Just Doing the “Right Thing”

An American couple and their child were driving in a Eurasian country when a little girl darted out in front of their vehicle. She was hit, but not seriously hurt. To do the “right thing,” the American man drove the little girl to a doctor in a neighboring village. To “show good faith,” he left his wife and child behind. He later returned to find that they’d been hanged by villagers who’d grossly misunderstood what happened.

Innocence Lost

And there was the case of the European couple traveling in North Africa ‚ who decided to go their separate ways briefly in a public market. The wife disappeared and has never been found–possibly having been sold off into ‘white slavery’ maybe?

Mysterious Chase

And then there was the woman who was chased down a street in India by someone in a mysterious black car with tinted windows. “White slavers, perhaps,” she figured. She was a lucky one: she escaped!

The Travel Psychologist’s Take

Momentous, momentary instances in travel can change one’s life—never to be the same again—in but a micro-second! What a difference an instant can make. All sorts of socio-cultural-psychological mental ‘baggage’ that we bring with us from home on tour can yet be so different, so inappropriate in such ‘alien’ environments that we find ourselves in. Just as‚ you ‘never get a second chance to make a first impression’—so it can be‚ that such apparently inopportune actions we so innocently take in seemingly innocuous circumstances can have such dastardly irreversible and unintended consequences for the rest of our lives!