“A ship in harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for.”
The idea of going to places that are largely unknown to us can be scary. We might feel a little better about going to a place if someone we know has been there and had a great time. More often than not, though, we may have formed negative impressions of a place at some point and not really know why. Or we may have heard about something specific happening in a region, probably from reading or listening to the news.
It’s Safer Than You Think. Let me start by telling you that I’ve found the people that I’ve met in my travels to be consistently wonderful. Like most people, I was a nervous traveler when I first started out. As enthusiastic as I was about the idea of traveling, when it really came down to it, I had difficulty reconciling that enthusiasm with what I had come to understand about the world from the news sources available to me. Once I started to travel, however, I learned that the reality on the ground was often much different from what I had been led to believe.
When we arrived in Morocco in early 2004 near the beginning of our yearlong Africa trip, I was very nervous about traveling in Muslim countries and my fear was palpable. I recall walking late one afternoon with my husband by one of the local teahouses. Visible through the big windows of the teahouse, a speech by our US President was being rebroadcast on the TV. While the Arabic subtitles on the screen enabled those watching to understand what was being said in their native language, we could clearly understand the President’s spoken words. The content was famously known as the “Axis of Evil” speech, and here it was being played loudly in English in a teahouse filled with Muslim men. We wondered what on earth the men in the tea house were thinking as they watched. Had the US declared war on an entire religion? We didn’t know what to make of it all. We especially didn’t know what it meant for us and for our safety. After all, we were traveling in a Muslim country with US passports. We felt for sure that this event did not bode well for us and our travel plans.
We soon learned, however, that our fears were unfounded. We came to understand later that most people in the world do not attribute the actions of a leader to its citizens. Nevertheless, our nerves were rattled after this experience.
While in Morocco, we needed to replace one of the tires on our Land Rover. We’d had a blow out while we were driving on the highway a few days before and needed a new spare tire. We pulled into a fuel station in Casablanca where we inquired in broken French about where we could purchase tires nearby. After a few minutes, a well-dressed business man walked up to us and asked us in perfect English how he could help us. We explained to him what we needed and he offered to take us to a place where we could buy a suitable tire.
He climbed into his late-model Mercedes and instructed us to follow him. We drove behind him through the narrow city streets until we arrived at a nondescript building. When we got out of our car, he called over to a young boy, gave him a few dirhams and asked him to watch both of our cars. We went inside the shop, which did indeed have tires for sale, but we were very disappointed by the selection and quality of tires available. Our new friend told us not to worry, we will go to another shop. He also emphasized to us that we should only buy if we are happy with the purchase.
So we followed him to another shop, then another, and another. Not one of these shops had any tires that were in good enough condition to take us long distances on bad roads and in deep sand.
Our well-mannered friend ended up spending that whole day with us. Throughout the day, we heard him talking on his cell phone as he canceled and rescheduled the meetings that he was missing. It seemed crazy to us that he would go to these lengths just to lead us around town in fruitless pursuit of automobile tires.
We were completely dumbfounded. Why would he give up his entire work day to help us? While the situation made absolutely no sense to us, we were deeply grateful for his help.
When we finally parted ways at the end of the day, we thanked him for taking time out of his busy day. We also took that opportunity to ask him why he decided to help us. I don’t think that I will ever forget his thoughtful answer.
He replied, “In the Koran, it says we must help three groups of people: family, friends and those ‘who know no one.’ You are travelers and know no one here, and that is why I helped you.”
In the span of that one day, we went from being afraid of what might happen to us while traveling in a Muslim country, to being utterly blown away by the kindness of a Muslim businessman. This was the first time we’d discovered that our preconceived notions were misplaced, but it was definitely not the last.
Keep News in Perspective. What we’ve come to understand is that, in general, newspapers and news programs only cover the worst events of any place. The financial viability of nearly every newspaper company is driven by sales. The more sensational and dramatic the news stories are, the more likely it is that someone will purchase a copy of the daily newspaper. There’s also another interesting human tendency that comes into play. When we read stories about a place we know little about, we tend to associate that one event in our minds to a much larger region than where the localized event took place. This can mean that we mentally tie an event that occurs in a very specific region with the level of safety of an entire country, or sometimes an entire continent.
I recall a conversation that I had while getting my hair cut in Johannesburg toward the end of our Africa trip. As I was sitting in the chair at the salon, the stylist noticed my accent and asked me where I was from. When I told her that I was from the US, she told me she had always wanted to visit the US but she was afraid to go there because of the rampant crime. I was stunned. The thing is, Jo’burg isn’t exactly known for its low crime rate. It was tough for me to understand why she thought there would be more crime in the US. I mean, the US is safe, right? So I asked her for more information. What kind of crime was she referring to? It turns out that she had heard about some drive-by shootings in Florida from the news and had assumed it was a problem throughout the entire US.
