The kindness of strangers: at San José airport, I couldn’t pay my departure tax – then a woman handed me the cash

There was no ATM at the airport and banks were closed. If I missed this flight, all my subsequent flights would have been cancelled Read more in the kindness of strangers series I was 19 and travelling by myself for the first time. It was 1994 and departure tax wasn’t always part of a plane ticket, so it sometimes had to be paid before flying out of a country. And if you didn’t have it, you didn’t leave – something I was about to learn the hard way. I was on a five-week trip around South A...

By Jacqueline Donaldson as told to Katie Cunningham