Here are some of my favorite funnies from around the world. Why? Because it’s tax day. And because today has been kind of a bummer anyway. And because you should stop asking questions.
Just enjoy these random bits that I collected on my round-the-world trip — like this command that was painted on a barn in Uganda.
It makes perfect sense.
Everything is slightly off in Bolivia, including this discount version of Uno.
Wise words from a Buddhist temple in Thailand.
The hottest curry at this shop in South Africa was the Mother-in-Law Exterminator.
An after-dinner condom jar in Thailand.
Uh, how many times does Taiwan have to tell you? DON’T sit on the bears!
Please to enjoy some cock at this Vietnamese shop.
Or sample the poo-poo platter here.
And drumroll please … my very favorite sign of all time. It’s pretty self-explanatory.
I read this article about the world’s most outrageous hotel amenities. They include all kinds of super-posh services that cater to one’s every whim and desire. Like a tanning butler. A fragrance sommelier. A soap concierge — you know, for all those moments when you really want to get clean, but you also need options.
It got me to thinking about my round-the-world trip. I didn’t get any of that fancy stuff! Nobody coddled me, wiped me or sprayed anything on me. At least, not on purpose. But that doesn’t mean my trip was amenity-free either.
None of these things included a sommelier, concierge or butler, but they were amenities all the same:
Amenities: CARBS! Microbrewed beers, a pancake buffet.
After a month of downing watery Bolivian brew, a free beer with actual flavor seemed like the most novel thing ever. And Saya beer is brewed on site by good people who know what they’re doing.
So what if the hostel showers were tepid and the beds were hard? I drank beer — REAL BEER — all night long. And in the morning, there was a free, all-you-can-eat pancake buffet waiting to sop up my hangover.
Backpacking is dirty business. Filthy, actually. One time in Bolivia I found a twig stuck to the back of my knee, and I had no idea how long it had been there. So when my friend and I saw an advertisement for Sol y Luna, it only took two little words to convince us to stray from our planned itinerary: Hot. Tub.
We traveled many, many hours out of our way. When we arrived, we discovered that the ecolodge had a very different idea of hot tub than what we imagined. It was a stone tub, situated outside in the garden. And it was filled by hand, one kettle of boiling water at a time.
But you know what? It was perfectly lovely. It would have been great anyway, but it was especially memorable since I hadn’t felt hot water on my skin in almost two months. The dirt floated away, the heat turned my bones into butter and I was clean for the first time in ages.
Amenities: Movies, chill room, floating bar, bioluminescent plankton, illicit activity.
Bodhi Villa almost feels like something I conjured up in a fever dream. There were beaches, crabs, rope swings and Billie Holiday. A sprawling bar opened into a river dock. The scenery was slightly too bright and sharp and unreal, like looking through the wrong lens at the optometrist’s office. At some point, a chubby Cambodian man named James Brown put me on the back of his yellow Vespa and drove me through acres of pepper plantations.
Days were drowsy and often spent in the “chill room,” but the nights exploded with raucous live music. A group of strangers became my closest friends in the world. We drank together. We sang loudly and off-tune. We jumped off the dock and marveled over the neon clouds of bioluminescent plankton that swirled around our limbs.
I was there for days? Weeks? Whatever it was, it was much longer than expected. One morning I woke up and realized I might end up at Bodhi forever if I didn’t get out. I immediately booked a bus bound for Ho Chi Minh City, about 10-12 hours away.
Before I departed, a new friend handed me a sandwich and a joint the size of a lipstick tube.
I politely declined, “Oh, thanks, but I don’t think I want to bring any drugs across borders today.”
“What? You got big plans for the bus?” he said. “Just take it and remember Bodhi … If you can.”
Almost every night, the owner of this hostel takes all his guests on a bike tour of beautiful Malacca.
It became one of my favorite memories of Malaysia. We carried bikes down skinny stairwells. The hostel owner strapped a radio to his handlebars and blasted Lady Gaga from the tinny speakers. And then we pedaled off into the night, through downtown, down ribbons of waterfront, all the way to a local restaurant that didn’t have a name or a real address. The excursion forged a camaraderie between all of us guests, and I saw things I wouldn’t have found otherwise.
