What are your top exotic escapes?
"The Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook: Travel," by Joshua Piven and David Borgenicht (Chronicle, $14.95), provides tips on the mundane (paying bribes) to the exotic (escaping the jungle).
The one statistic that seems to hold true is the rule of ten, described by an English biologist in 1993: one in ten exotics escape into the wild; one in ten of those become established; one in ten established exotics become pests.
A few decades on, Washington, my exotic summer escape from New Jersey, had repositioned itself in my traveler's imagination as a city a New Yorker is occasionally required to visit on business.
Zebra's on the loose pic.twitter.com/eatP6gsgVV Thankfully, exotic animal escapes are relatively rare today, and usually end reasonably happily.
The figures also show how the alternative minimum tax (AMT)–originally designed to make sure the wealthiest don't use exotic shelters to escape all taxation is increasingly hitting the upper middle class.
Then, in 2012, I went on a cycling trip around Cuba. Being a Canadian, Cuba offered a warm, inexpensive, exotic, and legal escape from the depths of the great Canadian winter.
The exotic animal had escaped from the private zoo owned by Pablo Escobar, the cartel kingpin shot dead on a Medellín rooftop 16 years earlier.
From fitting room poops to verbal abuse to Christmas tree jousts to escaped exotic animals, retail workers have seen it all.
