Travel

by Joshua Piven

  The WORST-CASE SCENARIO Survival Handbook: TRAVEL

  The WORST-CASE SCENARIO Survival Handbook: TRAVEL

  By Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht

  Illustrations by Brenda Brown

  Copyright © 2001 by book soup publishing, inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher.

  Worst-Case Scenario and The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook are trademarks of book soup publishing, inc.

  The authors wish to thank all of the experts, whose invaluable knowledge and experience have made this book possible, and may have even saved a life or two. Special thanks and good karma to all those who worked on the book: Mindy Brown, Erin Slonaker, Jason Rekulak, Susan Van Horn, Frances J. Soo Ping Chow, Jason Mitchell, Steve Mockus, and of course, Jay Schaefer.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data available.

  eISBN: 978-0-8118-7358-1

  a book soup publishing book

  www.booksouppublishing.com

  Visit www.worstcasescenarios.com

  Chronicle Books LLC

  680 Second Street

  San Francisco, CA 94107

  www.chroniclebooks.com

  WARNING

  When a life is imperiled or a dire situation is at hand, safe alternatives may not exist. To deal with the worst-case scenarios presented in this book, we highly recommend—insist, actually—that the best course of action is to consult a professionally trained expert. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO UNDERTAKE ANY OF THE ACTIVITIES DESCRIBED IN THIS BOOK YOURSELF. But because highly trained professionals may not always be available when the safety of individuals is at risk, we have asked experts on various subjects to describe the techniques they might employ in those emergency situations. THE PUBLISHER, AUTHORS, AND EXPERTS DISCLAIM ANY LIABILITY from any injury that may result from the use, proper or improper, of the information contained in this book. All the information in this book comes directly from experts in the situation at hand, but we do not guarantee that the information contained herein is complete, safe, or accurate, nor should it be considered a substitute for your good judgment and common sense. And finally, nothing in this book should be construed or interpreted to infringe on the rights of other persons or to violate criminal statutes: we urge you to obey all laws and respect all rights, including property rights, of others. Nonetheless, enjoy your trip.

  —The Authors

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Introduction

  1 Getting There

  How to Control a Runaway Camel

  How to Stop a Runaway Passenger Train

  How to Stop a Car with No Brakes

  How to Stop a Runaway Horse

  How to Crash-Land a Plane on Water

  How to Survive an Airplane Crash

  2 People Skills

  How to Survive a Riot

  How to Survive a Hostage Situation

  How to Pass a Bribe

  How to Foil a Scam Artist

  How to Foil a UFO Abduction

  How to Survive a Mugging

  How to Tail a Thief

  How to Lose Someone Who Is Following You

  3 Getting Around

  How to Jump from Rooftop to Rooftop

  How to Jump from a Moving Train

  How to Escape from a Car Hanging over the Edge of a Cliff

  How to Escape When Tied Up

  How to Ram a Barricade

  How to Escape from the Trunk of a Car

  How to Survive a Fall onto Subway Tracks

  How to Survive in a Plummeting Elevator

  4 Out and About

  How to Survive When Lost in the Jungle

  How to Find Your Way without a Compass

  How to Climb out of a Well

  How to Navigate a Minefield

  How to Survive a Riptide

  How to Survive When You Fall through Ice

  How to Survive in Frigid Water

  How to Survive a Trip over a Waterfall

  How to Survive a Volcanic Eruption

  5 Food and Shelter

  How to Survive a High-Rise Hotel Fire

  How to Find Water on a Deserted Island

  How to Purify Water

  How to Build a Shelter in the Snow

  How to Survive a Tsunami

  How to Survive a Sandstorm

  How to Catch Fish without a Rod

  How to Make Animal Traps

  6 Surviving Illness and Injury

  How to Deal with a Tarantula

  How to Treat a Scorpion Sting

  How to Cross a Piranha-Infested River

  How to Treat a Severed Limb

  How to Remove a Leech

  Appendix

  General Travel Strategies

  Strategies for Packing

  Strategies for Flying

  Strategies for Hotels

  Strategies for Travel in Dangerous Regions

  Foreign Emergency Phrases

  Gestures to Avoid

  About the Experts

  About the Authors

  FOREWORD

  By David Concannon, Explorers Club

  During a lifetime of travel and adventure, I have learned some things the hard way—by living through many dangerous and unpleasant experiences. These experiences have taught me several very valuable lessons.

  Lesson #1: The unexpected usually happens.

  It was July 1989. I was standing at 15,000 feet on the side of Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, wondering if I would live.

  I could still hear the voices of my friends before I left: “Kili is a cake walk. You don’t need any technical climbing experience to summit. You might get a little altitude sickness, maybe a touch of edema. Don’t worry, you will survive.”

  My thoughts were interrupted by the voice of a climbing partner, a physician, as he finished examining me. “Your lung has collapsed,” he said. “You also have pulmonary and cerebral edema, and retinal hemorrhages in both eyes.” Well, I thought, at least that explained the difficulty I had breathing, my new speech impediment, and the pain I felt in my eyes whenever I removed my sunglasses.

