Come on, we need a bit of life in here.

K!LL!@N · 08-07-2001 5:25pm #1

I'm sure everyone here has been on holiday at least once in their life.

So why not let us hear about your most memorable ( or most forgetable ) holiday.

There have to be some really funny stories to be told. So come on. Get posting!

I'll start off with a funny ( but somewhat serious ) incident that occurred while i was on holiday once.
We'd gone camping in France with the Scouts. It was a two week trip. Everything was great until the day we were going home. We got to the port ( St. Malo, i think ). Anyway, one of the leaders had a van with a lot of the tents and stuff in it. There were two others in the van with him. They were stopped by customs and searched. We didn't see the 3 people in the van for about another 2/3 weeks. They'd been arrested for possession of drugs. We all made it back safely. Needless to say parents were a little upset. No one really knows exactly what happened, but the owner of the van maintained the stuff had been planted.

plastic membrane · 08-07-2001 10:31pm

Well im going to Turkey in three weeks and i cannot bloody wait.

Just thought i should share that...

Who is The Beefy King ?

Owing to an administrative error, the Pope had been replaced by Lemmy from Moterhead...

androphobic · 08-07-2001 11:22pm

Okay good idea killian

Have been to a few places and have had some bad experiences but the one that comes to mind immediately is a holiday in Lanzarote (one of the Canary Islands) about 2 years ago with my family (parents, 2 brothers, 1 sister).

The holiday just didnt go well..

Apart from the fact that we had 2 horrible apartments with ****roaches and dirty bathrooms, two days after we arrived my (now)15 year old brother got beaten up by 4 young Spanish lads. Not a good start!..

Two days later my (now) 5 year old sister almost drowned in the sea but a lifeguard spotted her in time..

About a week into our stay, I got knocked down by a car.. not badly but it reversed suddenly and *boom*..

Then my brother got beaten up *again* by the same young Spanish lads!

During the second week of our stay there was really bad weather - tons of rain which meant that the roads were flooded.. didn't help..

Then.. and this part is a bit weird.. y'see my mother (for some unknown reason) had brought some bleach with her to Lanzarote (she says she thought it might come in handy). Instead of bringing it in a Domestos bottle or whatever, she decided to bring it in a 7up bottle and she put it in the fridge in one of our apartments. Anyway, my Dad thought (and you can't really blame him) that it was 7up and he started to drink it..

Typing this now it's amusing but at the time his stomach was in bits...

So anyway, to finish off a disastrous holiday, when we returned home the windows of my mothers car had been smashed..

I haven't been on holidays with them since.

Edited -- lol it censors c ockroaches?!

[This message has been edited by androphobic (edited 08-07-2001).]

K!LL!@N · 08-07-2001 11:48pm

I probably shouldn't be laughing.
But that would make a great episode for a comedy travel program. You know the ones where they follow a family around on holiday and find out how they are getting on etc.

By the way, i hope your dad was ok and didn't suffer any long term damage.

All we need is a few more stories to get this thread going.

I actually have another story from the trip i mentioned earlier. It was on the boat to France. It was a bit of a rough crossing and lots of people were feeling queasy. One lad in particular was feeling worse than the others. So, we told him to go out on deck, thinking it might be better for him out there. So he goes out. He's standing at the railing. "I'm fine now lads, thanks. It was a good idea to come out here." he said. We hit a big wave. This guy suddenly projectile vomits, but it's windy and it doesn't just go over the side. Instead it blows back in his face and he's covered in his own sick! We fell about the place laughing.

androphobic · 09-07-2001 12:15am

Eww hehehhe..

Nah my dad got over it..

Okay I might aswell continue the trend. Since we're on the subject of boats, I went to Irish college on Inis Mor when I was about 14. As part of the course we were meant to visit a shipwreck on Inis Oir so we set off on one of the days to do just that. The weather was really bad though and about 50 (half of the students) people were out on the deck of the boat (oh yeah we went by boat to the other island btw) getting really ill. We arrived at Inis Oir and everyone was really relieved to be able to get out of the boat and away from the seasickness until we realised that only one boat can dock there at a time and there was a boat already docked there! So we had to turn around and head back to Inis Mor and get sick all over again...

I was aupairing in Germany last summer so I had to look after 3 kids, aged between 5 and 2. The little 2 year old girl has some condition which makes her stop breathing for a few moments from time to time. Anyway one day she fell off the swing while I was looking after her and when I went to pick her up she wasn't breathing and her head was sorta hanging limply. No one had told me that she has this condition and I thought she was dead! She was okay like but it gave me a ****in fright..

She also tried to get knocked down while I was there.. ahh memories, memories..

K!LL!@N · 09-07-2001 12:33am

What kind of condition causes a child to stop breathing like that? ( Occy where are you?

) You must have been in a serious panic.

And she also tried to get herself knocked down?!? I take it you've planned to go back there next year right.

Evil Phil · 09-07-2001 10:04am

I got standed in Singapore for a night, but the airline put me up in a plush 5 star hotel.

