Always the Adventure: Trespassing allows for unique adventures

Bigfork graduate Amber McDaniel shares her adventures from a semester abroad at Oxford University and four months of backpacking across Europe.

Having grown up in Bigfork, I thought I knew tourism, but I quickly learned I had not seen anything yet. True tourism was despicable: people massing to hear a simple clock chime, clogging up streets to the point of impassibility, and ignoring the general culture of their surroundings for the sake of a photo with a dreaded selfie sick. Despite my technical definition as a tourist, I avoided them at all costs.

One of the ways I tried to keep off the tourist path was by quite literally going where I was not supposed to go. I like to define myself as a full time adventurer and a part time trespasser. I am a purveyor of abandoned buildings and restricted trails and the words “Do Not Enter” are the fastest way to inspire me to go somewhere. Two particular stories stand out in my mind.

The first took place in a little unsuspecting village in southern Spain. El Chorro would be nothing more than a tiny blip on a map were it not home to one of the world’s most infamous hiking trails: the Caminito del Rey. This crumbling cement path suspended hundreds of feet above a gorge has attracted only the most adventurous of hikers, at least until it was closed for renovations set to be finished early in 2015.

I traveled to El Chorro with the strict intention of hiking this trail, but upon arrival, I learned it was still not finished and thus closed to hikers. I was not about to let that stop me, so with my mother in tow, I hopped a fence onto active railroad tracks and followed them for several miles paralleling the Caminito on the opposite side of the gorge. You know what they say, families that trespass together, stay together. Finally, we found our way across: a narrow concrete bridge with absolutely nothing on the sides to stop us from tumbling down 150 feet to the raging river below. But we had done it. We had made it to the Caminito del Rey, and from there, hiking it was the easy part.

If that fails to paint to the picture, consider me in Berlin hunting down an old abandoned amusement park. Spree Park repeatedly finds a spot among the world’s most interesting abandoned places and I was determined to see it, regardless of the surrounding eight-foot fence bearing signs I later translated to read, “Do not enter! Violators will be prosecuted! Guarding with dogs! Danger to life and limb!”  

With the help of a French guy also trying to gain entrance, I found a gap below this fence and we slipped inside. We soon found the park’s signature sight: an eerie rollercoaster track entering the mouth of a giant brightly colored cat. Just after snapping a photo of myself in the mouth of the cat, a truck approached. Despite our attempts to quickly hide, two men and a ferocious dog got out, yelling angrily in German.

 “IDs!” one yelled. I tried to explain that my passport was at my hostel. While I was not lying, I would not have given it up either way. First rule of travel: Never surrender your passport to authority you don’t know. “IDs or police!” he yelled this time. 

For the next five minutes, we apologized profusely, playing the dumb foreigners card like an ace up our sleeves. He eventually settled for seeing my Oxford student ID, copied down its sparse information, then gave it back to me. “Because you are French and American, it’s no problem. If you were German, it would be big fine,” he said. Second rule of travel: Never be too prideful to let your nationality act as a “get out of jail free” card, literally.

These memories are among my favorites from my travels, because they were unique. They were not things your typical tourist would even dream of doing and thus I rejected the definition of tourist. I was a not a tourist, I was a traveler with a minor habit for trespassing.