Chapter One: Travel Advice
(Maui, 2015)
As our Flota De Sade bus tottered on two wheels around yet another hairpin corner, I could see the abyss below. An all too familiar sight. Suddenly, I could see another bus. It was in our lane and heading straight at us—another all-too-familiar sight. The only drivers who plied the Popyan-Pasto-Ipales route on Colombia’s southernmost section of the Pan American Highway, were homocidal psychopaths employed by our new pal Pablo Escobar, who’d recently “liberated” the battered Flota De Sade bus company from a rival. Our chauffeur, wired on cocaine, his reflexes heightened, loved a game of chicken. He’d proven it repeatedly along the way. As usual, he reacted to the challenge in the nick of time—only this time he sent us over the cliff instead of his opponent. You should have seen the look on his embarrassed face.
There went the vacation and my chance to raise world con-sciousness. On the bright side, as I fell thousands of feet to-wards a squishy death, I had a condor’s eye view of the magnif-icent Andes! Just before I turned into a mushy puddle, the phone rang and woke me up. Thank God, I thought. Then: Man, I hope these nightmares end soon.
I shook myself out of it and picked up the phone. It was my favorite nephew Jake calling to say he’d just started my new book (this one right here). Actually, it was an older book based on my travel journals, one I’d written when I came back from South America years earlier. Revising it for him had retriggered the nightmares I’d once suffered from. I hadn’t been eager to revisit those memories, but Jake and his nervous travel partner Gary were recent college grads, naïve to the ways of the Third World, and about to split for South America. They obviously needed some expert guidance. There weren’t any experts around, so they’d turned to me.
Lucky for them, I’d spent a year in South America when I was the same age. They’d already read my travel memoir High In The Andes, which covered the Colombian part of my tumultuous journey. Along with terrific travel tips (where not to go, how not to get there, and more importantly, how to bribe the police), it featured my misadventures searching for great pot, great waves, and good times with my surfer friend Buddy back in the early seventies. In other words, terrifying examples of what could happen to a couple of naïve young travelers without the benefit of a wise uncle’s experience.
“Thanks for sending the file, Uncle Mike. We’re out of here in a week!”
“You sound excited.”
“After reading High In The Andes we almost changed our minds, but what’s life without a little adventure?”
“That’s the spirit, Jake! I hope your trip goes smoother than mine.”
“As long as we avoid doing the things you did, how could it not?” he wondered.
“Ha! You’d be amazed at how many ways.”
As were Buddy and I. Not to say that all our adventures misfired or threatened to kill us. . .just that unexpected results are likely when two unprepared hippies decide to have an ad-venture and make some outlaw money in South America. Jake’s attitude had changed markedly from a few weeks earlier when he’d requested I delete the Peru material so as not to scare his chicken-hearted buddy Gary off the trip. I approved of his heightened sense of adventure—he’d need it to enjoy South America—but I wanted a reality check.
“So, what did you learn from High In The Andes?”
“I learned that everywhere you went, people got angry.”
“Not to boast, Jake, but they still do.”
“Why do you think that is?”
“I’m gonna guess. . .coincidence? Envy?”
Jake didn’t buy it. “Guess again.”
“Well, I hope you learned enough to stay safe. I’ll be bummed if you don’t make it home alive.”
“So will we.”
“Heh heh, no kidding. Let’s just hope less crap falls on your head than it did on mine.”
“Unless it rains turds, it would be almost impossible for it not to.”
“Don’t rule it out, Jake, South America has crazy weather.”
“Not that crazy.”
“Ha! I’ve seen a lot weirder stuff than that. Just to be safe, you should wear a helmet.”
“A helmet? Won’t the señoritas think I’m demented?”
“Hmm, maybe that’s why I struck out so often.”
“One reason, anyway.”
“Go ahead, take your chances. You end up with crap in your hair, don’t say I didn’t warn you. “Take it from me, girls aren’t wild about that, either.”
“I’ll travel lightly, but with a ton of shampoo. Besides, the crazy things you experienced had to be flukes.”
“Ha! If you traveled in as many Third World countries as I have, you wouldn’t be saying that. Bizarre people and events are the norm, not the exception.”
“Come on, Uncle Mike, the world has changed a lot since the early seventies.”
“Sure, nowadays everyone from New Guinea to the Congo has a cell phone, drinks Coke, and has as many tattoos as a professional athlete, but though they’re wearing a Bart Simp-son t-shirt and an Oakland Raiders ballcap, the disparity be-tween your worldview and a cannibal’s is astonishing.”
“Whaddaya mean?”
What did I mean? How could he not know?
“Well, for one thing, cannibals eat human flesh, you prob-ably don’t. Wait. . .you don’t eat human flesh, do you, Jake? It’s rude of me to just assume. . .”
“Come on, Uncle Mike, do I look like a cannibal?”
The way Jake sidestepped the question made me suspi-cious.
“With those teeth? I’m gonna say yes. Not that I’m judg-mental, just keep your distance.”
“Have you ever seen me eat anybody?”
“Well, no. But I’m not around much.”
“Let’s try to stay focused here. Just take it for granted that I’m not a cannibal.”
That’s exactly what a cannibal would say.
“What about your buddy, Gary? I’ve seen how he looks at me.”
“No, Uncle Mike,” insisted Jake, with a sigh of weary emphasis. “Gary is not a cannibal. He just thinks you’re weird.”
“Okay, good. That’s a relief. Now I only gotta worry about you. So, where was I?”
“The disparity of my worldview. . .”
“Oh yeah, right. The difference between cultures, species on the diet included, is what makes traveling to offbeat places interesting and fun. Also, dangerous! You get to hang out with headhunters, swim with great whites, hike on active volcanoes. And let’s not forget puking for hours on psychedelic jungle drugs, enjoying bouts of paranoid schizophrenia, and amoebic dysentery. . .”
I would have gone on, but Jake interrupted.
“You should get a job as a guide with Death Wish Tours.”
“No way, Jake, not after what happened in Peru.”
My days of tour guiding were over for good.