My Craziest Travel Story EVER! (You Won’t Believe This)

I want to take you back to 1990 in India and one of the craziest adventures I had traveling outside the tourist areas and outside my comfort zone. This was before the internet made it much easier to travel.

I was in a cafe in New Delhi with a couple of girls I’d met traveling. We’d heard that there was skiing in the Himalayas in Northern India—a challenging adventure in a place few foreigners went.

The first stop was Shimla, the old British summer capital in the days of the Raj—an interesting place but full of theft, not from the people but from the monkeys! They’d steal your food and they’d go into your room and grab your belongings. I can remember these monkeys on a wall getting ready to attack us and take our food. We pretended to pick up stones and throw them; the monkeys would duck behind the wall and poke their heads up to see if it was safe.

Manali, further north, was the jump-off point for the skiing—a winding road through high mountains or a short flight. So we decided to take the one-hour flight. Nice and easy, or so we thought.

We took off in a small propeller plane, but after a bumpy 15 minutes, it started descending. I could see an airport, and it looked like the one we’d taken off from—the top of a big hill shaved off to make a runway. I asked the stewardess, and she casually said, “Yes,” because of the weather. She said that “the clouds had rocks in them”—in other words, we could easily hit a mountain. I asked if it was unusual to abandon the flight, and she said, “No, we couldn’t get through yesterday or the day before.”

So, Plan B: get the 10-hour bus. Reserving a seat on a bus meant paying a guy to climb through the window and hold one for you.

A few hours into the journey, there were heavy storms causing landslides. The bus got blocked, so we had to climb over rocks and mud to get to the other side. This happened again and again. On the other side, we’d get a lift from a private car, a motorbike, or different bus and go to the next landslide. For 3 days, we did this. We slept on the floor in people’s houses and were invited to eat food with them. Chaos, uncomfortable, and tiring—all the good things that adventures are made of.

Finally, we made it to Manali and rented a small hut up in the mountains. We had met a hippie guy, and he was doing the cooking over an open fire while it rained outside.

Once the weather cleared, we were ready to hit the slopes and do some skiing. We caught a bus part of the way, but there was thick snow on the roads, and it couldn’t go any further, so we had to walk. A different bus pulled up next to us—it was a private group, and they offered us a lift. They said that they were going “shooting” in the mountains. I asked what they were shooting, and they said “elk,” and I seem to remember this was some kind of reindeer.

They dropped us off near the ski resort, but when we got there, it was closed, and there were no lifts running. There were some kids walking up the mountain and skiing down. We gave them a few rupees to borrow their skis—a long hike up, and then we could come down and say we’d skied in the Himalayas.

However, on the way down, rounding a corner, we were confronted by men in white camouflage suits pointing machine guns—like something out of a James Bond movie. One of those scary moments when your heart jumps. We didn’t need to worry; it was the guys that had given us a lift, and they were “shooting”—shooting a movie, and the movie was called “Elk”!

We hung around watching how Bollywood created movies. It was funny watching the woman hero standing on a sled being pushed along by five guys; on camera, it kind of looked like she was skiing.

An unusual adventure, but one of the so many I’ve had in the 35 years since I left the UK. Most adventures were exciting, and some were dangerous, but I still wouldn’t change any of it.

So what’s the takeaway from all this? It’s that you don’t find real traveling in guide books. I’ve been to the pyramids in Giza and the Taj Mahal, but honestly, I wasn’t impressed. There were so many tourists and people trying to make you buy things. I didn’t enjoy either. In Giza, I sat next to the Sphinx reading a book, and with the Taj Mahal, I sat by the river at the back, just reading to get away from the hassle.

Real adventure is from travels that you design yourself. When you venture off the beaten path, you have thrilling experiences with real people. There are millions of stories to be told, and you have to take yourself out of your comfort zone to be in one of them.