And Then I Killed Myself Over A Game Of Canasta

I don’t know about you but whenever I picture cruises I always think bikini clad ladies and nearly naked men frolicking around a giant boat as it sailed through the ocean as laughter and wine bottles floated in its wake. It’d be filled with laughter, cocaine, good times and sexy, sexy moments.

I’m sure you can only imagine my surprise when I barely survived sitting next to the two Columbian drug lords on my flight to the Galapagos only to arrive to find out that all the people that were supposed to be on my boat were ancient.

Like, Crypt Keeper ancient.

It was a sixteen person boat but they had only managed to book five of us on it so at first I was excited because the tour group would be smaller and I’d get a more personalized experience. That excitement? It got molested to death by old people. In the group I was the only one who was under 70 years old and at first I was confused and concerned that I had gotten into the wrong line and would end up trapped in a retirement home to accumulate bedsores and neglect.

After fifteen minutes of us standing around and eyeballing each other with such looks of disbelief on my part and nervous old person flatulence on their part because they were in the presence of a person who wasn’t close to death and they probably thought I was there to stab them menacingly and steal their dentures, I realized that no one else my age was going to be on this cruise and I was stuck with the Depends Brigade.

All our cruise pictures looked like this.

I’m not lying when I say it was the most fucked up cruise that I have ever been on, and my first cruise, because when you are outnumbered 4 to 1 by people who can barely stand to be awake for two hours straight at a time you spend five billion hours taking a walking tour that would have lasted only an hour.

On two occasions we actually lost three of them old people while walking which caused our Naturalist Tour Guide to have a mini freak-out because holy shit he lost his old people and we spent two hours trying to find them. After getting confused by the brisk pace we set for our speed they had begun to frantically mill around and get swallowed up by a larger group of tourists their own age and no one listened to me when I suggested that we abandon them to their fate.

We eventually found them, on both occasions, on other cruise boats. Because they naturally followed the larger groups back to their boats. Because they were old. And easily confused.

On one occasion one of the old men ended up crushing his way through a sea turtle nest because he was trying to take off his pants in what I was at first horrified to think he was planning on snorkelling naked but he ended up having secret swimming trunks under his pants but they wouldn’t come off properly so like a hundred baby turtles had to die.

And then he proceeded to almost drown in the water because his snorkel wasn’t fitted properly. My suggestion for abandonment was yet again ignored.

Our nights on the boat consisted of me watching “The Galapagos Rose” with the crew after dinner because the old people would fall asleep at like six and you know what’s more fucked up than Spanish language soap operas? Nothing.

After being on that cruise full of old folks I can kind of see why the Eskimo’s used to force their elders out onto ice flows to die.

It’s because they are so fucking boring.

Que The Miami Vice Theme Song

One of the things I did while I was in Ecuador was visit the Galapagos Islands with the intention of stealing a tortoise and sailing it out to international waters just so I can bring it back to Canada and raise it until I eventually grow bored of it and attempt to flush it down the toilet but it’d be too big to flush so I’d probably have to turn it into soup or release it into the wild where it’d probably piss off a gang of moose and get stabbed.

It may not have been a well thought out plan but it was my plan so you can shut up about “Only human laws don’t count in International Waters, not animal laws” and just let a person dream, OK?

To get to the Islands I had to take an airplane from Quito, the capital of Ecuador. There was a brief stopover in Ecuador’s second largest city, Guayaquil. How do I know these facts? It’s called reading the in-flight broucher. Oh snap, you’ve just been learned.

It was on this flight into Guayaquil that something magical happened and made me turn into the charmingly funny and witty and dashingly handsome adult I am today. What, dare you ask, was so magical about this flight? I’ll tell you dear child. I sat right next to two Colombian Drug lords.

I.Sat. Next. To. Two. Colombian. Drug lords.

I’m not even kidding. Honest to god drug lords. My first indication that they were Colombian drug lords happened to be the fact that they looked as if they had walked off the set of Miami Vice and on to my airplane. Gold everywhere. Grey tweed blazers over black t-shirts, dress pants, coke nails and moustaches.

