My Worst Travel Experience

For the most part, travel treated me incredibly well. I’ve met people who radiate life and have had experiences that I’ll always cherish, but inevitably, my luck was bound to run dry.

July 2022

In an Airbnb in Tuscany, my travel crew and I ended a phone call with our new employer…

Over the course of an hour, we’d seized an over-staffing issue with our employer in Italy to work for a three-week position together in another country. This fixed a timing issue with our ninety-day Schengen visa restriction and found us a place to stay during the gap week we had before meeting up with my dad in Venice.

While I sat on the couch looking at buses for four days from then, a slow ache spread from my stomach to my chest, leaving everything else numb.

All I could think was, “What the hell am I doing?”

It seemed a new chapter of my journey had begun.

For eleven hours, we slept and snacked on a bus to Zagreb, Croatia. After we arrived, my girlfriend and I waited at the station for our last bus to a nowhere town on the European border.

We called our employer when we got to the final station of our fifteen-hour journey. He didn’t offer us a ride to his place, so we took a taxi. The driver glanced at the address and knew the directions better than if we were headed to his grandma’s house, so I got his number for later, just in case.

After the cab spun its wheels up a dirt road littered with makeshift, “Private Property” and, “Do NOT Enter” signs, the driver stopped at a patch of woods and abstract structures, some hand-made, some weighed down by time. There was a slanted wood shack, a pergola of rusted pipes, and an old brick home, creatively misshapen and patchy, run down with heavy notches, hidden behind the overgrown brush.

Left alone with dust settling behind us, we called our employer’s name out as we approached the overgrown house. A man stepped out of the bushes, wearing only shorts, and said hello. He had wild eyes and hair that stuck up like mushrooms sprouting from the earth.

He led us to the front door. It was connected to a string pulley system that lifted a plastic bottle filled with mirky liquid to the ceiling, as the door creaked open. We walked up uneven stairs, through a crooked hallway, into his house. He opened up another door with the same bottle system.

Most of the house was made by hand with unfinished wood, and it slanted too much to one side. Exhausted from traveling for two days straight and sleeping on a bus, we threw our bags in our room. I noticed the bed was a leaning tower of mismatched mattresses laced in grime and dust, piled up against a corner.

Following him around the rest of his house, my girlfriend realized his kid’s room was empty. Part of our work there was supposed to be teaching them English.

“So where are your kids?”

“Oh, they are living with their mother.”

We walked with him around the rest of his property: five acres of hill, littered with trash, makeshift wooden appliances he called sculptures (mostly crude toilets), and wood planks where he dried fruit he’d picked from his trees. We stood around, pitting rotting plums and pretending they weren’t swarming with bees, talking little in the sun.

He showed us the slanted shed called his studio. It was dark inside, and dust covered the half-finished ideas packed between the weathered walls. Looking at it made me scared and sad at the same time. Part of me wanted to go in, part wanted to run.

Three weeks in Croatia with a man on a raw vegan diet. Though he seemed a little odd during our video call, I wrote it off as good-natured humor. I thought it would be an adventure, an exciting and rewarding challenge.

Simply put, sometimes things don’t go as planned…

“Hungry?” he asked us, smiling eagerly as we entered his kitchen after walking around. What comes next still makes me cringe.

Flies, ants, bees, and mosquitos mingled around a table covered with dissected, rotting fruit. Nearly one hundred strong, they crawled across wedges of watermelon and sucked on juice pooling in pans used as makeshift cutting boards.

Sunlight came through a hole in the wall the size of missing barn doors, lighting half our faces as we stood, pretending things were normal, chatting with a man we met two hours ago, in his kitchen without a fridge or cookware. He didn’t seem to mind the bugs nipping at his stomach and feet, standing with his toes spread wide, in only shorts.

I knew he was crazy, then. I’d given many things the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he’s just got different priorities, one with nature and stuff. I’m from Oregon. I can dig that. Maybe the rope tangled on the pergola was something other than the loosened noose it resembled.

Yet he was kind, a little nervous, sure, but I could tell he was trying to be hospitable… I think?

He nodded at the gigantic hole in the wall. “I got claustrophobic, so I took off the doors.” He chuckled a bit through his bite of red, ripe watermelon.

I shook a bee off my wedge and nodded as if he was making sense, then filled my mouth.

