‘The Train of Death’ – a train that runs regularly in Bolivia between Puerto Quijarro and Santa Cruz, taking 16 hours.
A runway should be between 8,000 and 13,000ft. Congonhas’s longest runway is 6,362ft long and has caused numerous planes to plough directly in to the apartment blocks surrounding the airport’s landing field.
The real Lunatic Express is actually a train linking Mombasa to Kampala which was built by 32,000 Indians in the 1890s who were worked to death, that is, if they didn’t die of disease or get eaten by lions!
Carl meets a traveller from Chile who was detained at the South Sudan/Ugandan border for 3 days because the border guards had never heard of Chile and thought it was made up!
At the time of publishing, the popular;ation density of America was 31 people per square km, some neighbourhoods in Mumbai have nearly 1 million!
In 2008 Mumbai’s Central and Western Railway released the official number of deaths in Mumbai by trains since 2003, the number was 20,706! (Making Mumbai’s trains the most dangerous transport in the world)
Blending in to the crowd as a foreigner in parts of the Middle East and Central Asia is so much more than wearing traditional clothing. It also matters how you walk. ‘Sure-footed. Fast. Head Up. Pushing through throngs of men, a sense of power no Afghan woman would ever dare display in a public market’
Maybe not as dangerous as originally thought – ‘if Carl had taken the both of his trips 1,000 times, he’d have about a 50% chance of being killed en-route.’
