ABC/Rick Rowell
Viewers got to know late Bachelorette contestant Eric Hill a little better on the Monday, May 26 episode of the hit ABC reality series. Hill, who died following a paragliding accident after his time on the show, had the first one-on-one date with Andi Dorfman and opened up about his travels around the world.
Hill, who credited his father's hitchhiking stories with giving him the travel bug, chronicled his world travels on his site The Global Odyssey and on The Bachelorette discussed a particular trip to Syria.
"Syria ended up being the scariest moment of my life hands down. My mouth always gets dry when I tell this story. Syria is by far the craziest war zone that we've ever been in," Hill said on The Bachelorette. "Because they actually target journalists and I was going in there as a journalist. We had to get across basically illegally. So, I crossed with a rebel fighter. We had a contact. It was a rebel fighter. He was what they call a fixer. Six days before we crossed the border, the city that we were in got shelled. And unfortunately it destroyed an entire neighborhood…The most powerful picture I've ever taken in my entire life came from that same day too."
Hill said when he and his group stopped for food two militants, who were equipped with grenades and assault rifles, found them.
"But I was used to all that. As crazy as it sounds I had seen that all day. But our fixer, you could just see him going pale. It looked like he was about to throw up and he goes, ‘I'm sorry guys. Things are going to get very bad for you. They think you're spies,'" Hill continued. "And I pull out my phone and write a text out to my parents saying goodbye and I love you and I'm not going to be able to say this in real life. But luckily the leader of the group wanted to see my camera and wanted to know why I was there. And I said I'm trying to show that no matter what happens to the Syrians here nothing can take away their happiness. He ended up throwing the camera back and he says, in Arabic, it gets translated very quick thankfully, ‘Go back to Turkey.' So Syria is not a place I would take you."
Dorfman asked Hill if he'd put himself in situations like that if he was married with a family. Hill said he wouldn't.
"The biggest goal in life is to actually have a family. For me there's a whole list of things that I will never do again once I have a kid," he said. "There's a few things if I ever want to try, I have to try them now, and luckily that just is becoming very short."