Ridiculousness

By Tom

Wanaka, New Zealand

We’ve been traveling for quite a while now and we’ve had some pretty ridiculous experiences.  But sometimes we see or hear about things that are much more ridiculous than what we’ve been through.  For this post, we thought it would be fun to give a brief cross-section of some of these stories.

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In Vietnam, there are places where tourists can fire an AK-47 machine gun for about $20.  For $50 you can throw a grenade, for $100 you can fire a rocket launcher, and for $150 you can fire a rocket launcher and blow up a goat.  Poor goat.  One guy we talked to who tried the AK-47 said the kickback was so powerful he ended up falling back and shooting the ceiling of the stall.  

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In India, we met up with some of Julia's friends who had recently been traveling in the desert regions of Rajasthan in western India.  They took an overnight 'camel safari' into the desert.  As one would expect, riding camels through the desert in India is fun for about 5 minutes and then the stifling heat and stinky, nasty camels detract from the experience.  Most of the trek was spent sitting in the shade during the mid-day heat trying not to move.  For dinner, it was obvious that their guides had absolutely no idea how to cook (not just how to cook well, how to cook food at all) placing food in the sand before they served it.  They were given no tent or sleeping bag to sleep in, just the blankets off the backs of the camels -the same blankets that the camels had been lying on and pissing on all day.  Oh yeah, and they were a blanket or two short for the group.  

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In Thailand, you can get a 'fish massage' on your feet.  You stick your feet in to a large fish tank where hundreds of tiny fish eat all of the dead skin cells off your feet for about 15 minutes.  It tickles a lot!

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One should avoid at all costs becoming involved with the police or authorities in any way in a developing country.  We met a Brazilian woman living in Laos whose local Lao ex-boyfriend showed up drunk at her dinner party and made a fool of himself in front of the guests.  He finished his performance by passing out standing up, hitting his head on the ground.  However, this type of behavior causes someone in Southeast Asia to 'lose face' which is a very big deal.  So he went to the police and said that her dinner guests had beaten him up.  The police then started harassing this Brazilian woman for bribes and threatened to arrest her for assault if she didn't  pay up.  She had became so fed up with paying them bribes that she was about to leave the country.

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Avoiding the notice of the authorities is especially true at border crossings.  An Aussie couple was riding on a dilapidated night-bus from Saigon in Vietnam to Phnom Penh in Cambodia.  Shortly before arriving at the border in the middle of the night, the driver pulled over to meet with someone.  He then demanded that the Aussies disembark, even though none of the locals were asked to get off the bus.  After reboarding the bus, they found large bags stuffed under their seats.  At the border, the Vietnamese border guard noticed the bags and started a heated conversation with the driver that ended with the driver handing over cash.  The same thing happened on the Cambodian side of the border and again the driver handed over cash.  The Aussies later surmised that whatever was being smuggled across the border was placed under their seat so that if a guard proved un-bribe-able, they would be the ones taking the fall because the goods were under their seats.  Welcome to prison in Cambodia!  (This story haunted us on every border crossing in Southeast Asia.)  

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In Nepal, you can do something called 'parahawking,' which combines tandem paragliding with falconry.  They release a trained hawk and then the paragliding guide takes you up by following the hawk.  The hawk is specially trained to find rising thermals and to guide the paraglider around.

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On the third day of our trip, we met a guy named Victor who was taking a year off med-school to motorcycle through Central America volunteering at medical clinics.  After planning the trip, getting all the necessary gear and packing the motorcycle, and then driving south across the U.S., he crossed the border into Mexico.  Within 10 minutes of crossing into Mexico he was on the side of the highway on his knees with a drug gang pointing a gun at his forehead.  This was one of two times he was robbed at gunpoint in Mexico.  (This was not the best story for Julia and I to hear three days into a 9-month trip around the world.)  

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We met a Canadian couple on a bus in India who were honeymooning for a couple of weeks in India.  They spent the first week at the beach in the south of India.  The girl immediately became violently ill and spent the first three days of their honeymoon with vomiting and diarrhea.  Then they traded and the guy spent the next three days with violent retching and explosive diarrhea.  By the time they'd recovered it was time to fly to the north of India where they took a bus into the Himalayas.  Unfortunately, there were particularly heavy rains this year and their bus was blocked by a landslide.  When the bus attempted to turn around to return to the previous village, that too was blocked by landslides.  So they spent the next three nights trapped on a lonely stretch of road, sleeping on a crowded bus.  Not the 'picture-perfect' honeymoon.

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The Sunderban estuaries of eastern India near Bangladesh are teaming with shrimp, which are harvested by men who wade in the water carrying nets.  Unfortunately, the estuaries are also filled with saltwater crocodiles -the big kind that can grow over twenty feet long.  In addition, the estuaries are a favorite hunting ground for extremely dangerous tiger sharks.  And if that wasn't enough, this region has a large population of tigers that have adapted the rare behavior of hunting by swimming.  So between the crocs, the sharks, and the swimming tigers, harvesting shrimp in the estuaries is so dangerous that the fishermen's wives dress in clothes appropriate for mourning and consider themselves widows until their husbands return.  

via google.images

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People eat live squids in parts of eastern Asia.  As you put the squid in your mouth, the squid usually fights back, slapping you in the face with its tentacles.  You have to chew thoroughly before swallowing or the squid will try to strangle you from the inside by sticking its suckers on your throat.

Just ridiculous