He Tāngata: Dave Nicholson on handling border guards and being mistaken for a drug smuggler

Dave Nicholson, director of sales for World Travellers, at Machu Picchu. Photo / Supplied

As told to Elisabeth Easther

I've been to 126 countries and I'm on my 13th passport. I first set off aged 23 to work in a summer camp. I also worked in Austrian ski resorts and in the Greek islands, looking for ways to travel and make money. My first summer camp was in 1986 in upstate New York. After camp, a couple of English guys and I went on a road trip, relocating a car to Key West. We took a week and the first night we pulled up at a park in Washington. We rolled out our sleeping bags and woke in the morning to find the Lincoln Memorial on one side and The White House on the other. You couldn't do that now.

After we delivered the car, we flew to the Bahamas, but hotels were so expensive we decided to sleep rough. We stashed our backpacks in some trees and went to town, then came back at 1am to get them. Because lots of drugs come into the Bahamas, dropped out of planes, the police pulled us over and started shooting over our heads. They searched us, and emptied our backpacks. Eventually we convinced them we were just a couple of Brits and a Kiwi and they let us go.

When I started working for Dragoman, the overland company, I headed into Asia, Central and South America and Africa. Doing trips across Africa, when we were crossing the Sahara, the Tuareg people were stealing overland trucks and leaving people stranded in the desert, so we'd go through in convoys of for safety. It was really exciting, with close to 90 passengers on five trucks going on a mission through the desert, through the Congo, or Zaire as it was called.

My shortest day's travel was 3m, because some of the potholes were massive, as deep as the roof of the truck. My longest day was in Iran on a dead straight tarseal road and we did 900km in one day. Fuelling up in Iran, 350l of diesel cost just US$1.50. In Iran, I used to tell passengers: "Just walk out of the hotel, a local will pick you up and offer to show you around. If they invite you back to their house for dinner, say yes." In some of the war-torn countries, you'd meet the most hospitable people imaginable. I'd be under the truck covered in grease, and a little kid would come along with a filled roll and a fizzy drink and say it was from his mum. They'd invite me to their house for dinner and the ladies would take off their burqas and ask about life in the West.

In the Congo, an empty peanut butter jar would buy a chicken and an empty beer bottle would get you a massive bunch of bananas. In remote areas, because locals needed containers, we could trade them for food. So a month before we got to those places, I'd ask the passengers to stash them. The first time I went off with a box of empty containers and came back with bags of food, they couldn't believe it. Recycling is changing though. When I was in India, tea was served in unglazed clay cups. You'd finish your tea, throw the cup over your shoulder and the rain would wash it away. Now they use polystyrene cups that get left to blow around. Food used to be served on banana leaves, but they've progressed to plastic.

A really cool Belgian family chartered me to take them from Belgium down to Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast. We were in Burkina Faso one night, camping on the side of the road, cooking dinner, sitting around the fire, and we heard African drumming in the distance. The next thing we know, 20 to 30 locals have surrounded us, and they put on a performance. The Belgian kids got up and sang their Belgian songs and because they all spoke French, it was just the coolest night.

I loved the challenge of crossing borders in Africa where officials would say, "you're not passing". But it was a just a matter of time before I worked out how to get through. Zaire was quite corrupt and I was always stopped by a policeman in a particular town. Invariably he'd find a reason to fine me. One little water squirter on the windscreen wasn't working, there was no warning triangle — it was a different trivial thing each time, and I made lists of what this guy wanted. I was really pleased one day to go through and for that guy to be stumped.

At the end of my time with Dragoman, I was with the truck on a barge going down the Amazon and my group was on a passenger boat. I was looking in the fridge door when my address book slid into the river. I thought about diving in to get it, but I didn't know whether anyone would notice me, all those Brazilian truck drivers — and at the end of all that travel, I watched my address book disappear.

When I came home, I ran tours around New Zealand, but it seemed a shame to waste all that knowledge, so I started working for Adventure World as a sales rep, and eventually became the GM. Today I run World Travellers, a retail travel business with 25 travel agencies throughout the country. Walking and cycling holidays are growing in popularity. The Camino de Santiago in Spain is popular, and cycling in Southeast Asia. I recently did a 19-day cycle trip from Hanoi to Saigon. The best thing about cycling, it gets you in touch with locals. You'll race a kid home from school, and the parents will wave you in to sit on their deck and have a cup of tea. Biking also means you go home feeling fit, instead of having sat in a bus, eating and drinking too much.

Travel has given me a respect for all different cultures and I think it's made me a good judge of character; I'm able to get on with all sorts of people from all walks of life although lately I've gone a bit soft and I prefer five-star to roughing it.

Dave Nicholson is director of sales for World Travellers.