More Advice on Travel

28 Nov 08 Some additional sage advice on international travel, from several colleagues, who travel even more than I do: 1) Grow a beard, and let your hair grow longer than usual. Looking a little disheveled, even seedy, helps with invisibility. Looking too scrubbed and well-groomed identifies you as a Westerner. Remember, shaving was a custom introduced to the world by the Romans. Most of the rest of the world never picked up on it! 2) Wear cheap, generic watches. Leave expensive watches at home. To be particularly avoided are military-style watches. 3) Clothing needs to look well-worn. Shoes too! Wear hiking boots, not Western-style sneakers. 4) Carry a small rucksack with a ballistic panel inserted. These panels are available from Safe Direction. 5) In the rucksack, have at least two, small knives, well-secreted in separate locations. Also, several IBDs and a tourniquet, a small GPS, with the location of the US Embassy and hospitals programmed in, several MREs, a water bottle or two, and a hundred feet of para-cord. 6) Carry an emergency cache of American Dollars, Euros, Pounds. 7) Make sure friends and family know your literary, including flight-numbers, local contacts, and phone numbers. When you disappear, they will at least know where to start looking for you! 8) Register overseas travel with the US State Department. It enables local embassies and consulate offices to contact you when trouble develops. Travel Registration Page: _https://travelregistration.state.gov/ibrs/ui/index.aspx_ (https://travelregistration.state.gov/ibrs/ui/index.aspx) 9) Make a color-copy of your passport, and keep it in a separate location. It will make it infinity easier to get a replacement, when necessary. 10) Be prepared to remain sconced-up, maybe for as long as a week. When stuck in a hotel room, immediately fill the bathtub with water. Use bed-sheets to make bandages, ropes. Most importantly, you must realize that you will be on your own. You may escape the initial venue only to encounter several more perimeters before you can evade the aggregate incident. Local police will be completely overwhelmed, instantly. Few tactical teams, even in the USA, are remotely prepared to handle a coordinated, multi-location incident like the one developing right now in India. They are trained to confront and contain barricaded individuals, usually associated with domestic incidents, one at a time. Precious very few are have even a concept of a protracted, military-style engagement by actors who came to die while murdering as many innocent people as they possibly can. One obvious AQ mandate is that teams of terrorists are to produce the highest casualty count possible. The higher the body-count, the more publicity they get. They will predictably murder/maim everyone they get near. Westerners are specifically targeted, but they are there generate a pile of bodies, and no one is likely to be spared. The events we are currently witnessing in India may well be duplicated within CONUS! Foreign travel, even to Mexico and Canada, carries with it great hazard, but today, even travel within CONUS is far from risk-free! /John