I am recently engaged. On our last trip (in Istanbul, Turkey and the South Caucasian nations of Georgia and Armenia), I proposed to my soon to be husband David. What’s more exciting about the marriage and party, however, is clearly the honeymoon. I’ve never been one to care at all about the romantic implications of a wedding ceremony, and have certainly been to enough of them to know what I do and don’t like, and so David and I have used travel as an excuse to not really have a wedding ceremony at all – instead we’re putting some of that dough toward the honeymoon of our dreams and a lot toward paying down the principal owed on our house.
We’ll be getting married at the end of August and leaving for our honeymoon directly after that, so of course I was on beach patrol. I try to give David some reprieve from “see everything in a condensed time frame” types of vacations from time to time, so I figured a week on a beach and a week somewhere else would be a good way to accomplish this.
After much flight searching and weather checking, we decided that a great honeymoon would be to spend our first week in Tunisia, and then our second week in Malta (primarily on the smaller, more laid back island of Gozo where we could both sit in the sun on a beach, and also do some killer trail running). I was particularly excited as I’ve never been to Africa and I’d only heard great things about Tunisia as a country.
We had planned on flying into Tunis, spending three days there in an AirBNB right outside the medina, then renting a car and driving west to El Kef, right on the Algerian border, then exploring the ruins at Dougga and Bulla Reggia before heading back to Tunis and catching a puddle jumper flight to Malta (only an hour away!)
Then the mass shootings at the National Museum in Tunis happened, followed by another mass tourist shooting in Sousse.
We questioned our decision of locales. Normally, an event like this wouldn’t make me too nervous. While I haven’t traveled anywhere particularly dangerous (though I have certainly been in some dangerous situations), I tend to believe that fear shouldn’t prevent one from traveling. Bad things can happen anywhere and everywhere. And despite having traveled to placed that may have histories of conflict (like Cambodia, Georgia, or North Korea), the places I have felt most unsafe have been unrelated to where I’ve been at the time, but more about situations I find myself in due to lack of general awareness (it also helps that I don’t drink anymore). I have felt safer walking streets of Ulaanbaatar and Phnom Penh after dark than in some neighborhoods adjacent to mine in Seattle.
This said, we chose to change our travel plans. The nature of the violence in Tunis and Sousse frightened our families, and we decided that it could be fun to do something completely different. And while I am a little regretful about not being able to see Tunisia, I have no doubt that I’ll be able to go there in the future – and hopefully learn some Arabic beforehand.
Has conflict ever caused you to change travel plans? Or other unforeseen events? What did you do – did you travel there anyway?
2 comments
congrats on your recent engagement!
and i dont blame you for passing on tunisia for the time being. it seems unpredictable and not worth chancing your safety.
Yeah – it’s always a tough call. Like, some of the places we go are considered inherently “dangerous” – even though they’re really safer than our hometowns in the states.
But it’s hard not to take events like this into consideration – especially when its tourists that are involved – like, all of these events are terrible, but I don’t necessarily assume added risk to myself until I see people like me being targeted, if that makes sense.
(Also – I love your blog and would love to pick your brain on the Baltics!)