Nat Locke: All this talk of people getting stranded made me think about my own less heroic survival stories

This week, it has seemed like everyone has been getting stranded.

First there were the hordes of mountain climbers stranded on Everest because a blizzard blew in. Around 1000 climbers needed to be rescued. I think we can all agree, that’s a lot.

One young woman said that their camp was completely buried under heavy snowfall, and she almost collapsed from the effort of trying to clear the snow for hours and hours. In the end, she couldn’t find her tent again and had to scrabble around to find someone to share with while they waited out the storm. This could, of course, be an adorable meet-cute, but it turns out it wasn’t a rom-com. Eventually, firefighters had to clear the snow off the trail with horses and yaks. YAKS.

And then there was the story about the WA woman who was hiking in the Stirling Ranges and rather innocuously stepped off a rock and broke her ankle in three places. She had to sleep in a cave overnight with only Panadol as pain relief until the SES and the rescue helicopter could extract her.

This is obviously a very relatable story for yours truly given my proclivity for tripping in unremarkable circumstances and breaking something. I also quite like a pleasant bushwalk, so it’s probably just a miracle that I haven’t ended up in the rescue helicopter myself. Yet.

In that lady’s defence — and probably all those mountaineers as well — she and her fellow hikers were pretty well equipped for their adventures, with an extensive first-aid kit and adequate supplies to survive a night in a cave, if you can look past the absence of prescription painkillers.

My own episodes of strandings have been — dare I say it — slightly more arduous. Like that time I got stranded in Prague for two extra nights because Dubai flooded and all the flights in and out — including mine — were cancelled. Imagine my story of survival under those circumstances. I had to change hotel rooms twice. TWICE. I had to find more cute little bars to sip wine in. I paid for a taxi ride to the airport for no reason. Thank you for praying for me.

And then there was the sorry episode when I was stranded in Dubai (Dubai is definitely a theme here) because my flight from Morocco was inexplicably late and I missed my connection and then I had to spend two days in a transit hotel with a particularly awful buffet. It was a distinctly less pleasant experience than being stranded in Prague, but probably mildly better than being stuck in a blizzard up a big mountain. But only slightly. The decor was a distinctive colour I like to call “stained beige” and (unrelated) I had run out of clean knickers.

The thing about being stranded is that you have no control over the situation.

You are at the mercy of outside forces, whether they are delayed flights or blizzards or chalky bones. And that can seriously mess with your mind.

In Prague, once I had arrived at the airport to be told that my flight was cancelled, I was informed that I would have to go through the agency that I booked with in order to find new flights. That meant waiting about eight hours because of the time difference and then waiting on hold at midnight while everyone else in Europe who was in the same predicament called through at the same time.

For that entire period, I didn’t know how many more nights’ accommodation I needed. I wasn’t able to warn my boss how many days of work I was going to be missing. I couldn’t let my house-sitter know how many more nights her services would be required.

In the end, of course, it was all fine. It was a delayed flight, not a life-threatening emergency, but that feeling of being in limbo with no way of knowing how and when it would be resolved was genuinely unnerving. Even if I wasn’t in a cave.

Ultimately, being stranded usually turns out to be fine and you can tell a fun story about it at barbecues for years to come. You can even use it as a cautionary tale because there are lessons everywhere: don’t fly through Dubai; don’t climb snowy mountains; always carry more Panadol than you think you’ll need, etc.

And if you happen to get stranded in Prague, hit me up. I know a great little bar that’ll get you through.