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.