Unique Experience?

[allanos]

As a junior purser, aged 19, on a cable ship, sailing through an Atlantic hurricane, stern first for a day and a half, because of the fear we would be pooped by the enormous waves of a following sea.

 

Four years later, aged 23, hitch-hiking south down through Africa, from Alexandria to Victoria Falls, starting off with less than 90 pounds.  I encountered too many unique and wonderful experiences to mention, on that journey, and too many outstandingly generous and hospitable people: Egyptians, Sudanese, Ethiopians, Kenyans, and European expats, the whole way down.

 

I slept on a beach in Dar-es-Salaam and had my backpack stolen and ended up with only 10 pounds in my pocket.  Fortunately, I met a lot of generous and helpful people on the way, and managed to make it to the Rhodesian border post at Victoria Falls, where I was turned away owing to being penniless.

 

I found great employment in Livingstone, Zambia, and stayed there for three years, building a nest egg to be able to move on.  A town full of wonderful people and a great social life. Those were the happiest days of my life.  It is difficult to describe the splendour of the Zambezi, close to the Falls, in the late afternoon: elephant on the small islands within it, crocodiles, hippo, exceptional bird life, peace and tranquility.  I have never forgotten it.

[AAArdvark]

What mainly "lines the main road" and all other roads in Baguio now is hours of traffic. 

[Puchaiyank]

12 minutes ago, allanos said:

As a junior purser, aged 19, on a cable ship, sailing through an Atlantic hurricane, stern first for a day and a half, because of the fear we would be pooped by the enormous waves of a following sea.

 

Four years later, aged 23, hitch-hiking south down through Africa, from Alexandria to Victoria Falls, starting off with less than 90 pounds.  I encountered too many unique and wonderful experiences to mention, on that journey, and too many outstandingly generous and hospitable people: Egyptians, Sudanese, Ethiopians, Kenyans, and European expats, the whole way down.

 

I slept on a beach in Dar-es-Salaam and had my backpack stolen and ended up with only 10 pounds in my pocket.  Fortunately, I met a lot of generous and helpful people on the way, and managed to make it to the Rhodesian border post at Victoria Falls, where I was turned away owing to being penniless.

 

I found great employment in Livingstone, Zambia, and stayed there for three years, building a nest egg to be able to move on.  A town full of wonderful people and a great social life. Those were the happiest days of my life.  It is difficult to describe the splendour of the Zambezi, close to the Falls, in the late afternoon: elephant on the small islands within it, crocodiles, hippo, exceptional bird life, peace and tranquility.  I have never forgotten it.

Thank you for your report...I have often thought my life was the most interesting ever...having experienced many of the world's wonders and cultures...many of you TV posters have been wonderfully adventurous...kudos to all of you!  ????  

[watcharacters]

20 hours ago, Wilsonandson said:

Now that's a unique experience. Woken up at 4 in the morning by the crowing of hungry cockerals. Washing your body in a concrete outhouse with iron roof. Drinking the local rain water. Eating fish the size of gold fish. Laying around in the shade playing cards with the old women chewing beetle nut. Watching the young farm hand climb up the coconut tree and machete the nuts down to the ground. In the afternoon having all the village kids stare at you, some touching you to see if your real.

 

 

I lived in Issan for years  but didn't go through any of that.

 

Sorry but my feeling are  "Better thee than me".

[Burma Bill]

Yes, seriously. As an older teenager on a job experience course with British Railways back in steam days (1962), I was fortunate to ride between Peterborough and London Kings Cross on the footplate, and help with firing, the fastest steam locomotive in the World (still to this day), Sir Nigel Gresley's "Mallard".Sir  

[allanos]

4 hours ago, Khaeng Mak said:

• Staked a kid (baby goat) out on Komodo island and watched it get attacked and devoured by a pack of dragons
• Caught a 108 kg yellow fin tuna
• Worked in Mother Theresa's street hospital in Calcutta
• Trekked to the base of Sagarmatha
• Completed an indentured apprenticeship and three degrees
• Dived with a 4m white pointer
• Visited 47 countries
• Rode a horse worth 7.5 million dollars US in Washing DC
• Built my own consultancy up from scratch starting in my garage with initial capital of only $1,200
• Completed successful projects for some of the largest private and publicly listed companies in the world
• Successfully applied to government for grant to assistant project that sought to find male mentors for boys raised by single women
• Raised significant amounts of money to assist in purchase of equipment for pediatric ward 
• Developed my own propriety software that was adopted by a number global companies including Glencore and Xstrata
• Surfed a 5m barrel
• Seen a sumatran rhino in the wild
• Layed a flower on Tenzing Norgay's grave
• Patted a snow leopard
• Hand feed a loaf of bread to a hippo
• Spent my 35 birthday dancing on the aft deck of a 52 foot cutter rigged ketch moored in the Scheldt river in Antwerp.  I was tripping on molly, Bergen Op Zoom hydro, and Cote d'Or chocolate. I was dancing with a bunch of uni girls who where part of the African dance troupe. We where dancing to live trance music played on a set of bag pipes.  It was snowing.
• Punched a bully and broke his cheek bone and eye socket.
• Stabbed in a nightclub
• Robbed at knife point
• Survived a crash into a power pole.  I was in the back seat.  Other 3 friends in the car killed
• Water skied at 90 miles per hour behind blown 454 boat
• Learned to barefoot
• Successfully invested in rare coins and gemstones
• Developed property
• Taught at Technical College and University
• Taught Intellectually Disabled Students
• Taught Aboriginal and Torres Straight Island students
• Taught myself to code in JS and PHP
• Published author
• Published academic author
• Published cartoonist

