2008's Strangest Travel Stories
Tuesday, December 30, 2008 at 08:13PM Among 2008's strangest stories comes from the www.sfgate.com website, Dont call us lesbians, or we will sue! Or, the Facebook Group titled 'I dropped my cell phone down a toilet and got my arm stuck there.'
Luckily it wasn't his BlackBerry or he would have dived in head-first
Word to the wise: If you drop your cell phone into the toilet of a
French high-speed TGV train, don't try to fish it out. In October, a
passenger tried to do just that and accidentally triggered the
flushing mechanism, sucking his arm down the toilet, the BBC reported.
The train had to be halted for two hours as firefighters cut through
the train's sewage pipes. The passenger was last seen being carried
off the train, the toilet still attached to his arm.
Bringing dignity back to baldness, one head at a time
In September, Air New Zealand announced it would pay 70 bald men to
have advertisements temporarily tattooed onto the backs of their
heads.
The plan was for the men to stand in line at airports and promote a
new system for reducing check-in waiting times, according to the
Associated Press.
The follicly challenged men were to be paid $1,000 New Zealand dollars
(about US $525 ) apiece, and the airline assured them the tattoos
would fade away after two weeks.
He's got a learner's permit, so what's the problem?
A pilot with the Turkish airline Anadolujet was fired in September
after he left the cockpit to use the bathroom and left the controls of
the Boeing 737 in the hands of a 15-year-old boy, the British
newspaper the Mirror reported.
Perhaps the pilot had forgotten that in 1994, 70 people died after an
Aeroflot pilot let his son fly the plane and the boy accidentally
turned off the autopilot.
Call Samuel L. Jackson - I smell a movie deal
There's an unaccounted-for snake on an Air India passenger jet.
In September, the Hindustan Times reported, a maintenance crew
discovered the snake coiled up under a seat after a flight from
Srinagar to Delhi, and were unable to catch it as it slithered around
the plane. The snake crawled into an air vent and was never found,
even after searchers unscrewed panels inside the fuselage, opened all
the doors and fumigated the plain.
Reports that the snake was a venomous cobra were denied by Air India.
Jetways are so economy class
After a flight from New York to Georgetown, Guyana, in July, a
first-class passenger got angry at seeing economy passengers being
allowed to exit before him - so he opened an emergency door and slid
down the chute.
The man appeared to be intoxicated, the Associated Press reported,
perhaps unnecessarily.
At least one business cares about its customers
Nobody likes those new airline fees for checking luggage, but at least
the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, a legal Nevada brothel near Carson City, is
doing something about it: It's reimbursing its fly-in customers for
the fee.
"As long as the airlines keep sticking it to the consumer, we feel
obligated to help," Dennis Hof, owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch,
told Travel Weekly.
Yours to keep, with our compliments
An arriving passenger at Japan's Narita International Airport found a
little surprise in his luggage when he got home: 5 ounces of
marijuana, courtesy of the customs staff.
As the BBC reported, a customs officer hid the package in the side
pocket of a randomly chosen suitcase as part of a test of airport
security. But drug-sniffing dogs couldn't find the cannabis, and the
officer couldn't remember which bag he put it in.
Japan has extremely strict drug laws, with jail sentences for the
possession of even small quantities of marijuana.
Next up on eBay: Wolf Blitzer's beard
A baggage screener at Newark Liberty Airport was arrested in October
after he allegedly stole a CNN video camera and tried to sell it on
eBay. Investigators placed the winning bid and recovered the camera at
the suspect's home.
He was charged with pilfering more than 100 items from luggage, the
Associated Press reported, including cameras, laptops, cell phones,
GPS devices and MP3 players.
They were cheering with embarrassment
Visitors to the Croatian town of Slavonski Brod got an eyeful in
November when hackers broke into the tourist board's computer and
replaced the tourist tips on a giant video screen in the town center
with pornographic movies.
"This incident shocked a lot of people and made our visitors feel very
uncomfortable," said Deputy Mayor Zeijka Kristof.
Actually, reported the British newspaper the Daily Times, the crowd
that had gathered around the video screen was cheering.
Crete residents aren't wild about word 'cretin,' either
Three residents of the Greek island of Lesbos asked a court in June to
prevent a Greek gay rights organization from referring to homosexual
women as "lesbians." They argued that this insults their heritage, the
Associated Press reported, because Lesbos residents have traditionally
been called "Lesbians."
Please make sure to disengage your brain before switching on the
satellite navigation system
A driver crashed an 11-foot, 8-inch-high charter bus carrying two
dozen high school softball players into a 9-foot-high pedestrian
bridge in Seattle's Washington Park in April because he had been
keeping his eye on his GPS navigation system and missed the posted
warnings.
Five days later, authorities had to pull a taxi minibus out of the
River Nar in King's Lynn, England, because the driver was obediently
following errant directions from his GPS unit.
