Vagabond Tales: Nobody plans to visit a hospital in Uruguay

by Kyle Ellison on

About the last thing that anyone wants to have happen on their vacation is to end up in the hospital. This much nearly all travelers can agree upon.

What’s even more fun is ending up in a hospital in a country that speaks a foreign language, realizing your vocabulary doesn’t yet include the translations for words such as “syringe”, “infection”, and “spinal tap”.

Luckily for me I found myself in a hospital in a country where I actually do speak the language (Spanish) and I didn’t need any of the aforementioned words listed above. Also, perhaps even luckier is that I wasn’t actually hurt, but instead was simply in search of some prescription drugs.

Allow me to explain.

Punta del Este, Uruguay is a South American beach oasis that’s part South Beach and part Las Vegas. Furthermore, it’s safe to say it’s one of the premier party spots for global jet-setters who may be interested in obtaining some prescription drugs for a big night out.

It also just so happened to be the beach town that my wife and I found ourselves in on our honeymoon when we realized the Xanax she had been packing for the trip home was actually long-expired and completely ineffective, and we had 21 hours of flying coming up before we were safely back home in Hawaii.

It’s been well documented here on Gadling that many people frequently cope with a fear of flying in their own personal ways, and the seriousness of this situation was not to be taken lightly. With the issue of the expired Xanax making itself known, we were really reduced to only two options: buying a used car in Buenos Aires and driving back to California without being kidnapped by FARC rebels in Panama’s Darien Gap, or finding the nearest hospital and getting another prescription whipped up and bottled with our name on it. Stat.Which is how I ended up in the waiting lounge of a Punta del Este hospital attempting to convince the receptionist that two twenty-something year old foreigners who hadn’t even checked into a hotel yet and held no travel insurance really did in fact need some prescription drugs and could only pay in cash.

Yeah. Right.

To be fair, I knew that extracting drugs out of a foreign hospital with no prescription in a second language was going to be a little tricky in the first place, which is why the hospital wasn’t the first place we tried.

Prior to aiming our rental vehicle for the skeptical confines of the Punta del Este hospital we had actually done our best to terrify everyone in an upper-class residential neighborhood on the tip of the doorman at our hotel. Informing him of our immediate need for Xanax, he gave us some rudimentary directions to what was essentially “the house of a guy he knew who could hook us up.” He said the guy was a doctor and ran a home practice, but it was sketchy at best.

Some people go to Punta del Este and lay on the beach or gamble at the casino, while others apparently creep out amongst manicured lawns and spend their day on a mystical hunt for a home-practice doctor who’s mentioned only in hushes and whispers. After having lurked around at least 6 or 7 different yards with the glazed determination of international drug fiends we finally settled upon the hospital as our best bet.

Finally planted in the backroom of the beehive that all hospital’s the world over seem to be modeled after, we actually received a doctor who was very understanding and forthcoming with the goods. No English, but at least forthcoming.

He said he could recognize the genuine nature of my wife’s distress, but we must understand that the number of people who go into doctor’s offices complaining of anxiety to get their hands on some Xanax had taken a disastrous turn in the past few years.

Counting out some little blue pills and securing them in a sterile clear baggie he finally handed over what was literally our ticket back home.

Come to find out later the dosage of drugs such as Xanax in Uruguay is apparently much higher than the legal dosage allowed in the US, which is why to this day my wife on airplane flights can usually be found spilling her drink into my lap with either her chin or eye socket.

Is the hospital in Punta del Este the best way you could plan to spend part of your honeymoon? Absolutely not. But it beats losing all of your money at the casino.

Read more of the Vagabond Tales here…

Vagabond Tales: Lunch on Guilty Beach, Cambodia

by Kyle Ellison on

Lunch on Guilty Beach was a tough meal to swallow.

If you look on a map of Sihanoukville, Cambodia, you’ll find beaches such as Victory Beach and Independence Beach, but you’ll find no such place as Guilty Beach. Regardless of what a map might say, unofficially, every beach in Cambodia is Guilty Beach.

