You know it's going to be a bad day when....

There have been a few times on my trip where you just know it’s going to be a bad day. It might start off okay and then something snaps and you know the day is going downhill quickly. Other times you know the second you wake up that you might as well just go back to sleep. On the first portion of my trip there were a few of those days, which I can look back on now and simply think they are hilarious, especially because they did not actually happen to me personally. Below are a few of my favorite “Oh Shit” moments!

Ferries
As I’ve mentioned before, this trip was totally focused around boats. We went on all types of boats – speed boats for diving, pontoon boats for floating across a lake, rickety & falling apart 6 person boats for going on a mangrove tour or kayaks just for fun. However, you never want to rock up to a ferry depot where you are told from moment uno that you are going to get sick. When you buy your ticket, they give you a “highly recommended” motion sickness tablet. When you actually board the boat, they give every passenger a “just in case” plastic bag. The ferry employs people whose sole responsibility is to walk around handing out paper towels and swapping out plastic bags. Shoot, sometimes they even have to hold babies because the parents are too busy throwing up. I’m not going to go into too many gory details but I will say when they pass out drugs like candy, it’s best to take them!

Chicken buses
I wrote a blog entry before about chicken buses. These are retired, repainted school buses that cram people in, personal space becomes a thing of the past and it’s perfectly normal to see beds & bicycles on top of a moving vehicle. The drivers are completely insane and overtake trucks when there is no room and their engine has absolutely no power. The heat, the smell, the dirt roads and the oncoming traffic are enough to make you wish that you were instead running an ultra marathon through the Sahara. Now imagine doing all of this when you are drunk and hung over…and that’s what happened to one of the girls on our trip.
We knew we had to be up at 6 am for a long day of travel so we went out for a quiet dinner. Somehow the night turned into drinks, salsa dancing and a police ride home for one of the girls (for safety, not due to being arrested!). One of the girls – rock on Kelly! – ended up having quite a lot to drink, so much so that she was still drunk when we got up the next morning. She claimed it was food poisoning, but I think we all know the truth! She is such a champ and I can’t imagine how she did it, but she rode the chicken buses for 8 hours feeling absolutely terrible. At one point she thought she was going to be sick and I’ve never seen a plastic bag fly to the back of a bus as quickly as that one did. She tucked it behind her ears and proceeded to fall asleep on the shoulder of the sweet Guatemalan man sitting next to her. The best part was at the end of the 8 hour day, she thought the chicken buses were the most fun thing we had done yet on the trip. The rest of us were just happy to have escaped with our lives!

The Roommate
At some point in our lives, most of us have encountered a bad roommate. They come in all shapes and sizes – the roommate who snores really loudly, the one who steals your last glass of milk or the one who “borrows” your favorite shirt only to get a stain on it. When you’re traveling on a tour you are put in a room with a random person or three and you just get to jump in and get to know each other. Most of the time it works out well because you are respectful enough to leave hot water for the other person, to clean up your own messes or to leave the key at reception so they are not locked out for hours. Sometimes someone has an early tour or comes in really late and there is no choice but to wake up your roommate. If you are in this unfortunate situation, you try to navigate it as politely as possible – giving a quiet knock on the door, shaking their shoulder to wake them up or calling their name.
However, one of the guys on my tour got the best wake up of all time. His roommate (let’s call him The Runner) decided to go for a 6 am run and for some reason decided to wake up his sleeping roommate (we’ll call him Mr. Asleep). So what does The Runner do? Does he shake the shoulder of Mr. Asleep? No. Does he call out the name of Mr. Asleep to wake him up? No. Does he shout his name or do jumping jacks or start pounding on the walls? You guessed correctly, he does none of the above. Instead he does the unthinkable. The Runner lifts up the blankets and sheets at the end of the bed and starts tickling the feet of Mr. Asleep. Yes, that’s right – he decided it was okay to wake up someone he had known for 2 days by tickling his feet!!!! CREEPY!!! Do you have any idea what I would do to someone who woke me up by tickling my feet? No, I don’t know either, but I promise you it would not be good!