Travel Horrors

Traveling the world, shooting pictures: Sounds glamourous, right? Except when you have to bed down for the night with only a bug-filled sack as your mattress. But as much as they relish telling their travel horror stories, the traveling photographers we interviewed all say it's simply the excitement of the unexpected that keeps them going back out on the road.

When Cannibals Attack
While he was soaping up in the shower on a shoot in the Congo, Getty staff photographer Spencer Platt heard the sound of thunder. He was grateful for the change in weather; it had been hot in the town of Bunia, where he and photographer Mike Kamber, who was shooting the conflict between the Lendu and Hema tribes for The New York Times (this was 2003), had been sharing a hut. Maybe he should bring in the laundry from the clothesline, thought Platt.

Then Kamber burst into the bathroom, screaming. What Platt had thought was thunder was in fact artillery shelling, as the town of Bunia came under heavy attack. Still soapy but dressed, Platt ran with fellow photojournalists up a road to the UN Embassy to safety because the Lendu tribe was known for rampant looting and violence.

"We were petrified," he says, "because the Lendu's have this reputation for savagery and literally, cannibalism. And the men dress like women. They wear these wigs and these freakish skirts. So if there's anyone you could visualize as being the most terrifying group to attack you, you know, they were it. Cannibals in drag."
Yes, Platt and colleagues lived to tell the tale.

Avalanche On Everest
It was after midnight, with sub-freezing temperatures and visibility only as far as a battery-powered headlamp would reach. Still, things were looking good as Jimmy Chin, a leading adventure photographer, and three others worked their way across a darkened glacier. They were on the way to the summit of Everest and what they hoped would be the first snowboard descent of the mountain's north face.

Then a loud sound echoed over their heads. "We heard this 'crack' way up high," remembers Chin. "That's never a good sign." Worse, the noise didn't stop but "kept rumbling and rumbling and it sounded like it was getting closer."

Climbing Everest has its dangers: the sub-freezing temperatures, the lack of oxygen. But the mountain also features "seracs," bus-sized chunks of ice that break unpredictably. If you're under one when it breaks you die; if you're down the mountain you may face avalanches. That seemed to be the situation for Chin, on assignment for Men's Journal.
The four were roped together, customary for dealing with crevasses. They couldn't see anything beyond the range of their headlamps. "Pretty much you're just standing there," says Chin.

They tried to confer, but while Chin could see mouths moving the noise grew too loud to hear each other. "Pretty soon it sounds like a train. You know it's coming."

Then, just for an instant, the four headlamp beams illuminated a towering wall of white crashing toward them. "You can't see the top of it," he says. "It's the air blast" that precedes the avalanche.
Chin was blown into the air. "You're kind of flapping in the wind, looking for bus-sized, house-sized chunks of ice."

And then Chin was deposited on the ground, covered with six inches of powdery snow. He dusted himself off and found the others were ok too. When they explored a bit they discovered that the avalanche itself, with its massive load of snow and ice, had stopped just a few hundred feet short of their position, a tiny buffer that saved their lives.

More than a little psyched out by the scare, the four decided to call it quits and head back to camp. They decided against making another attempt, deeming the risk of avalanche too high. Chin remembers the adventurers felt badly about making that decision - until they awoke the next morning to see their whole planned route had been blasted over by another huge avalanche.

Missing Something? Yes, It Can Happen.
It's the photographer's worst nightmare. Only Chris Usher wasn't dreaming.

Usher, a freelancer for Time and Newsweek, was in Aspen in 1999 covering President Clinton when King Hassan of Morocco died. Custom required the king be buried within 24 hours; American foreign policy dictated the US president attend the funeral.

That meant a quick flight for the president and the press pool to Rabat, with a stopover at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. It was on the second leg of the trip that Usher noticed he was missing his two Nikon bodies, complete with key lenses.

At first he thought a colleague was playing a trick on him. Then he realized the cameras weren't on the plane. "I'm going up the aisle [of Air Force One] going 'Oh no, oh no!' " recalls Usher. "You feel your stomach come up literally to the back of your throat."