I arrived in Seoul around midnight. I was too tired to travel an hour all the way into the city, so I booked a night at a guesthouse that is located close to the airport. Everything about this place was marvelous. The owner’s husband, Jackie, picked me up at the airport. My bed was ridiculously comfortable. The shower was hot and strong. The wifi was fast. The coffee was brewed first thing in the morning. There were games, DVDs, a Wii, even traditional Korean costumes for dressing up. And I am not exaggerating when I say this was the cleanest place I’ve ever stayed. It was SPOTLESS.
The hospitality went above and beyond what I expect at a hostel/guesthouse. The owner, Liz, and I had long conversations about our travels and our favorite places around the world. We exchanged e-mail addresses. They took my photo for the guest wall. And then Liz and Jackie practically had to kick me out.
“We can drop you off the train station …”
“Thanks. Maybe in an hour or so.”
After some time passed, they tried again.
“Don’t you want to get into the city …?”
“Uh, yeah. Maybe later.”
Finally, they said I should probably go unless I was going to stay for another night. It actually made me ache to leave. The place felt just like home — only a nicer, cleaner version of it.
A few days later, I received a follow-up e-mail from Liz. She wanted to see how my travels were going, make sure I was safe and see if I needed anything. “Yes!” I was tempted to respond. “I want to pack you up and and take you with me!”
My wounds were open and gaping, blood running down my hand in hot, thick rivers.
And I was in small-town Bolivia, alone with a mediocre Spanish-English dictionary.
I approached people on the dusty street for assistance.
“Far-mah-SEE-yah?” I sounded out the word for pharmacy in hesitant Spanish.
One by one, each person cast their gazes downward.
“Far-mah-SEE-yah?” I said again.
Everybody quickly shuffled away from the crazy, bleeding lady.
“Far-mah-SEE-yah?” I asked an old man, who was sweeping dirt from a dirt patio onto a dirt road.
Nope, he shook his head.
Sobbing, I shook my fist at the sky and cried out to the heavens. “Far-mah-SEE-yah!”
“Oh. Far-MAH-see-yah,” the old man said, changing the emphasis ever so slightly.
“Yes! Si, si,” I said, gratefully.
“Why you not say so? Is right here.”
He ushered me inside his unmarked store. A long glass counter ran the length of the room, crowded with untidy stacks of boxes. The shelves along the wall sagged under heavy glass bottles and a rainbow assortment of pills. Near the window, several fat mason jars were filled to the brim with urine-colored fluid and pale spirals of snake bodies.
The man tossed a stained white coat over his clothes and looked at me expectantly over half-rimmed spectacles.
I held out my hand, which was Swiss-cheesed with several fang holes.
“Mono es loco!” I said, in my best Spanish. “Mono … uh, el bite-o my mano.”
Then I bared my teeth, let our a guttural growl and pantomimed the tearing of flesh, though I probably looked more like a grumpy Cocker Spaniel than a terrifying monkey.
“Si,” the doctor agreed. “Loco.”
“Necesito medicines,” I said, asking for pills.
He wanted to know what kind.
“Antibiotics. Er, antibiotico?”
His coat swirled as he turned, shimmying around the shelves, grabbing a wide variety of pharmaceuticals. He fanned them out in front of me.
“Which one?”
“No se. Which one for mono bite?”
He shrugged.
“No se. Which one you want?”
I shrugged and pointed at something that had a lot of important-sounding Zs in the name.
“How many?” he asked.
“How many should I have?”
“How many you want?” He held out a handful of pills and looked hopeful. “Viente bolivianos for all.”
I was pretty sure antibiotics didn’t work that way. That is, just swallow a few dozen at random and keep your fingers crossed.
I excused myself and jogged to the Internet cafe down the street. A few quick searches later, I had my answer.
Back at the pharmacy, I gave the man a piece of paper with the name of an antibiotic, plus the strength and quantity I needed.
“No have,” he said. Then he pushed a long package of orange and red-striped pills across the counter. The foil was old, peeling off the back of the tamper-resistant strip. “Good enough.”
I didn’t have much choice. This place had five internet cafes and several watering holes, but only one pharmacy. It would take many hours by bus through coca fields to get to the next sizable town. In addition, labor protests had shut down some of the major roads, leaving me practically stranded in this rural village.
That said, I didn’t want to take unknown pills, since I was fairly certain they would send me down the rabbit hole to wonderland.
I firmly said no, declining the strange antibiotics.
