries had blasted the bridge near Guwahati on the Brahmaputra River so all traffic had been suspended until the army constructed a makeshift arrangement for trains to cross to the other side of the river.

How you managed this situation in the end?

Would you believe it that we had to stay at that place for three days and two nights in the dark because the engine of the train had left the train for scheduled maintenance to the next station which was already overcrowded with waiting trains? There was no proper food water or electricity and it was the peak of the summer to make things worse.

Share photos of this travel memory or give some referential pics

I was traveling on this route but it's an old story when I had no digital camera or even a phone with a camera. That was the time when I had a basic phone and even that phone had no signals in that area.

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Incidentally, most people were dependent on public call booths and I was in a company that manufactured public call billing machines.