Is It Really That Dangerous?

“Isn’t it dangerous there?” I think this might be one of the questions we have heard the most since we started talking about travelling the world. Before we left, people would ask us about certain countries and then immediately follow it up with something about how dangerous they were supposed to be. Sometimes it was because they had seen something in the news, sometimes because they had heard something from someone else, and sometimes they simply had a certain image of a country in their head. And honestly, I can’t even blame them for that. If you’ve never been somewhere yourself, how else are you supposed to know what it is really like? We all build our idea of places from what we see, hear and are told. The problem is that what reaches us is often not the whole picture.

Our answer has usually been, “Yeah, probably, but it’s kind of dangerous everywhere.” I know that sounds like a very unserious answer, especially when you’re talking about travelling to another country. And obviously, we don’t think you should ignore actual risks or travel somewhere without informing yourself. There are places where you need to be more careful, and there are situations where you simply have to use common sense. But I also think there is a difference between being aware of something and being afraid of something you don’t really know. When you only ever hear about a country because something bad happened there, it becomes very easy to associate the entire place with that one thing. You don’t hear about the person who went to work that morning, the family having dinner together, the friends meeting for coffee or the millions of completely normal things happening at the same time. You hear the story that made the news.

Travelling has made me question how many assumptions I have had about places I had never even visited. We had them too. Sometimes we arrived somewhere and realized that the picture we had in our heads was completely wrong. Other times, we noticed that some of the concerns we had heard about were actually real. I think both experiences are important. Travelling doesn’t mean pretending that every place is safe or that problems don’t exist. It also doesn’t mean that everything you hear before visiting somewhere is automatically true. For me, the biggest change has been realizing that a country can be many things at the same time. It can have serious problems and still be full of kind people. It can have areas where you need to be careful and other places where everyday life feels completely normal. It can have a difficult history, political problems or high crime rates and still be a place where people are simply living their lives, raising their children, working, laughing and doing all the ordinary things people do everywhere.

And I think that is what bothers me most about the way we sometimes talk about other countries. We reduce entire places to a few words. Dangerous. Poor. Unsafe. Corrupt. Exotic. And suddenly that becomes the whole country in our minds. Before travelling, I don’t think I realized how limiting that can be. The more we see, the more we understand that there is always more to a place than the version of it we get from the outside. That doesn’t mean ignoring the difficult parts. If anything, it means being willing to look at them properly instead of simply deciding what a place is before you have even experienced it.

This is also one of the reasons we want to share our own experiences through this blog. Not because we think our experience represents an entire country, because it obviously doesn’t. But because sometimes the only way to challenge an assumption is to hear another perspective. We want to talk about the places we visit honestly, including the things that surprised us, the things we got wrong and the moments that made us see something differently. There will be beautiful places and incredible experiences, but there will also be things that are uncomfortable or don’t go the way we expected. That’s part of travelling too.

So, is it really that dangerous?

Sometimes, yes. Sometimes, probably less than you think. And sometimes, the honest answer is simply that you won’t know what a place is really like until you stop looking at it from the outside.

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Written by Fabienne, Ecuador