  I could handle the inability to speak and the mental confusion. What really bothered me was the knowledge that I had collapsed a lung (for the second time in my life), and that my one good lung was filled with fluid. “If you get pneumonia, you will be dead by morning,” the doctor said. “You better start walking.”

  And walk I did, for 24 miles.

  Two days later, I flew in an unpressurized airplane to Kenya, followed by a flight to Germany and a horrible ride in the smoking section of a Pan Am flight to New York. After five days, I walked into a hospital in Philadelphia, where I was examined in stunned silence by a neurologist and specialist in pulmonary medicine. According to the textbooks, I shouldn’t have made it. But I did. I had survived.

  From that point on, I knew I could survive any worst-case scenario in my travels if I just kept my wits about me and forged ahead. Miraculously, I have always emerged from my adventures without permanent injuries, and have even been able to exit under my own power.

  Lesson #2: Accept the things that are beyond your control.

  Although I have not always been able to predict specifically what problems, major or minor, are going to arise, I have learned that once something does occur, I need to accept it as unavoidable. Having my pants pockets razored in Buenos Aires, being diverted through Kosovo because of “terrorist activity” in Croatia, and losing my luggage on domestic flights through Atlanta are the inevitable consequences of travel rather than extraordinary occurrences or self-inflicted mistakes.

  When I was living in Kenya, I chartered airplanes to travel on weekends because flying wa
s considered safer than driving. One time the plane I wanted to charter was booked; that weekend the plane crashed. The Kenyans reacted nonchalantly. “Hakuna ma tata,” they said. “No problem. Things happen.” Sometimes things happen for a reason, I thought. Sometimes they don’t. But the following weekend, I took the train.

  For some people, putting themselves in extreme situations and then facing the dire consequences is part of the thrill of travel. But for all types of travel, you must resign yourself to the fact that your luggage will be lost, your hotel reservations will be canceled, and the last flight out will leave without you.

  The key is to then decide what you are going to do about it.

  Lesson #3: Always have a contingency plan.

  With a little advance preparation, you can survive the unexpected.

  I once suffered from severe hypothermia thanks to an old cotton sleeping bag I carried on a backpacking trip through the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The weather forecast in the lowlands called for sunny skies and mild temperatures. Up in the mountains, however, it rained for five days straight. Everything I had was soaked, and I was never able to get warm. I eventually became delirious—and nearly unconscious.

  After spending two days in another person’s dry sleeping bag with two half-naked companions to restore my body temperature, I vowed I would never be caught unprepared again. I have not.

  Now I research everything before I travel. I study alternative travel arrangements, accommodations, climate, travel advisories, appropriate equipment for my destination, and anything else that may be relevant. I have avoided being stranded in airports due to missed connections by knowing about later flights on competing airlines. I once traveled on eleven trains and buses to make it from Switzerland to the Hague, Netherlands, before my hostel locked its doors at midnight. (My first Swiss train was ten minutes late, and I missed every one of my original connections through Germany and the Netherlands. I still made it.) But you must be prepared. After all, a rainy day in Paris can be just as miserable as a gale in the North Atlantic if you are caught without the proper gear.

  Lesson #4: No matter how bad you think things are now, they can always get worse.

  I recently participated in a month-long expedition to the R.M.S. Titanic. The expedition provided a daily dose of Murphy’s Law (“Anything that can go wrong, will”). Each day brought new and exciting challenges, sometimes several at once. Equipment failed, the weather was horrendous (we survived three gales and a hurricane), and the team was stricken with food poisoning. And all this was on top of the incredibly high level of risk we had expected to encounter.

  Diving in the submersibles meant routinely facing death by implosion, drowning, fire, freezing, or asphyxiation. And to heighten the tension and discomfort, the expedition was being covered by the world’s media. Nevertheless, we survived and succeeded by dealing with each challenge head-on, fixing it, and moving on to the next. We never let problems accumulate, or else we would have been overwhelmed. On our expedition or on your trip, the emphasis should not be on how bad everything is but on how to make it better, one step at a time.

  Once you’ve learned all these lessons, you still need to know what, technically, to do. That’s where this guide comes in.

  People don’t take trips—trips take people.

  —John Steinbeck

  The timorous may stay at home.

  —Justice Benjamin Cardozo

  INTRODUCTION

  The statistics are against you: more than 50 percent of all travelers run into problems. While we hope that the worst that you’ll ever encounter is a seat-back that won’t recline or a dripping sink in your hotel room, there is a lot more that could go wrong.

  Hijackings. Leeches. Runaway trains. Tarantulas. Tsunamis. Severed limbs. Muggings. Plane crashes. Brake failure. UFO abduction. Maybe a hotel fire while you’re sleeping on the 33rd floor.

  Our advice is simple: always be ready for the worst.