The moustaches were a dead giveaway.

After reviewing the movie Taken multiple times before I left the country so I was up to date on my “insurance policy” which was basically “If kidnapped and sold into the sex trade, call Liam Neeson”, I knew making eye contact would probably lead me down some type of horrible road littered with Colombians and cocaine.

Folks, I made eye contact. Honestly, how could I have not? How often do you get to be thisclose to a drug lord?

Unfortunately I should have listened to my movie instincts because the moment I made eye contact to the one sitting nearest me he started striking up a conversation that I couldn’t understand because he was speaking whatever they speak in Columbia (Columbanese?) and I can barely master the English language on a good day so I was at a loss for words.

The guy kept trying to speak to me despite the fact I couldn’t understand and it frustrated his friend to the point that he decided he was going to translate. He only knew a handful of English so it didn’t really help my efforts of “not inadvertently agreeing to be kidnapped.”

Because, honestly, that’s all I got from that conversation. That by forcing mini vodka’s on me from the plane they would get me drunk and sell me into the sex trade and maybe Liam Neeson will or won’t come for me because in the movie he was totally a dick who ignored the fact his daughters friend got kidnapped too and left her to rot. I didn’t want to be that daughter’s friend in this scenario.

They did get extremely excited to find out I was Canadian as if Canadian meat goes for a far better price than say Russian meat. Since I didn’t want to be kidnapped and turned into bacon, I feigned interest in what was going on outside the window and that every cloud I saw was more beautiful than the last.

This backfired because the guy next to me suddenly got interested in my intense interest for what was happening out the window and tried to get his friend to ask me what was so interesting that I wasn’t having any vodka they kept trying to slip me.

Fortunately when they ended up getting off of the plane at Guayaquil and the old couple who sat across the aisle from me (who, also, ended up being on my cruise but more on that disaster later) started talking to me about how when they were in the airport those exact same guys next to me ended up losing a briefcase that had $60,000 in it and had started freaking out because they refused to go to the Police and how terrible it would be to show up to their boss empty handed.

So basically not only was I sitting next to two drug lords, I was sitting next to the two worst Columbian drug lords in the history of druglordshipness.

Which was pretty awesome considering they probably would have botched my kidnapping leaving me free to enjoy the rest of my vacation.

For A Price, She'll Molest You Too.

A year ago I was sort of wandering around in a daze and felt that my life was missing something that would have made it totally awesome. Instead of cutting off one of my arms and replacing with a robot arm that had lasers to enable me to fight crime or commit crime, the logical solution to increasing awesome was to hop on a plane and go to Ecuador for a month.

Of course, while being in a foreign country and never having actually left your country of birth before this trip, I totally did the tourist thing and packed my days full of stupid things that included sightseeing and horseback riding up a freaking’ volcano with a tour guide that talked about how horrible marriage was and the best thing I could ever do is live alone until I’m dead. No joke. That happened.

One of the things I decided I was going to do was a traditional “Shaman Cleansing” that I had booked through the resort I was staying at. Being the naive, silly Canadian that I am I figured it would be something like what the Native’s of my homeland do. Burn shit and then wafts it around you until you smell like burnt poplar while having a feather in your face. You know something simple and mildly entertaining. And, apparently, cleansing.

Ecuador, my friends, pretty much took my expectations and beliefs and punched them right in the face after giving my grandmother a reach around.

After getting up at a stupid early time in the morning we had to drive three hours to Otavalo to have this uplifting and magical experience. Our trip was sprinkled with sight-seeing, stray dogs, being educated by the marriage hater why poor mountain people are a disease on the land, and seeing some type of sacred mountain we managed to get to the town and submerge ourselves in an old world market that has been going on since the dawn of time that, by some miracle, catered to tourists.

After shopping and lunch we drove to a nearly abandoned parking lot where I was instructed that we had to wait in our vehicle until someone who worked with the Shaman would come greet us to make sure we weren’t spies or the police or something. It felt like an awkward, inappropriate stake out. Then some kid on a bike peddles up, bangs on our window and forces us to follow him in our van through various back streets until we came to Shanty Town USA (not in the USA). There were chickens, goats, and children running around wild in a mystical sort of fashion.

