Close to the Edge Part 1 (Classic)

The Atlas Obscura Podcast - SiriusXM and Atlas Obscura

This classic episode of The Atlas Obscura Podcast explores personal stories of near-death experiences during travel, highlighting moments when

Key takeaways

• Adrenaline can trigger instinctive survival behaviors even when the threat is misunderstood or fictional.

Main topics

• Travel dangers and unexpected encounters
• Survival instincts and decision-making under stress

Notable quotes

"If this goes really poorly, this could be it. What a way to go. Pretty unpleasant." – Dylan Therese on being surrounded by wild dogs.

Conclusion

These stories underscore how travel can push people to their limits, revealing both

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Back in 2011, my wife and I got married. And we put off our honeymoon for a while. But eventually, we took a trip through Southeast Asia. And it was, honeymoon is probably not the right way to describe it. It was a kind of hectic, kind of bare bones, fast, sometimes pretty stressful trip. That's just the way we travel sometimes. Speaker 2 (0:30) While we were traveling, we were in Laos. It's a beautiful, pretty rural kind of agricultural country. And at one point, my wife and I were walking around and we crossed this bridge over a river and we were trying to get to the other side of this huge field. I said, we can just walk through the field. It's not going to be any problem. She said, Dylan, this is a terrible idea. And I said, no, no, no, it's fine. So we started walking through this field. I don't know what they were growing, but it was tall. It was well above our heads. So you couldn't really see that well where you were headed or what was in front of you. And as we're getting pretty deep, pretty far into this field, trying to sort of cut a diagonal through it, we start to hear this growling. And five, maybe six dogs come out of this vegetation, just sort of appearing out of nowhere and effectively surrounding us. And they are snarling and inching closer and closer to Michelle and I. And it was one of those moments where you just, your heart starts pounding. Your adrenaline bursts into your system and you just think, oh, no. If this goes really poorly, this could be it. What a way to go. Pretty unpleasant. And so Michelle and I grabbed each other's hands and we just... We sort of whispered to each other, like, don't move. Just start backing up. And we were kind of shouting back at the dogs, like, go away, get away. And I started picking some stuff up off the ground. I wanted to find, like, a rock or something, but I just found, like, old foliage. And sort of throwing it at the dogs. And we're just very slowly backing out of this field with these wild-looking, mangy dogs snarling and drooling. following us all the way out of this field until we got to the edge, at which point they lost interest. And in retrospect, I assume they were guard dogs, you know, so that people didn't come and steal what was being grown there. But it was just one of those moments where you realize, had this gone a little bit differently, I would be on my way. Both Michelle and I would be on our way to the final travel destination in the sky. So that is what this episode is all about. Times when you were or you thought you were close to the final exit. We're going to hear from Nikki Rivera, who works in our trips department, and from Warren Webster, our CEO, about times when they thought, uh-oh, this is it. Little stories coming up. I'm Speaker 1 (3:58) Nikki Padilla Rivera, and I design trips for Atlas Obscura. Back in my tour guiding days, when I was a New York City tour guide, I used to do student trips a lot. So I would get in a bus full of students from Ohio or Atlanta, and they would be in the city for three days celebrating their senior year or the chorus trip or special academic awards. And they would come and all do the same things. We would go see a Broadway show. They would do a music workshop. They would take an NBC studio tour. We would go to Bubblegum Shrimp in Times Square. And if they didn't have tickets to see the Statue of Liberty in Ellis Island to actually visit the museums, we would instead take