Travel Tales

Travel Tales: Nine Lives Travelers is a collection of very scary tales of close calls and great escapes in your travels. Nine Lives Travelers are people who could have easily lost one of their "nine lives" by not making it through a travel situation that should have claimed at least one of them, had things gone differently. This book is a collection of bad and fearful things that do occasionally happen to travelers despite their best efforts to avoid them. But bad things DO happen now and again, and it's best of course to avoid them in the first place, but, of course, if we cannot, we should certainly do our best at least try to escape them. While there's no easy, simple list of failsafe strategies for always staying safe in dangerous situations that may arise in travel, there are, however, meaningful strategies to be learned from the examples in this book that will enable one to increase one's personal safety and reduce the risks of dangerous outcomes. While many of the Nine Lives Travelers tales are not strictly about life and death situations, some are about difficult, embarrassing, funny, and otherwise annoying situations that we all would do very well to avoid and certainly do without. The scope of the close calls and ultimate escapes in this book may very well surprise you. And some would never even occur to you. Some are even funny, like, for instance, El Diablo Chapt Loco, the very close-call story of riding the Crazy Red Devil "chicken bus" through the horrifying mountain roads of Panama. Yes, such an adventure may never happen to you, but after reading about it, it may give you some pause - who knows? Maybe you'll never, ever happen to board a chicken bus! Sure, you'll read stories in this book that will alert you to situations that may never even occur to you. But if you avoid even one new travel or life danger - if you can avoid losing that one of your nine lives) by simply reading this book -then I'll have accomplished a very useful purpose. Since it's impossible to include every tale of nearly losing one of your very valuable nine lives, in my collection of True Travel Tales all in one single volume, they do, of course, appear throughout my True Travel Tales series. A few books elsewhere in the series, for example, Travel Tales: Wild Animals, Travel Tales: The African Safari Reader, and Travel Tales: Snakes and Other Critters, of course, do specifically include tales of close calls (and, hopefully, great escapes) by travelers, largely on safari in Africa and elsewhere in the world, with wild animals, including lions, tigers, snakes, hippos, elephants, Cape buffalos, crocodiles, dogs, bulls, monkeys, baboons, birds of prey, cougars, hyenas, bears, snakes, scorpions and many more. Just What Is a "Nine-Lives Traveler?" In Travel Tales: Nine Lives Travelers we broadly consider that those of us travelers and adventurers though having naturally our one and likely only single cherished God-given life to live have the potential, of course, to court seriously dangerous or potentially disastrous (or even funny or embarrassing for us) close calls such that we may very easily and loosely have skillfully managed to "save" or even sometimes hypothetical "lose" in our travels or adventures. Yet we live another mindful day. We say we have "lost" (or nearly lost) one of our potential so-called "nine lives" when we have managed to maintain, contain, or even sustain ourselves in these sometimes risky (or exceedingly embarrassing or funny situations during our travel lives) and have duly managed to "survive" and "overcome" to live yet another travel day!