  We don’t believe that the response to the possibility of bad luck or danger is to stay home. (For one thing, as we examined in our first book, The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook, sometimes adventure gets thrust upon you even when you are staying in and around the house.) Go out and see the world. Climb mountains, cross rivers, ride camels, sample the local cuisine, set a course for adventure—just know what to do when your travels take a turn toward disaster.

  To provide you with as much help and protection as possible, we’ve taken an expansive view of what constitutes travel: A sandstorm might be an exotic, foreign experience if you live in New Jersey but not if you live in Saudi Arabia; if you live in Tahiti, knowing what to do if you fall onto subway tracks is a remote possibility, but if you live in Paris, New York, Tokyo, or other cities, it may well be a daily concern. A local excursion for one person might be completely foreign to another.

  So for the purposes of this book, travel begins the minute you go out your front door, whether you are going across town or across the equator. These are the worst-case scenarios you could encounter, and these are the skills that could save your life.

  But even though we mean well and want you to feel reassured, we are not experts in safety or survival. We are just ordinary tourists—civilians, amateurs, two regular guys (albeit regular guys with a healthy dose of paranoia and a lot of curiosity). So to deal with the threatening situations, we have again consulted experts in their fields: the U.S. Army and State Department, security specialists, pilots, railroad engineers, movie stuntpeople, counter-terrorist consultants, expedition guides, exotic creature zoologists, and demolition derby drivers, among others. (Biographies of the experts are included at the back of the book.) With their input and advice, we have constructed these illustrated, step-by-step instructions on what you need to do in dozens of dire situations.

  To make this handbook useful even on less eventful days, we also asked our legions of experts to provide us with their personal, insider approach to traveling in comfort. We’ve compiled an appendix with select strategies for packing, flying, lodging, and traveling in general, using their collective advice and our own experience. Rounding out the appendix is a list of extreme emergency phrases (in five languages) and a selection of physical gestures to avoid, since their meaning varies widely from country to country.

  If, just once, whether tomorrow or in ten years, you are called upon to apply the information you’ve learned from this handbook, you could save a life—your life, or the life of someone you’re with. This book could be your passport to survival. And the pages can be used as emergency toilet paper if you’re really in a jam.

  At the very least, it will provide good information and entertainment for the armchair survivalist.

  Bon voyage.

  CHAPTER 1

  GETTING THERE

  HOW TO CONTROL A RUNAWAY CAMEL

  1. Hang on to the reins—but do not pull them back hard in an attempt to stop the camel.

  A camel’s head, unlike that of a wayward horse, cannot always be pulled to the side to slow it down. Camels are usually harnessed with a head halter or nose reins, and pulling on the nose reins can tear the camel’s nose—or break the reins.

  2. If the camel has sturdy reins and a head halter, pull the reins to one side to make the camel run in a circle.

  Do not fight the camel; pull the reins in the direction the camel attempts to turn its head. The camel may change direction several times during the incident—let it do so.

  3. If the camel has nose reins, just hang on tight.

  Use the reins for balance, and grip with your legs. If there is a saddle, hold on to the horn.

  4. Hold on until the camel stops.

  Whether the camel is running in circles or in a straight path, it will not run very far. The camel will sit down when it grows tired.

  5. When the camel sits, jump off.

  Hold on to the reins to keep it from running off.

  HOW TO STOP A RUNAWAY PASSENGER TRAIN

  1. Locate the emergency brake.


  There is an emergency brake valve just inside each end of every passenger car. These valves are generally red and should be clearly marked.

  2. Pull the handle.

  This opens a valve that vents brake pipe air pressure to the atmosphere, applying the brakes for an emergency stop. There is a possibility of derailment, depending upon track curvature and grade, train weight, and the number of coaches.

  IF THE BRAKE DOES NOT WORK

  1. Call for help.

  Locate a crew member’s radio. Depress the “talk” button between the earpiece and the microphone. Do not change the channel, even if you do not hear an answer. Transmit an emergency distress call: Give any information that may help the listener understand the location of the train (for example, train number and destination). The Train Dispatcher should hear you and may clear traffic without responding. If you cannot find anyone on the radio, you will have to attempt to stop the train yourself.

  2. Make your way to the front of the train.

  Pull all emergency brake valves as you proceed, or instruct other passengers to apply handbrakes. These brakes are different from the red valves described earlier, and are located on each end of the passenger coach, inside the vestibule. They are applied by turning a wheel or pumping a lever. Tighten these valves as much as possible, and leave them applied.

  3. Enter the locomotive.

  The locomotive is usually right after the baggage car, just in front of the passenger coaches. Exercise extreme caution when stepping over and across the car couplers that connect the locomotive and baggage car.

  There may be several locomotives on the train—not just one. Repeat the following steps in each locomotive. However, there is a chance that the trailing locomotive cab will be reversed, and that you will not be able to proceed any farther forward. If this is the case, retreat to the last car of the train and follow the instructions on page 26: “If the Train is Not Slowing or a Crash is Imminent.”