And I am just getting started...

You appear to be an immensely "driven" person, and time management is clearly your forte.

 

It should give you a great amount of pleasure when you sit back and reflect on all of your life's achievements, not the mention the achievements yet to come.

 

Kudos

[zyphodb]

Lots over the years, but as another poster said, I don't tend to dwell on them, just look forward to the next ones...

[Skeptic7]

6 hours ago, Krataiboy said:

Birth.

Now that is truly once in a lifetime! 

[473geo]

I have enjoyed a varied and interesting life, most of my experiences are not unique, as with many experiences listed here, they are limited edition achievements, often the result of an action/introduction by others, and something a person as an individual can be proud of, as such are all given to be personal triumphs in their own way.

 

[Lacessit]

24 minutes ago, 473geo said:

I have enjoyed a varied and interesting life, most of my experiences are not unique, as with many experiences listed here, they are limited edition achievements, often the result of an action/introduction by others, and something a person as an individual can be proud of, as such are all given to be personal triumphs in their own way.

 

Agree. Memorable achievements are things like climbing a mountain, or winning a championship in any form of sport. Unique achievements consist of doing something no-one has ever done before you.

[Dumbastheycome]

My life  to  date.

But being charged by a bull rhino is still vivid in recall.

But I do have the  picture of it  just before it  charged ! lol

Edited April 28, 2019 by Dumbastheycome

[emptypockets]

Watching manta rays jumping at sunset at Daliwoi bay NE Arnhemland Oz

[emptypockets]

I guess for a few members not having the income or 800,000 baht in the bank might be a life changing experience. 

[xylophone]

Many experiences, both unique and memorable in one way or another: –

 

– Got a job working in the Sahara desert and was absolutely amazed at the huge expanse of clean quietness and I would go out into it and sit in my Land Rover in the early hours of the morning just taking in the silence. Quite amazing.

 

– Having an irate Libyan soldier hold a loaded pistol to my head for some time whilst shouting/screaming and berating others around me for drinking alcohol. Thought I was a dead man.

 

– Following on from that, being taken outside of the room and with a few others, lined up against a wall by a bunch of Libyan soldiers with rifles – – really thought that was the end.

 

– Unfortunately seeing a deck-hand fall over the side of the rig boat in Nigeria and get eaten by something, because he disappeared with a scream beneath the surface and nothing ever was found of him despite eight hours of searching.

 

– Sailing the waters in a huge aluminium hulled launch, out from the Nigerian coast, doing a reconnoitre of the wellheads in the area and just being amazed at the things I saw; small fruit bats stranded on the deck of one platform and small fish on another, not to mention huge barracuda, which we sometimes had to eat because we ran out of food.

 

– Seeing the poverty and suffering of the local people in Biafra at the end of the war, where hundreds of thousands of people died, yet many managed to retain a smile.

 

– Playing a pre-match warmup game of tennis with Steffi Graf.

 

– Sailing the New Zealand Americas Cup challenge boat offshore Auckland.

 

– And probably one I'm most proud of would be retiring from my job as an executive at a bank having built an investment division to the value of $2 billion, and looking back at my life to see that I left school at 15 with no qualifications whatsoever and started work in a brickworks as an apprentice electrician. I think that is one that I'm most proud of.

[Ireland32]

19 hours ago, Nyezhov said:

Getting charged by a bear with nothing but a .32 in my hand.

I woke up in Yosemite at 3:00am i has  32 eyes looking at me, all bears trying to get knapsack out of tree only tent around in Tenaya Lake...also Tina Turner walked into my room in Military Academy , her son was my roommate, on a plane getting bumped into my legs by Paris Hilton, she said “sorry” then standing next to George Clooney in Immigration, Same flt Cathay -Pacific, also at Newport Beach, Myself and Maria Sharapova going thru her Swag Bags after she won Wimbledon , Also going on a cruise around South America, we left Buenos Aires and our ship had turned green from immaculate white, Grasshoppers covered the thing when we reached Uruguay...  

