Taking chances

On another site, on a thread advising on how to travel safely, one poster warned "never engage in questionable activities!"I responded "Well, yes and no."

Being TOO good, I said, you can miss out on some fun experiences. When my girlfriend and I were backpacking in our twenties (many, many years ago!) we engaged in some mild illegitimacies with respect to currency exchange and visas that make for some very happy memories now. I won't take up the space to report them here, but they are related on my blog, identified with the letter T in the Archives menu. T1 tells of talking our way out of (!) East Germany at the wrong place, T6 of doing the same kind of thing at the end of our visit to Bulgaria, T4 of entering Russia with contraband, and of exiting Egypt with slightly forged currency-exchange slips. T11 relates how we circumvented a ban on travel to Syria.

Again, all too good NOT to have taken a bit of a chance on. Of course a) those were less suspicious times and b) we never had anything to do with drugs. T9 (June Protected content titled "Getting stoned in Alexandria", but that was about getting stoned in earnest, not merely - you know - "stoned".

Anybody preparing to go back-packing through strange lands should accept that every once in a while, it's okay to take a calculated risk.