He figured he had left the cameras and lenses hanging over a chair at Andrews. He had picked up some extra equipment during the stopover, so he felt like he was carrying his normal complement of cameras, though he wasn't. "When all your shoulders are burdened [with photo gear] you're good to go," he explains.

When he arrived in Morocco, his colleague, Jim LoScalzo of US News, lent him a Nikon 8008. He also had some Leicas and a medium-format camera. But the cameras he had left behind had his two key long lenses attached, including a 300 mm. A White House photographer without a 300 mm is like Henri Cartier-Bresson without his 50mm.

How did Usher's nightmare turn out? Surprisingly well. President Clinton, acting against Secret Service advice, decided to walk in the funeral procession. Lo Scalzo and Usher did the same. Instead of shooting the gathered heads of state from a distance, the two found they were in the middle of the action, needing wide-angles, not long glass.

Usher says that while Lo Scalzo was burdened walking in the Moroccan heat with the standard compliment of heavy lenses, Usher found he was equipped just right with what he had. "I never needed the long lenses - it was the best thing that could have happened," remembers Usher. "I ended up with a whole lot of great pictures."

Billionaire Shock
You'd think people with personal fortunes in the billion-dollar range might exude some good luck. But photographer David Strick has found that for him, billionaires have the opposite effect.

First: David Murdock, CEO of Dole Foods. A shoot outside one of Murdock's California mansions was going well until Strick picked up his camera, and went into a kind of seizure. "Literally my body just started to seize up and vibrate at the same time," Strick recalls. He managed to flip the camera over his head and the seizure stopped. It turns out that though all the lights were properly insulated from the ground, the power cord wasn't and it had a tiny break in it, enough to nearly electrocute Strick. Murdock seemed unphased by the vibrating photographer.

When Strick had to photograph Otis Booth, who made his $1.7 billion in Berkshire Hathaway stock, it was a troubled assignment from the beginning. Forbes wanted the picture in front of Booth's home, but the place was being set up for a tented party. There were workers all over the place, and in moving an aluminum ladder out of the way Strick and his crew dinged a car. Then Strick tried to move his own van out of the picture, but dropped one of its back wheels over the edge of the driveway into a very muddy lawn. There it stuck.
"It went really far in," says Strick.

So he put an assistant behind the wheel and told him to pound the accelerator while Strick stood behind and pushed. This proved to be a very bad idea, with results straight out of Laurel and Hardy. The van's wheel spun, spraying mud onto Strick. Strick shouted to the assistant to stop. The assistant "was gunning the engine, so he couldn't hear me screaming at him," says Strick. The farce continued. Any watching five-year-old would've just died laughing.

Strick was covered in mud from his socks on up. He cleaned off his glasses so he could see and went on with the shoot. He says Booth "didn't seem phased" in dealing with a photographer who appeared to have just crawled from the nearest swamp,

Of his two wealthy subjects, Strick says, "Massive amounts of money give them some kind of assurance

The Fake-Ambulance-Kidnapping-Shakedown Scam
Livia Corona loves Mexico City, and tells all her friends they should visit the capital. But don't ask her about the ambulance.

The story starts like this. Corona is in Mexico City on a shoot for a record label. It's night, and she and some band members are in a convoy moving from party to party. The car Corona is riding in, with a friend at the wheel, makes a U-turn and gets hit by a drunk driver. Corona's wearing a seatbelt but has hit her head. It's bleeding.

"I see what's happened and I pass out," recalls Corona. Next thing she knows she's being strapped to a wooden backboard by paramedics who load her and the woman who had been driving into an ambulance. When another car of friends tries to follow the ambulance, the police block it, an ominous sign.
When Corona next wakes up, the ambulance crew is telling her and the other woman, "We're not taking you to the hospital unless you give us money."

"You're crazy. I need to go to the hospital. I have a hole in my head!" Corona tells them. But it doesn't work. The EMTs park the ambulance. The rescue has turned into a kidnapping.

The two women argue for hours with the EMTs, who initially demand $6,000, then lower it to $1,500. The women say they have no money. Corona keeps lapsing in and out of consciousness. "I try to stay lucid," she says. She also tries to hide her collection of credit cards in her underwear. "If they see that [the cards] it's going to be ATM kidnapping until all the money is gone," she worries.