Come for the windsurfing, stay for the waterboarding
Who says conditions at Guantanamo Bay are harsh? In May, it was
revealed that the U.S. military maintains a luxury resort there for
its own use, with air-conditioned suites, surfing, a golf course and a
bowling alley, London's Daily Mail reported. There's even a gift shop
where you can buy T-shirts that read, "The Taliban Towers at
Guantanamo Bay, the Caribbean's Newest 5-star Resort."
And it's only 2 miles from SFO to Brisbane
Sydney, Australia, routinely lands at or near the top of the list of
the world's favorite travel destinations. But tourist numbers aren't
quite what they should be, because would-be visitors keep flying to
the wrong Sydney.
In January, a 21-year-old German traveler who thought he was flying to
Sydney, Australia, to visit his girlfriend ended up instead in Sidney,
Montana, after misspelling the destination when booking his ticket
online.
The wayward traveler, who had only a thin jacket to ward off the
winter chill - he'd been expecting summer weather in Australia - was
stuck for three days in the Billings airport before he could buy a
ticket to Australia with money his parents and friends sent from
Germany.
It was, according to Reuters, the second time in two years a German
tourist had made this mistake.
And in September, a sculptor from Buenos Aires who thought she was on
her way to the land down under stepped off a plane instead in Sydney,
Nova Scotia.
"She was taking pictures out the airplane window and said to herself,
'Something is not right,'" a woman the sculptor met on the flight told
the Cape Breton Post.
Making the best of the situation, the sculptor decided to spend her
vacation in Nova Scotia.
The same thing happened in August 2002 to a couple from London, the
paper reported, adding that Sidney, British Columbia, has also
received its share of Australia-bound tourists.
Listen for planes colliding and you'll be fine
Let no one deny that St. Mary's Airport, on the Isle of Scilly off the
southwest coast of England, is an equal opportunity employer. In July,
the Plymouth Herald reported, the airport advertised an opening for an
air traffic controller and noted that the application was available in
Braille.
And, yes, the island's name is pronounced "silly."
You have to wonder how this guy made it to 64
This item came in too late for last year's report, so we're including
it here as a public service:
Airport security rules about bringing liquids aboard airplanes nearly
killed a 64-year-old German man last December. Screeners at the
Nuremberg airport found a quart of vodka in his bag and told him he
would either have to pour it out or pay to have his carry-on checked
as luggage. But the man chose a third option: He unscrewed the cap and
chugged the entire bottle on the spot, prompting a trip to the
emergency room with near-fatal alcohol poisoning.
How about a full-body search for the happy couple?
A Canadian man intent on surprising his high school sweetheart with a
wedding proposal in a romantic setting had to pop the question instead
at an airport security checkpoint.
Aaron Tkachuk had planned to propose aboard a Caribbean cruise, but an
alert X-ray screener at the Prince George airport in British Columbia
noticed a small box in the toe of one of his packed socks and insisted
on having a closer look, the Associated Press reported. Out came a
white gold, diamond and ruby ring, and Tkachuk was forced to propose
on the spot.
His girlfriend said yes.
Somewhere in the mountains of Pakistan, Osama bin Laden is very disappointed
In May, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security awarded a $382,000
anti-terrorism grant to a bus service that shuttles gamblers from
Colorado Springs to nearby mountain-town casinos, the Colorado Springs
Gazette reported.
The money is to be used for GPS systems and for training drivers,
which the paper quoted a bus company official as consisted of teaching
them "to be aware of their surroundings, of what's unusual and the
people on board."
But you did remember the gummi bears, right?
An Israeli family jetted off from Ben Gurion Airport to a vacation in
Paris in August - and accidentally left their 4-year-old daughter
behind in the gift shop.
The parents, who were sitting in different parts of the airplane, did
manage to bring four of their five children with them. Each parent
assumed the fifth was with the other, according to the BBC.
And you thought the cloying smell of Cinnabons in the food court was annoying
No need to worry about bears infesting the Juneau airport. In
September, a canister of anti-bear spray - a supercharged version of
the pepper spray that can be used to fend off assailants -
accidentally discharged in the airport, and quickly spread through the
ventilation system. One person was hospitalized, and the airport had
to close for an hour and a half before maintenance staff could flush
the spray out of the ventilation ducts.
We're going to have to count that as a snack and charge you $15
A Ryanair flight from Budapest to Dublin had to make an emergency
landing in Frankfurt in August after mushroom soup leaked from an
overhead bin onto the head of a man who was severely allergic to
mushrooms, the BBC reported.
No secondhand smoke, but a contact high is just fine
The Netherlands banned smoking in bars and restaurants in July, with
one notable exception: marijuana is still OK. Patrons can still smoke
it in Amsterdam's "coffee shops," where they can buy up to 5 grams a
day to smoke on the premises, according to London's Daily Telegraph.
Is that enough leg room for you, buddy?
A passenger sued JetBlue Airways in May for $2 million after the
captain ordered him out of his seat and told him to stand up or go
"hang out in the bathroom" for the duration of the New York-to-Los
Angeles flight, the Associated Press reported. The man had a gift
ticket, and an off-duty JetBlue employee who had originally agreed to
sit in the cockpit jump seat changed her mind and wanted the man's
seat.
