We all hope that our trips will go of without a hitch (barring the fact that when things go awry, we end up with the best travel tales). Working as a photojournalist, I’ve traveled to nearly 150 countries and, while I love my job, I’ve had my share of lost bags and missed fights—and I’ve seen my share of the inside of local hospitals around the world.
Each country seems to have its own souvenir: malaria in India, Giardia and typhoid in Nepal, dengue fever in Thailand and dysentery in Mexico. In Mongolia, I was run over by a horse that left me with a cracked rib and a concussion. If you look quite closely, you can still see the word “Nikon” etched into my cheekbone from where my camera slammed into it. The worm in my head is defnitely not a frst-date story, and don’t even get me started on how I’ve broken my nose three times.
While I was working in South Sudan, it turned out not to be the threatening militia in a city under siege that surprise-attacked. It was a crazed pack of biting and scratching razor-toothed vervet monkeys leaping from a tree that forced me to a hospital for a second series of rabies shots and antibiotics (the first time was when I was bitten by a mastiff dog in Tibet).