'I thought I was dead when the Taliban found embarrassing item in friend's backpack'

A YouTuber who prides himself on visiting "the places you probably shouldn't" admits he feared for his life after the Taliban opened his backpack in Afghanistan.

has travelled the in search of adventure. The former personal trainer has been everywhere from Ethiopia to Peterborough. But there was one trip where his determination to pack appropriate supplies for every possible emergency nearly spelled disaster.

Ben told the how he ran into trouble on a trip to : “We landed in Kabul …and I was thinking ‘What have we done? There were Taliban everywhere. They were walking around with RPGs, guns you name it. Their flags were everywhere.”

To his surprise, the first day in the war-torn country went perfectly well. However, day two was a different story. He continued: “We travelled through the mountains and this is where we got stopped by the Taliban – on a mountaintop in the middle of nowhere.”

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The Afghan fighters searched through the visitors’ bags – apparently suspecting that Ben’s hairdryer might have been some sort of weapon. But worse was to come.

He explains that he had a condom in his wallet and “as a joke,” thrown it into his mate’s backpack on day one of the trip. He went on: “They were going through his backpack, and they looked at [the condom] and start shouting ‘Haram, Haram!’ [forbidden].

“I thought ’S***, I hope they don’t know what it was,’ but they knew what it was. We were all s******g ourselves. Eventually after about half an hour, it all calms down we drive off and go to the next town which is in a mountain region.”

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Ben, his mate and their Afghan interpreter were led into a former US compound that had been taken over by the Taliban: “There were armed guards everywhere …they are all staring at us they've all got RPGs, massive beards, guns …and we get led up to this room.” By this point Ben was convinced that he was going to spend the next 10 years in an Afghan jail.

But – despite a significant language barrier – Ben and his pal and eventually convinced the intimidating Taliban commander that they weren’t western reporters.

After that, they managed to make friends with him and even managed to score passes that enabled them to cruise past checkpoints almost unmolested for the rest of their trip.