Edited April 28, 2019 by Ireland32
Change story a lil

[Puchaiyank]

14 minutes ago, xylophone said:

Many experiences, both unique and memorable in one way or another: –

 

– Got a job working in the Sahara desert and was absolutely amazed at the huge expanse of clean quietness and I would go out into it and sit in my Land Rover in the early hours of the morning just taking in the silence. Quite amazing.

 

– Having an irate Libyan soldier hold a loaded pistol to my head for some time whilst shouting/screaming and berating others around me for drinking alcohol. Thought I was a dead man.

 

– Following on from that, being taken outside of the room and with a few others, lined up against a wall by a bunch of Libyan soldiers with rifles – – really thought that was the end.

 

– Unfortunately seeing a deck-hand fall over the side of the rig boat in Nigeria and get eaten by something, because he disappeared with a scream beneath the surface and nothing ever was found of him despite eight hours of searching.

 

– Sailing the waters in a huge aluminium hulled launch, out from the Nigerian coast, doing a reconnoitre of the wellheads in the area and just being amazed at the things I saw; small fruit bats stranded on the deck of one platform and small fish on another, not to mention huge barracuda, which we sometimes had to eat because we ran out of food.

 

– Seeing the poverty and suffering of the local people in Biafra at the end of the war, where hundreds of thousands of people died, yet many managed to retain a smile.

 

– Playing a pre-match warmup game of tennis with Steffi Graf.

 

– Sailing the New Zealand Americas Cup challenge boat offshore Auckland.

 

– And probably one I'm most proud of would be retiring from my job as an executive at a bank having built an investment division to the value of $2 billion, and looking back at my life to see that I left school at 15 with no qualifications whatsoever and started work in a brickworks as an apprentice electrician. I think that is one that I'm most proud of.

Great story...you have reason to be proud...I fear the current generation...for the most part...lacks the ambition and drive of older generations...I hope I am wrong...????

[Nyezhov]

39 minutes ago, Ireland32 said:

Tina Turner walked into my room in Military Academy , her son was my roommate, on a plane getting bumped into my legs by Paris Hilton, she said “sorry” then standing next to George Clooney in Immigration, Same flt Cathay -Pacific, also at Newport Beach, Myself and Maria Sharapova going thru her Swag Bags after she won Wimbledon ,

O Yeah? I was at Coachella once and Paris Hilton walked past me!

[simon43]

My unique and life-changing experience will sound totally trivial to many, but those with bad eyesight might understand.

 

From 5 years old, I had to wear glasses, due to short-sightedness.  This gradually got worse as I got older.  By the time I was 18 years old, my eyes were rated at -12 and I wore bottle-thick glasses.  Without those glasses, I was reduced to moving by touch in unfamiliar spaces.

 

As contact lenses became available, I started to wear hard lenses, progressing onto soft lenses.  With those aids, my vision was just fine.  But every time that I removed my lenses or glasses, the (IMHO) most important of our 5 senses was all but useless.  Every morning when I got up, I would crawl around the room looking for the TV remote!  Without contact lenses or glasses, I had to touch my nose on a newspaper to read the words.

 

About 18 years ago, after Lasik (laser) eye surgery was well-established. I went to a respected Lasik specialist in Chelsea.  They told me that they had never applied Lasik to someone with such poor eyesight, and they would need to 'burn away' a lot of my eye lense to correct my vision.  Because of this, they were unwilling to guarantee that they could correct my eyesight back to normal, but they would try.

 

The doctors spent several hours carefully measuring my eyeball/lens curvature etc, and programming up their wonderful Lasik laser.

 

The operation was quick and painless, with only the smell of burning eyeball filling the air. My eyes were bandaged up for about 4 days...

 

When the bandages were finally removed, my vision was .... perfect!  

 

Although I have gone through several more unique and life-changing experiences since then, (mainly involving my ex-wives, but also my educational charity work in Burma), I will never forget the sheer joy at being able to wake up in the morning and being able to see everything clearly ????

[Khaeng Mak]

This is developing into a very nice thread.  I will add some more of my experiences when I get a chance.

[allanos]

I have had 3 unique experiences, fortunately not life-changing, but scary nonetheless, and all at the wrong end of a weapon.

 

The first was when I was in Cadiz, Spain, and had an altercation with two Guardia Civil, and I turned my back on them to walk away.  One of them cocked his machine pistol and the friend who was with me smartly got between them and me, and then diffused the situation.  I was 19.

 

I was in Lourenco Marques, now called Maputo, in 1973, aged 28, at the time that Frelimo had taken over and were bossing their way around.  One of them took exception to myself and two friends, and forced us at the bad end of an AK-47 to get into our car, and drive to a Frelimo command post outside of the town.  To this day I am not sure why, but he made a lengthy report to his commander which went on forever, gesticulating to us all the while, and then we were told to <deleted> off.  It was a volatile situation at the time, but, fortunately, came to nothing.