When I was greeted by the Shaman lady she looked to be about a hundred years old, midget sized with age and missing just about all her teeth. She also didn’t speak English and I only know how to rudely say no in Spanish so everything had to be translated by my tour guide.

Everything was going fine when the lady brought us into her little Shaman shack and showed us her beautifully creepy alter that was full of bleeding pictures of Jesus and what I assumed the smiling happy faces of her family because wouldn’t it just be weird if those were just the models that came with the picture frame? Things got weird when she started speaking in Spanish and trying to pull my clothes off of my body in a SURPRISE! I’m going to granny date rape you sort of way.

I tried to fend her off while looking at the tour guide for some help when he eventually said to me “you’ve got to take your clothes of for your Cleansing” and he kind of said it with a smile on his face as if he had waited his whole life to tell a naive, innocent Canadian girl that it was time to strip down for a toothless hundred year old lady.

Eventually Date Rape Granny drew certain across the hut for privacy so I could just show my titties to grandma and not the tour guide because he was an unhappily married boy. But he still had to sit on the other side of the curtain because he would have to translate for us. It was the most awkward peep show I never wanted to be in.

After my mental breakdown I shucked all my clothing until I was just standing in my underwear in this dirty like shack with pictures of bleeding Jesus staring into my soul in a leering, judgemental fashion while her picture frame model family smiled at me. The ritual began with the little old lady grabbing a bottle and spouting of some nonsense before she took a big gulp of liquid. The Tour Guide barely gave me enough warning when he told me I should probably close my eyes for what was going to happen next.

She spit the liquid all over my face. All. Over. My. Face.

Now, getting spit in the face is off putting I’ll admit. What makes it worse? FUCK YOU! It’s tequila that has been distilled to the point that it’s the purest form of alcohol it could ever hope to be. And it Just. Got. Spit. Into. Your. Face.  What’s worse than it getting spit in your face? Having to rub it into your face until the burning is slightly less burny.

She didn’t stop with the spitting either. She continued it until my whole body was drenched four or five times until I was pretty sure I had accumulated a contact high by having it rubbing in my face or soaked through my skin. Oh by the way, her hands were roaming every during this just to make sure that my tits and everything else was soaked in liquor.

That feeling of potentially being date raped by a Shaman Grandma? Totally increased tenfold. I couldn’t even concentrate super hard on being cleansed as I was supposed to because I had to formulate a plan of how I was going to tell The Pilot I was date raped by a Ecuadorian Grandmother who didn’t even bother with roofies because she’s hardcore and just decided to start with spitting in my face.

I didn’t think it could get any worse than it was until shit got real.

Once I was completely covered in magic juice she started beating me with nettles. Fucking nettles. As in, I’m going to pull this thorny shit from a bush and beat the first fucking person that willingly comes into my shack. Just for fun. The nettles stung so much against my liquor stung skin that I almost wished she had just planned on date raping me instead.

Just to add insult to injury, she spit more magic juice on me too. Then almost as an afterthought she rubbed an uncracked egg and stones me on too. Just like “Hey, while I’ve got all this random shit sitting around I might as well just molest you with them. For fun, ya know?”

Finally I was allowed to put my clothes back on and I was told I wasn’t allowed to eat anything good and wasn’t allowed to have a shower until midnight. Then we had to drive the three hours back to the resort in a country that routinely boils your blood on an overcast day in a van that didn’t have air conditioning. Needless to say, I’m pretty sure the driver got drunk off the fumes I was emitting after my cleansing beat down.

It wasn’t until I got to the resort and tried to have a shower that I found out they had shut my water off in my room until at least midnight because they take this shit super seriously in Ecuador that it hit me.

I just paid that lady a hundred dollars to spit on me and then beat me up while Jesus cried blood and picture frame models watched. Next time, I might just ask for Shaman identification.