Eventually the other woman is allowed to call some friends in another car. When they arrive one of them gets into the ambulance. It's getting crowded in there and Corona realizes she needs to throw up. The ambulance attendants object; they may run a crooked ambulance but it's a clean one. They tell Corona to step outside if she wants to barf.

She does so, then climbs into her friends' car. The EMTs object. "You can't take a patient from an ambulance, it's a crime!" they protest.

Finally a deal is reached. Corona may be driven to the hospital by one of her friend, but he'll have to leave his car registration behind as collateral. Then things get really complex. The first hospital gives her an aspirin and sends her to another one for a CAT scan.

Meanwhile Corona's friend, the driver of the car in the accident, still being held by the renegade EMTs, manages to call a lawyer listed on her auto insurance card. He arrives and starts arguing, not to free the woman, but to deny she had any responsibility for the original wreck. After all, he's representing the insurance company, not her.

Eventually somebody calls the police. They take the driver, Corona's friend, to jail. After she tells them what happened they go out to find the EMTs, leaving her in a cell with local drunks. Corona, now sporting a neck brace, arrives at the jail. Also arriving (Corona swears this is a real story, not the climax of an improbable Mexican sitcom) are four sullen EMTs in the company of police.

The EMTs tell the friend with the car (Remember: they'd taken his auto registration with his name and address) that they know where he lives and someone is going to get killed if the friend in jail identifies them. He manages to communicate this to the jailed driver in time to hush her up. She tells the police she doesn't recognize these guys.

At which point the police release her, and everybody more or less goes home.

Hostile Fauna

John MacLean says the best part about traveling "would have be the adventure and the miraculous surprises that just pop out of nowhere."

Nearly everything about his 1999 trip to Costa Rica, he says, offered either or both. There, he stayed in accommodations whose bathrooms featured what MacLean calls "suicide showers," so dubbed because the electric generators that heated the water put bathers inches away from electrocution.

If the bathrooms made for adventure, then the indigenous wildlife presented surprises. MacLean and his friend Curt Peters were one day shooting stock images of howler monkeys in the rainforest. Flat on their backs, the photographers shot upward into the sky to capture the monkeys, perched on tree branches about 100 feet above them. Screeching all the while, the monkeys began throwing branches at their distant relatives below. When one of the monkeys nailed Peters with a three-foot branch-which landed directly on his camera lens-the photographers understood they'd overstayed their welcome.

Cross-Cultural Understanding
New York based photographer Andrea Fazzari knows how to put a positive spin on otherwise harrowing experiences. In 2002, she and a friend were driving through the Lapland Region in the northern tip of Finland, working on a story about the Sami people for Travel + Leisure. When Fazzari's companion, who was driving, turned slightly too hard in an effort to avoid an oncoming car, it sent the SUV spinning out of control, off the road, and into a snow bank.

Shaken but physically well, Fazzari forced the passenger-side door open against a wall of snow. The accident itself was terrifying, but more daunting was the possibility of being abandoned in the isolated bank. Then a van slowed on the road within hailing distance of the snowbank. Fazzari flipped through her guidebook in search of a few Finnish words. But words were hardly necessary. their Finnish rescuer (who came back later with a friend and a tractor) was an old pro, whom Fazzari was taken with immediately. "He was very cinematic," she says. "He had one of those hats with the fur flaps. I guess you could liken it to Fargo. And he was jolly and huge."

Once the SUV was extracted, the crew of four took a nonverbal excursion back to a little village, where they shared hot chocolate and a meal.

"I can't really think of the experience badly now," says Fazzari, who took pictures of her hosts. "It wasn't actually hard to find a positive in this because I was so fascinated by this man. And these people who live in these tiny villages who are very sincere and very much tied to nature, they know what to do. They don't panic."

For Fazzari, the incident also underscored her inextricable link to the rest of the human race. "One of the things I like so much about my work is that I learn about humanity, and I'm touched by all kinds of people. It's fascinating to understand that really at the end of the day, our cultures and traditions are different, but we all have the same wants and desires and needs in life."