Roof-top swimming pool, plush room etc. Anyway, about 5 days later I was sleeping on a rainforest floor in Sumatra, it was pitch black and I was woken up in the pitch black with 'something' crawling over me. I nearly sh*t m'self but I just lay still and it went on it's creepy way, whatever it was. Saw wild orangutans though, which was cool. They're like giant teddybears.

Lucy_la_morte · 09-07-2001 3:06pm

I just got back from 2 weeks in Paris, France. I was visiting family who live to the south west of Paris in Chevreuse. I must say I had the greatest time of my life there. I definately recommend going there, everything is just so well organised. I do recommend some knowledge of the French language though, most of the places I went were not top tourist locations and the employee's were not exactly fluent in English so I had to use French (which I found enjoyable

). It has a very beautiful and chic city centre, definately need the full 2 weeks to see it all.

It's just a tail, but I'm sort of attached to it.

Lucy la morte.

androphobic · 10-07-2001 12:38am

<font face="Verdana, Arial" size="2">Originally posted by K!LL!@N:
I take it you've planned to go back there next year right. </font>

never ever ever ever again

Trojan · 10-07-2001 7:53am

A quite scary experience I had in India, it's one of those character building moments I'm sure, but I was damn nervous at the time.

Ok, to set the scene, me & mate (Gert) left Delhi for a weekend up in Uttar Pradesh. The guy with me was a friend of the family, worked as a Red Cross delegate in Delhi.

Gert got his secretary to organise 2nd class sleeper tickets on the train from Delhi up to UP (to a place called Ramnagar, about 30 miles from the national park we were staying beside). The distance wasn't that long in itself (round 200 miles), but it was an overnight train, and they don't move that rapid either.

Anyways, we go up to the park after a very pleasant train journey, and had a great 3 days on safari round the park, got scared sh!tless when some tigers decided to start hunting the openback jeep we were on (we never saw it, just heard it), had an elephant safari (those things are like tanks)... mad weekend in all. Like me sleeping through a 6.8 R earthquake when less than 200 Km from the epicentre (but thats another story)..

The only problem was that when we got back to the train station in Ramnagar we had a spot of bother. Like I said before, Gert had gotten the office secretary to book the tickets for our trip (we could have got them booked by the lodge company instead). The idiot had booked us one way, but not the other (she was fired that week, for a completely different fúck up).

So there were we, stuck with no tickets for a sleeping berth. We tried to get every possible 1st, 2nd and 3rd class sleeper, seat etc, but everything was gone. The only thing left was general class

Now, on an Indian train trip, especially an overnighter, general class is exactly that place you don't want to be. Uncomfortable wooden seats, 6 to a seat (where you'd normally put 2), floor space packed with people lying or sitting everywhere, filthy open toilets with an unbearable stench, luggage thieves two-a-penny. It was not a pleasant prospect, and I was not looking forward to 8 hours of pure hell.

So I was left in general class, arms wrapped around our bags, while Gert went to see if there was any possible way to get around the situation.

He came back to me with a big grin, and told me that he got 2 bunks on a sleeper for us! So I was thrilled, until he informed me it was on the prison carriage!

So we went up the train about 20 carriages (these trains are significant fractions of a mile long and can take 1/2 an hour of acceleration just to get to 30 or 40mph). We got to the prison carriage, and were welcomed on-board by a guy with a big grin and a rifle. He showed us to 2 plain wooden upper-bunks, where we settled gratefully. The bunks below us were empty at the time.

After a short snooze of about an hour, I woke to see about 6 guys below, 3 on each bunk, lying from the wall out rather than lengthways. Again, I snoozed, despite the smell that was starting to emenate from the jacks down to our right. After another hour, there were 4 guys on each bed below, and 4 trying to sleep on the floor between the beds. The corridor was packed silly with men, all relatively young, in green uniform (I thought they were army, but it turns out they were police).

I couldn't sleep because of 2 factors: I was dying for a p!ss (you know how it is when you're on a bus? try that for 6 hours), and the smell from the jacks was overwhelming. There were fans (windows didn't open), I put them on but 5 mins later someone turned them off (must have been noisy). I dont know how they could put up with the smell...

Finally we got into Delhi after what was a sleepless, painful journey for me, I was wrecked.

I found out afterwards the exact circumstances of us getting the berths: Gert had bribed the head policeman who was organising the carriage for all the police returning back to Delhi (after a weekend at home). That guy told everyone that Gert was the new police chief at the village where the park was: a few britishers are still involved in the police in India, so it was plausible. I was his assistant!

So thats how I ended up getting a bunk in a prison carriage with about 300 Indian police .. interesting journey, and not one I'll forget easily.

I found some links for where we stayed, this is the national park: http://www.travelmasti.com/Wildlife-sanct/corbett.htm

And here's the address of the place we stayed in, lovely place, recommended: http://www.india-travel.com/corbett.htm (it's Tiger Tops Corbett Lodge, the one at the top)

Al.

[This message has been edited by Trojan (edited 10-07-2001).]

Come on, we need a bit of life in here.

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