 

Age 60, I arrive early in the morning at my downtown office in Johannesburg.  It is still dark.  The front door was open so I was quite sure that my African lady manager had already arrived, and opened up, but, strangely, had not put our lights on.

 

As I walked through to our offices, to my alarm there was a man standing over her with a gun pointed at her.  Almost immediately, I hear a pistol being cocked behind me, and it is thrust into the back of my neck.

 

I was forced to open the safe, and the contents were "liberated".  We were then put in the kitchen on our premises, and the door was closed 

behind us.  I expected that our assailants would come back, and shoot us, but, luckily, they had simply disappeared.

 

These then, are my unique life experiences, of a different kind.

 

 

Edited April 28, 2019 by allanos
typo

[geisha]

Climbing Machu Picchu at 62 , breathtaking, literally ! Jungle trecking  through Borneo and staying in the Dayak  and Iban villages. Can’t choose the best experience. 

[Lacessit]

2 hours ago, Nyezhov said:

O Yeah? I was at Coachella once and Paris Hilton walked past me!

You didn't coax her into the sack, stud? I'm disappointed in you.

[Nyezhov]

10 minutes ago, Lacessit said:

You didn't coax her into the sack, stud? I'm disappointed in you.

She offered, but I wasnt in the mood right then, I wanted a slice of Pizza more. I dont like it when they beg like she did, so degrading

[Lacessit]

1 minute ago, Nyezhov said:

She offered, but I wasnt in the mood right then, I wanted a slice of Pizza more. I dont like it when they beg like she did, so degrading

Oh come on. You expect us to believe you turned her down? Next, you'll be knocking back Sharapova because she's too tall.

[Nyezhov]

1 hour ago, Lacessit said:

Oh come on. You expect us to believe you turned her down? Next, you'll be knocking back Sharapova because she's too tall.

Too needy. She still wont leave me alone.

[CharlieH]

2 hours ago, Nyezhov said:

She offered, but I wasnt in the mood right then, I wanted a slice of Pizza more. I dont like it when they beg like she did, so degrading

Atleast the pizza would've lasted longer...???? and probably been more enjoyable.

[Lacessit]

2 hours ago, CharlieH said:

Atleast the pizza would've lasted longer...???? and probably been more enjoyable.

You evidently haven't witnessed his table manners.

[Nyezhov]

7 minutes ago, Lacessit said:

You evidently haven't witnessed his table manners.

Just because I look bad whilst eating does not mean I dont know how to eat.

[HuskerDo]

On 4/27/2019 at 12:18 PM, Nyezhov said:

Getting charged by a bear with nothing but a .32 in my hand.

Not believable. Had this happened you wouldn't be here to speak about it. Movin on.

[HuskerDo]

15 hours ago, Khaeng Mak said:

• Staked a kid (baby goat) out on Komodo island and watched it get attacked and devoured by a pack of dragons
• Caught a 108 kg yellow fin tuna
• Worked in Mother Theresa's street hospital in Calcutta
• Trekked to the base of Sagarmatha
• Completed an indentured apprenticeship and three degrees
• Dived with a 4m white pointer
• Visited 47 countries
• Rode a horse worth 7.5 million dollars US in Washing DC
• Built my own consultancy up from scratch starting in my garage with initial capital of only $1,200
• Completed successful projects for some of the largest private and publicly listed companies in the world
• Successfully applied to government for grant to assistant project that sought to find male mentors for boys raised by single women
• Raised significant amounts of money to assist in purchase of equipment for pediatric ward 
• Developed my own propriety software that was adopted by a number global companies including Glencore and Xstrata
• Surfed a 5m barrel
• Seen a sumatran rhino in the wild
• Layed a flower on Tenzing Norgay's grave
• Patted a snow leopard
• Hand feed a loaf of bread to a hippo
• Spent my 35 birthday dancing on the aft deck of a 52 foot cutter rigged ketch moored in the Scheldt river in Antwerp.  I was tripping on molly, Bergen Op Zoom hydro, and Cote d'Or chocolate. I was dancing with a bunch of uni girls who where part of the African dance troupe. We where dancing to live trance music played on a set of bag pipes.  It was snowing.
• Punched a bully and broke his cheek bone and eye socket.
• Stabbed in a nightclub
• Robbed at knife point
• Survived a crash into a power pole.  I was in the back seat.  Other 3 friends in the car killed
• Water skied at 90 miles per hour behind blown 454 boat
• Learned to barefoot
• Successfully invested in rare coins and gemstones
• Developed property
• Taught at Technical College and University
• Taught Intellectually Disabled Students
• Taught Aboriginal and Torres Straight Island students
• Taught myself to code in JS and PHP
• Published author
• Published academic author
• Published cartoonist

And I am just getting started...

Most is made up for sure.