Guilty Beach is not just a Cambodian phenomenon, but rather a global destination that can be found along coastlines the world over. It’s in Los Cabos, Mexico, in the shadow of the famous Cabo arch. It’s in Jaco, Costa Rica, backed up by sagging palm trees and world class surf. It’s in Asilah, Morocco; it’s in Mabul, Malaysia. Guilty Beach is every beach in the world where those unfortunate individuals living well below the poverty line–many of them children–work the beach in the hope of squeaking out much less than a living; most likely, they’re just trying to make that night’s dinner.

While beach merchants and scam artists can often be viewed as hawkers selling goods you would never want, Guilty Beach, Cambodia is thusly labeled because here it is different. Children don’t prod you to buy some fake sunglasses–they simply ask for a bite of your food. Men don’t sell knockoff jewelry for extra beer money. Rather, children sell bracelets while carrying their infant brother in their arms because their parents are too sick, or worse, dead.

Guilty Beach is thusly named because I no longer want that $2 plate of fried noodles, or that $1 can of beer. How can I accept that $2 plate of food when I just told an 11 year-old girl I didn’t want her $2 bracelet? Then to eat it in front of her, as her eyes fail to flinch from the fried fare before me.
So why not buy the $2 bracelet? Why not donate my meal? Because the sad reality is knowing you cannot help them all; that there are no amount of bracelets that will heal this heart wrenching dilemma. Furthermore, the precedent set by rewarding begging can be far more disastrous than the apparent problems you’re trying to prevent.

Finally, it’s a somber truth knowing that these innocent faces, with bulging stomachs and bulging eyes, are merely working for someone above them, whether it’s family or otherwise. The average tourist won’t buy sliced mango from a fully grown man, but they’ll open up their wallet for a child. And sadly, everyone knows it. These are merely conscripted child soldiers in a brutal reality of poverty and survival.

“They tell us to say that,” the little girl confesses. She has just asked us to “open our hearts by opening our wallets.” It’s a heavy line that’s been proven to work.

How do you deny an 11 year-old girl of $2 while she holds an infant and tries not to cry? How do you not look at all of them, 20 or 30 deep, wishing you could buy all of their bracelets so they can go play in the water like all 9 and 11 year-olds should?

Even if you buy them from two, three, or eight different children, eventually you have to tell one no, and is their pain dampened any by the fact you just helped the eight previous? The guilt is nonetheless the same. A line intrinsically must be drawn somewhere, but that line never gets any less painful, or justifiable. We gave the girl $1 for a smaller bracelet, and she left despondently, a sense of failure in her face. Nobody wins in this game.

Even more, who am I that you should even feel the need to beg to me? I don’t deserve this phony pedestal you place me upon. I don’t deserve this plate of food you lust after. I don’t deserve to sit on this beach, in this comfortable chair, and lead an easier life than you.

Lunch on Guilty Beach was a tough meal to swallow.

Vagabond Tales: How to roast marshmallows over an active volcano

by Kyle Ellison on

This may sound strange, but one of my favorite aspects of international travel has to do with liability, or rather, the lack of it.

Although the age of personal responsibility seems to have gone the way of the cassette tape and litigation is now just another part of business, believe it or not, there are still a refreshing amount of countries out there where common sense and an acceptance of the risks involved are all that are required for most activities.

This is why you won’t see many people roasting marshmallows over slow-moving lava at Kilauea National Park in Hawaii, but you certainly might see the same at a place such as Volcan Pacaya, an active volcano in central Guatemala where I once dined over the 1500 degree Earth.

Set just outside the colonial outpost of Antigua, a town whose cobblestone streets bustle with Spanish language immersion students feasting on flan and savoring fresh local coffee, Volcan Pacaya has been actively erupting for the past 47 years. The undisputed highlight of the Pacaya Volcano National Park, roasting marshmallows over the active eruption has for years been a cheap thrill of travelers scaling the side of the mountain, and seeing as you could never get away with something like that back home in the US I was understandably keen to try it.For the grand total of $15 I arranged a tour with a company departing from Antigua for a late-afternoon ascent of Pacaya. In a decrepit old van stuffed with fellow adventure travelers, the rusty metal box climbed its way over dusty gravel roads high into the preserve. Local children with dirt-smudged faces swarmed our van upon arrival in an effort to sell us wooden walking sticks, but unfortunately for them I had already spent the last of my quetzals for the afternoon on the bag of sticky white marshmallows ready to be roasted. Had they accompanied me to the lava field I gladly would have treated them.