He showed us back to our bedroom and left us to rest up. I was admiring a hand-crafted bucket with a wooden lid when my girlfriend and I heard something scuttling in the walls. I approached the corner by the bed where the sound came from and found a procession of ants marching along the wall. Then, with tiny nails, it scampered again.

This was when my girlfriend gave me the, “We need to leave, right now,” look.

After laying frozen on the bed for a minute, I conjured the courage to call the cab driver from earlier. He didn’t answer, so I texted him, asking if we could be picked up. After the first few messages didn’t go through, my girlfriend texted him and received a reply.

Not knowing how our host would take the news, considering he took the doors off his house due to claustrophobia, we waited in our room, thinking of how to approach leaving.

After a few minutes, we walked out with our bags, expecting to see him, but he wasn’t in the house. We went outside.

The look of us on the dirt road with our backpacks, completely unannounced, made me nervous about what he’d think, should he catch us at that moment. Again though, he wasn’t anywhere. My girlfriend and I called his name, louder and louder into the woods, but no response ever came.

I sent him a text explaining that we were leaving. Should I have said that we were bolting because he’s crazy? I don’t think so. I didn’t know what else to do or how to put it, so all I could do is lie. Here it is below.

As the cab skid up the slate-rock road, our host’s puppy darted toward it, gnashing and barking with a hackled spine as if it’d never seen anyone but its master. The driver cracked the window, and we insisted we just hop in back with our bags, no need to put them in the trunk. Cold breath on my neck, I threw my bag on my lap as I got in after my girlfriend and closed the door. We had no place to go, so when he asked I said, “Back to the station.”

And just like that, off we went, down the hill and onto a paved road. . .

I spotted a little red Fiat 500, full of junk and misplaced ideas, parked by a house ahead of us. Our host sat in the front seat, chatting up his neighbor. There was only one place our cab could’ve come from, and with his wild eyes he watched the car marked, “taxi” on the top as we wound right past him. He saw me but looked at the whole scene instead of its pieces.

I got a phone call a few seconds later as we rounded the corner. It was him, and I checked behind to see if he was following us.

“Hello? Where are you going?”

“Oh, hey,” I said. I knew he hadn’t read my text yet, but after seeing the look on his face, I didn’t want to bring it up directly. “I’m sorry we couldn’t say goodbye or anything, but you weren’t home.”

“Goodbye? What do you mean goodbye?” He spoke loudly, and I could hear the wind swirl as he drove up the road.

I told him about the text I sent about ten minutes before, but it only made him more upset.

On the fringe of an accusation, his voice grew louder. “You cannot leave without me there! What if you stole something? You stole my Vitamix! Yes, you stole my expensive blender!”

When he said this, my entire body locked up. Everything inside me had been replaced by something nearly hollow, spreading from a pit in my stomach to my head.

I obviously didn’t steal this guy’s blender, so I tried to calm him down. It didn’t work.

Through the phone, I could hear the wind swirl as he sped up the road in his red fiat. At this point, he was shouting, billowing with rage. “I call the police! Yes, I call the police on you!”

And I tried to calm him down, but nothing did the trick. Eventually, he hung up on me…

At least, he thought he did, but I could hear the wind die down, and him pacing around his house, muttering to himself like a cyclops in its den after its captives had fled from under its nose.

“Stole my blender… yes,” he kept repeating to himself until I hung up.

We spent the next seven hours at a McDonald’s next to the bus station, eating french fries and talking with family on the phone. My sister had a BnB in Zagreb reserved for that night, so we asked if there was room for us to stay. We asked if her Workaway had room to accept two more people to help out.

Seven hours later, we boarded a bus to the capital of Croatia and arrived at two in the morning. After a twenty-minute walk with our bags, we found the BnB, peeled off the clothes we’d been wearing for nearly two days, and crashed on a cushy chair that pulled out into a twin bed.

A host family from our teaching job in Italy agreed to let us stay at their house for a few weeks, so the next day my girlfriend and I traveled to Brescia, Italy. We were met with a sharp contrast of love and warmth. They bought a mattress for me to sleep on, a glass door for their downstairs shower, and a separate fridge. We had wine at lunch, and they made us laugh every day.

Now

I’m enjoying myself in an unfamiliar place, trying my hand at making travel a slower, less stressful experience. It’s something I love, and I’m working on making it a sustainable piece of my life, between my other goals. More on this soon.

I wish you all the best. Thank you for reading my story.

Live your way,

Noah

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