If you’re interested in the topic of pant-wettingly exciting travel adventures, which, by the mere fact that you’ve clicked over to here, the best travel blog in the world, kind of suggests that you are, then more fool you. You’re not going to find that kind of offensive inanity here.

No, what I’ve become the dark master of the arts in, oh brave and valiant reader, is putting the truth back into travel, demystifying the twisted twee travel tales of the my kooky colleagues along the way.

And boy have they done some damage that lot. Amid all those lists barraging me to taste the rainbow (Skittles anyone?) in Thailand or encouraging me to eat antelope in “5 reasons to go on an African safari” (read: desperately short of material), I’ve become sick. Desperately sick at the thought of reading yet another precociously POSITIVE travel article.

So with that continued nausea rumbling in my nether regions, allow me to wipe the chunks of yesterdays microwave meal off my screen and let rip about crappy travel trips you’d never be able to pay me to do. Unless flesh was a unit of currency of course. Then I’d go through even the deepest of hells to get closer to you…

Trips You’d Never Be Able to Pay Me to Do: Cape Town to Cairo

First springing to my attention when putting together an article on epic overland travel trips on my rather run-of-the-mill site DontFlyGo, I couldn’t help but notice that the Cape Town to Cairo travel route sounded like the kind of journey that would rather have me standing square centre in a javelin field full of gold medal competitors (ubiquitous Olympic reference there).

Miles and miles of dry arid land, next to no luxury hotels to rest my delicate bodice in and scant chance of any nookie, I just can’t see what all the fuss is about with this one. Driving over endless bumpy roads after scanning site after site for decent van insurance deals? Not me chuck. I’ll leave that to the far more intrepid Brendan Van Son.

Trips You’d Never Be Able to Pay Me to Do: Miami to Key West

I recently posted about my travails as an underage drinker in Miami and my penchant for ping pong, what I didn’t mention however was the trip I took down to Key West in a rather banged up car hire right around Spring break. For an underage Brit to arrive in somewhere like Key West, right in the middle of the American college world’s most debauched season, well, let’s just say its something tantamount to waving an early 00’s nude Angelina Jolie in front of a straight man’s face (of course I can’t relate).

Even if I had been able to drink and partake in such “partays” I’d probably have to get lashed seven ways to Sunday to put up with such an innocuous bubonic plague of a crowd. Horrendous but almost worth the hot muggy ride through the everglades while Nickelback roared on the stereo.

Trips You’d Never Be Able to Pay Me to Do: Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi

Yeah so I lived in Vietnam, what of it? Well aside from that validating me as a pan-Pacific explorer and actually putting a little bit of weight behind my assertions of being a “travel writer” (despite not having left Europe for over a year), it also means I can shed a little light on the horror that is the Ho Chi Minh City to Hanoi train trip.

A 30-hour journey sitting aboard what resembled a park bench (I made the fatal error of buying the cheapest ticket) and playing footsie with a 70-year old peasant woman from Danang (she might have been 25, those rice paddies tend to age people pretty fast) – who also might possibly have been the uncertified Guinness world record holder for the worlds most gnarled toenails – and I can safely say, never again. Gave a nice footjob mind.

Trips You’d Never Be Able to Pay Me to Do: St. Petersburg to Anapa

“St. Petersburg to where?” you say. Yeah I didn’t know either. All I did know was that Sergey, the minder of my 19-year-old self, was the only English speaker in a 200-mile radius and that his directions I pretty much had to follow.

Having used me as “bait” to chat up promiscuous young girls in Russia’s second largest city the night before, Sergey made damn sure I was safe and sound on a train with the murder-inflected gazes of vodka-swigging Russian families the next day. 48 hours of sign language, the over powering smell of human excrement and a diet of strange Russian pastries and I could draw a line under ever returning.