Have you ever gone on a quest? Perhaps not a quest with a specific goal in mind, but the type of quest where you realize you're on an epic adventure and you have no idea what got you to that point? Writing The Saga of Maior Natu gave me the opportunity to hide tidbits of my adventures with you. This chapter in particular is full of seeds and nuggets from my journeys. They may not be completely accurate, tarnished by years of forgetfulness, but they are all true.
Remember the time...?
Yeah, I used to do a lot of road trips with a really good friend of mine. I don't know why he asked me to travel with him that first year, but I had never travelled with anyone other than my parents and one girl friend who didn't talk to me anymore (not because of the trip, we just moved away from each other), and was very nervous that I would do something typically stupid or embarrassing and ruin my perfectly not normal reputation. That first year I was so worried that he would never want to speak to me again that I was fairly shut down and scared to talk. That is, until part way through...what was it, the first day?... when we stopped to grab a coffee somewhere and he asked me to pour it into his travel mug for him. I tried, but I have never been good at pouring things. To top it off, we were driving and hit a bump and the coffee seemed to soar dramatically into the air before landing with an audible *SPLAT* on my leg. I honestly laughed so hard I cried, and I figured it can't get more embarrassing than that, so I was able to loosen up a little.
Cut to a couple years later and we're eating fish and chips on the pier in Vancouver. This friend of mine, who is an incredibly intelligent and well-educated individual, sees a swan and asks absentmindedly, "Are all swans female?" It's times like these that I felt the tables turn. I wasn't the only one to do embarrassing and stupid things.
Another time we were camping throughout the States and we normally would wake up, go to the campground washrooms, then head quickly back to our campsite to pack and leave as soon as possible so that we could get to the next location. I don't think either of us were particularly great morning people; I had a tendency to dawdle and if I took too long he would get annoyed so I tried to hurry. One day I stood outside for ages, waiting for him to come out of the bathroom. Eventually he comes trekking out and tells me that the stall walls in the bathroom fell in on him and the guy next to him. They both had to crawl out under the walls to get to where it was safe. The man had injured himself so my friend, a nurse, patched him up and helped him out. Then the guy got super nervous and asked if he could just give my friend $100 so they wouldn't have to go through his insurance. My friend told him we are Canadian and we just help people and don't need to worry about insurance. I never thought we'd have a crazy bathroom story in our journey, but there it was.
On my very first vacation with my former girl friend, we went on a month-long trip to Thailand. We were able to have so many adventures there, riding elephants, having a lobster dinner in an almost hurricane-like storm, touring the temples. But our ride on the tuk-tuk stands out as one of the most ridiculous things ever. We got on the tuk-tuk and asked to go to one of the temples to check it out. The driver drove us to what we think was a back entrance and told us the temple was closed for a bit. Then he drove us to a store and asked if we wanted to shop for diamonds. We said no. Then he drove us to another store and asked if we wanted to shop for something else. We said no. Then he drove us to a third store and asked if we wanted to shop for hand-made clothing. We said no. Then he proceeded to beg us to go in because if we went in to one of the stores, even if we didn't buy anything, he got a commission for convincing us to go in. So we did. The tailor was in shock when he saw us since my friend was so tall amongst the shorter Thai people around us, but we said hello and then walked out and the tuk-tuk driver took us to the front of the temple this time so we could actually go in. It was never closed, we just got tuk-tuk scammed. Joke's on him, the ride was still pennies compared to anywhere else I've been.
It was also on this occasion that she and I were able to visit the beautiful Phi Phi Island (pronounced pee-pee island). On our way there, we saw a man we dubbed "dork tourist extraordinaire." He had a massive camera and took pictures for hours on the ferry to the island. He wouldn't sit down at all. When we got to the island, we hopped into a longboat to travel to the other side of the island and get to our resort. Our longboat was called the May Lisa. On route, the engine died. We were stuck out in the middle of the Andaman Sea, far from shore, in a longboat with my name on it, and the engine didn't work. Some other longboat eventually sidled up next to us and tried to help out. They couldn't get it going. Finally, as a last-ditch effort, our longboat driver literally chipped off a chunk of wood from his own seat, shoved it into a crack in the motor and pounded it in with another chunk of wood, and suddenly the engine started. It was so bizarre. My friend and I didn't speak the language, though my uncle did and he was with us, but we still couldn't figure out what was going on.
Those are just some snippets of the list of bizarre and never ending weirdness that happens when I travel. I find it to be all part of the adventure. You really don't have stories to tell when you get home if nothing ever goes wrong. Right?
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