Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Drug and alcohol safety.
When most travelers, especially young travelers, get in trouble, it
is usually accompanied by alcohol. So be smart about your drinking. Just like at home, don't
accept drinks from random people and don't leave your drink alone.
Ticket machines dupe.
Always be a little leery of people who try to help you at ticket ma-
chines. I know some people who got scammed in Paris from a well-dressed man who “helped”
them buy metro tickets. They wanted to buy two five-day passes, which costs about $50 each,
so the man offered to use his credit card because he told them Australian bankcards don't
work in the machines. He said that they could just pay him in cash. He did buy them tickets,
but he bought them a one-way child's ticket (which looks very similar to a five-day pass) that
cost about $1.50 and he pocketed the $100.
General Safety Tips
There are a lot of little things that can be potentially dangerous that we sometimes forget about
when we're traveling. Pay attention to traffic. Every year, a handful of tourists are killed in
London because they forget that traffic comes from the opposite direction. Be careful when
walking under scaffolding because construction workers sometimes drop things. I once had a
large bucket full of concrete powder fall about two feet in front of me. It fell from the seventh
floor and it probably weighed at least 50lbs. That would have been a bad day if it had landed
on my head. Pay attention to trams because they're very quiet and the tracks blend into the
road so they can be hard to see.