When it comes to our home environment, we all know how to compartmentalize and even minimize risks because our experience tells us it’s unlikely to happen to us. We tell ourselves that we are safe because we don’t live in Florida, because we don’t drive deserted roads late at night, or whatever the reason. But when something happens somewhere else, especially somewhere we are unfamiliar with, we tend to blow the risk out of proportion. When Ebola broke out a few years ago in a small western African country, many people canceled their trips to game parks in eastern and southern Africa. It didn’t matter that Africa is three times the size of the continental US – what happened in one tiny region in Africa was presumed to affect the entire continent of Africa.
Every one of us is susceptible to news stories to some extent. Even after having a fantastic time during our Africa trip, we found ourselves facing our fears again ten years later when we were preparing to travel into Mexico with our young son. We’d heard lots of terrible stories in the news, and it was only after doing some research to determine where exactly those incidents had happened and how we could minimize our risk that we felt comfortable proceeding with our travel plans.
I’m so glad we did. Our time in Mexico turned out to be one of the biggest highlights of any of our trips and Mexico came to be one of our favorite countries overall. We had planned to only stay three months in the country yet we ended up staying six months. The food was fantastic, the people were incredibly friendly, and the cultures and history throughout Mexico were diverse and intriguing. Moreover, Mexico turned out to be even more family-friendly than most other places we’d been, including the US. It saddens me to realize that we would have missed out on all of that if we had let our fears prevent us from traveling into Mexico.
The truth is that bad things can happen to you no matter where you are. The Aurora theater shooting occurred just one mile down the street from my office at the time and less than five miles from my home. I still remember seeing all the news vans and ambulances at the hospital when I was driving to work that next morning. With shooting events like that one becoming more of a regular occurrence in our society, how can we really feel that the danger is worse elsewhere?
Some Things Are Just Random. There is probably nothing we can really do to protect ourselves from random acts of violence, since they are, by their very nature, random. Accidents, too, can happen anywhere. Most car accidents happen within a ten-mile radius of our home (because that’s where we tend to drive the most) and they often happen while we are driving to and from work or taking care of errands that we do on a routine basis. Even if we were to stay home all the time in an effort to protect ourselves, it wouldn’t guarantee that we won’t fall in the bathtub or accidentally get injured in some other way. Besides, living in a bubble, even a self-imposed bubble, is really no way to live.
So I think it comes down to the question: Do you want to live your life in fear, or are you willing to take on a reasonable amount of risk so you can live a fantastic life? Personally, I vote for living a fantastic life – mainly because it’s a lot more fun and fulfilling. I also don’t want to look back on my life with regrets about things that I really wanted to do but didn’t because I feared what might happen. As long as my dream is bigger than my fear, I will figure out a safe and responsible way to make my travel dreams happen.
Take Calculated Risks. That’s not to say that I advocate for taking risk just for risk’s sake, or for going into a situation blindly. I don’t. Instead I recommend that you take calculated and manageable risks. Usually all it takes is doing a little research about where you plan to go to gain a reasonable understanding of the risks and figure out how you might mitigate or avoid them altogether. By being armed with specific knowledge about where you plan to visit, it is much easier to plan and prepare for any situation. In addition, by having access to relevant information for a specific region, you will likely find that your overall fear will subside.
Arm Yourself with Specific Information. The best approach that I have found to learn about what a particular place is really like is to talk with other travelers who have recently been specifically where you want to go. Every city and region is different, so the more specific you can be in your search for information, the more accurate your results will be. With the availability of the internet and social networking, this is quite easy to do. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of travel groups on Facebook, for example, that have been created to exchange this kind of information. It’s worth it to join a few of these types of groups while you are still in the planning stages so you can get a sense of the kind of information that is typically shared in each group before you start posting your own questions.
You can also talk with people that you encounter in your daily life. Do you know someone who travels a lot for fun and has recently been to where you want to go? Ask them about their travels and what their highlights were in the place you want to visit. The important point to remember is to find out specifically where they went and figure out how that compares with where you plan to go. Even places in relatively close proximity can be very different. If you were going to Disneyland in California, for example, and someone you know just came from south central Los Angeles, you might reconsider your trip if you mistook your friend’s experiences for what you might encounter in Disneyland. That’s why it’s really important to ask for specifics and take the information you receive in the context it is given.
Once you start your trip, you are likely to encounter other travelers who have visited some of the places that are on your itinerary. Experienced travelers tend to enjoy exchanging travel stories and advice with each other and you’ll find that it’s often the main topic of conversation whenever two or more travelers are gathered together. The best advice tends to come from those who have the most travel experience, because they are able to compare their own experiences from different places and put them into perspective for you.
It’s important to remember not to let vague fears stop you from going after your travel dreams. It is said that courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. Pinpoint what exactly you are afraid could happen and do a little digging to learn more specifics about places that you want to visit. When you have solid, reliable information at your disposal, you will feel more in control and your fears are likely to subside.
Stepping Boldly Forward