Posted on Tuesday, April 19th, 2011 at 3:44 pm

A few years ago I took a solo backpacking trip through Europe after I had finished my study abroad trip in England. It was a great experience and I had a lot of fun.

To begin the story, in one month I would start my trip from Prague. I would make my way south to Austria and Hungary down to Italy then slowly up to Switzerland, Germany, Netherlands, Denmark and finally ending in Sweden. It was in the middle of this trip in Italy when I had my scary moment which I’m going to share with you.

So I’d finally made it into Italy and I was done with Florence and Venice, I was in Pisa seeing the Leaning Tower and was scheduled to take the train on the same day to Rome. After getting on the train and seeing the nice scenery I’d finally arrived in Rome safe and sound! But that’s when my scary experience happened. After getting off the train my stomach started to hurt a little bit, it was barely noticeable that I didn’t think twice about it. I walked around the front of the train station looking for the bus I needed to take to the hostel, which was further away from the city center, after awhile I found it and got on.

Almost right after I got on the bus my stomach started to hurt intensely, I started to have cold sweat and then my vision started to black out. Now at this point I was already on a packed full bus, going to a hostel and all I had was a printed paper with vague direction of how to get there. The bus doesn’t stop at every bus stop and most of the passengers were Italian who didn’t speak much English. I knew I was in trouble then, since the bus was full I was standing up. I quickly wrap my hand around the railing and put my backpack on the floor between my legs, hoping that my hand will stays wrap around the railing in case I passed out (thinking ahead, I thought it would just look like I was resting my eyes with my bag locked between my legs hopefully discourage people from running away with it in case they saw the opportunity!). After that, I was drifting in and out of consciousness standing there on the bus. In the beginning, I remember just wishing to arrive at the hostel before anything could happen! Luckily after a while I regained enough consciousness that I was able to make it off the bus and, with some help and some combination of pointing and made-up sign language, made it to the hostel.

My insurance ended after my study was done and I didn’t think about getting one during my trip, luckily nothing truly serious ended up happening to me that I would need to be hospitalized for, I don’t know how I would deal with it. Now I’m able to look back and say it was an interesting experience that I can tell people about. But at the time, it was scary to be in a place that you don’t know anything about for the first time and on the verge of completely passing out and not knowing what will happen.

I know that many people probably have just as, if not even scarier moment while they were traveling. If you have any horror travel story just other mishaps that happened on your travel, share it with us.

Posted by ahoontrakul

Originally from Thailand, Apinant grew up in the United States and has extensive international experience traveling throughout Asia, Australia, North America and Europe. He has lived, studied and worked abroad in China, England, Taiwan and Thailand. Apinant is a graduate of the University of Florida with a Masters in International Business and a Bachelors of Science in Business Management.