Later, I had my wounds sewn shut in a cluttered, moldy room. The local hospital was dirty enough that everyone recommended this place — a veterinarian’s office — as a safer alternative.
The vet, a small but sweaty man who had a mild command of the English language, asked for details about my monkey attack. My friend Deborah helped me translate the incident.
The vet knew I had been volunteering in the surrounding jungle at a primate sanctuary, a place where formerly abused and mistreated monkeys are reintroduced to the wild. I told him that during my shift, a stocky monkey named Reno hopped on my lap for an afternoon snooze.
Reno was the size and shape of a muscular basketball, but his fur was as soft as a plush toy. When I stroked his back, he snuggled deeper into the crease between my legs and hips. The sun was shining, and the air smelled like fresh rain and papaya. It was a good moment.
Just then, Reno pissed all over me.
As I opened my mouth and blurted out, “What the –?”, Reno hopped down, grabbed my hands and sunk his teeth into my flesh.
The bites were vicious, deep enough to hear fang make contact with bone. As the blood began to flow, Reno lapped at the liquid like some kind of Robert Pattinson vampire monkey.
“See, mono es loco!” I said, wrapping up my story.
He tugged at the black thread that now zig-zagged through my skin, tied a knot and trimmed the string.
“Better,” he said, gently patting my stitches. “Come back if the pus gets too bad.” He dabbed a purple fluid on the wound. It looked terrible.
With viente bolivianos in my pocket, I walked back to the far-MAH-see-yah for a handful of pills.
OK, actually that monkey is pretty damn sweet. His name is Romeo, and he was my constant companion during my two-week volunteer stint with the Inti Wara Yassi organization at Parque Machia.
Inti Wara Yassi runs three wildlife sanctuaries through Bolivia, and they provide a home for mistreated animals. There are some extreme cases of abuse — like a puma who was practically crippled by jumping through flaming hoops at an illegal circus — but the majority of their birds and animals have been seized from exotic pet black market.
I was assigned to Monkey Park, where more than 400 monkeys live independently, reintroduced into the jungle. They’re not quite wild, because we still feed them and they do have interaction with humans, but it’s as close to natural conditions as they’re ever going to get.
I worked nearly a 12-hour shift each day, starting with breakfast for the monkeys each morning. They eat bananas, of course, but they also receive a quinoa porridge that was supplemented with lots of monkey-riffic vitamins.
My job also included preparing monkey lunch and dinner, cleaning monkey cages and scrubbing monkey blankets — though most of the monkeys live without any captivity, we lock up the spider monkeys each night to keep them safe from poachers and thieves — and lots and lots of monkey cuddling.
Like with Martina here, who I think looks a little bit like an Amish dude.
And, of course, Romeo, oh Romeo!
Then, one week into my work, tragedy struck.
A hulking monkey, Renor, hopped onto my lap. He’s the number-two guy for the alpha monkey, so he’s larger and far stronger than most of the other capuchin monkeys. Imagine a big playground ball made of muscle and fur.
After about 15 minutes on my lap, he suddenly hopped off, grabbed my hands and chomped down on me. First he bit down on my right hand, but didn’t puncture the skin. He moved on to my left hand, where he made two deep fang holes into the thumb, then a couple more holes on the hand. At one point, I heard his tooth hit my bone.
During one of the bites, he pulled my hand away, creating a gash in my flesh. Then he very calmly looked me in the eye and lapped up the blood. He didn’t seem angry or spooked; he was simply gnawing on me.
He had a tight grip on both my hands, so I couldn’t do much except let him go all vampire on me. I was afraid that pulling away would cause him to react even more violently.
Another volunteer heard me curse and walked into Monkey Park to see what was going on. When he approached, Renor scampered off into the jungle. I headed for the clinic, where the sanctuary vet gave me a couple stitches. (I was told that the last time Renor bit someone, he gave the guy 72 stitches, so I got off lucky.)
Here’s how my wounds look one week later.
It was difficult to return to Moneky Park the next day.
If I had done something wrong and caused the monkey to bite, that would have been one thing. But Renor’s behavior was so erratic and random, I was scared something would happen again. Plus, at the same time, the alpha monkey was acting particularly aggressive and biting at least one volunteer per day.
I’m proud of myself for going back, though. Monkey Park offers volunteers a lot of quiet time, and I did a lot of thinking about what it means to work through fear, find confidence … and trust your monkeys again.