The lava on the mountainside is constantly shifting, however, and on some days the conditions are better than others for tracking down Mother Nature’s mountainside BBQ. On this particular day our guide Eduardo, a friendly, sun-weathered and semi-toothless gentleman informed us there was a fresh column of lava that was inching its way down the southwest flank of the mountain, so that’s where we were going to head.

Steeply ascending the side of the 8,373 ft. peak, the first hour was spent beneath a sweeping green canopy of forest and mud-soaked trail that had obviously seen a lot of recent use. When we finally rounded the corner to the southwestern flank and could see the whole of Pacaya opening up before us, my disappointment loomed large when it became apparent there was no lava to be seen anywhere.

“No te preocupes” Eduardo ensured me. “You cannot see the lava from here, but when you reach the top, it looks black like the rock. From there you can see.”

With Eduardo’s guarantee we raced off down the sub-alpine scree slope until our shoes were full of tiny rocks. Although being buffeted by 50 mph wind gusts, our group nonetheless progressed up the flank of the mountain until reaching a point where the Earth suddenly seemed to be shifting.

Though I found myself standing on black lava rocks hard enough and sharp enough to slice right through skin, just a few feet away the same rocks had taken on the appearance of cake batter being slowly poured into a bowl. Black folds and ripples tinted with flares of orange bulldozed a molten path down the mountainside as I watched Earth being created before my very eyes. For the intensity of the moment, never had I seen such a violent and lethal force move so imperceptibly slow.

It was the faint trace of movement, however, which allowed the marshmallow roast to become a reality. With sticks acquired from the canopy floor beneath us, various trekkers squatted mere inches from a substance which could cut right through our bare flesh. With the nonchalance of a child next to a campfire, our handful of international volcano hikers sat in a semi-circle and dined on roasted Jet-Puffs from 6,000 ft above the valley floor below, all of us firmly taking responsibility for our own potentially dangerous actions.

So even though Kilauea National Park in Hawaii may have the longest running eruption in the United States (and myriad fences and boundaries keeping you at bay), if you want to dine on food roasted by nothing but the Earth, head to Antigua, Guatemala, a place where it’s still possible to gauge your own surroundings and be responsible for your own decisions.

Read more of the Vagabond Tales here.

Vagabond Tales: The lure of Baja’s Scorpion Bay

by Kyle Ellison on

“Rich man or poor, surf star or surf bum, Baja all equally humbles us. Baja does not care.” -Anonymous-

From the dusty confines of an open air Mexican cantina, a sunburnt American man gnawing on a $4 breakfast burrito managed to ruin my day in a single breath.

“It’s been surfable every day until you got here” he smugly mused, a dribble of hot sauce inching down his chin.

We had just driven 20 hours through the desert, and we’d gotten completely skunked. We knew the outlook wasn’t looking great, but completely flat and unrideable wasn’t the end result we were anticipating.

In fact, before we undertook the arduous and systematic task of loading up the caravan back north of the border with gallons of water, camping equipment, emergency medical and mechanical supplies, cases of Tecate, and all other Baja desert essentials, we knew the surf was only going to be about knee high at best.

The models were showing an outside chance a swell might still develop, however, and we decided to roll the dice anyway and make the bone-jarring haul through the Mexican desert.

Apparently, we had failed.

Such is the lure of Scorpion Bay, Mexico, however. A well-known spot on any surfer’s lifetime or annual checklist, dedicated wave-hunters continue to make the pilgrimage through the desert to the sleepy little fishing village of San Juanico for a shot at what many deem to be the perfect wave.

Whether it’s offering up ankle biters or overhead, the wave at Scorpion Bay can be appreciated and experienced equally by everyone from full time professionals down to the regular guy just searching for a taste of endless desert perfection.

Notoriously a fickle wave prone to long flat spells, the gamble always hangs in the air as to whether or not to gamble on the journey, knowing that if you stay home, it could mean missing that connection from 3rd point all the way into town. Experience, however, tells you that realistically it probably won’t play out that way.

It’s that slight percentage, however, that constantly keeps people coming back.”It’s a drug” claims another palapa dweller I later encounter sipping a Pacifico in the cantina.

“Even though you know you shouldn’t come down, you get a taste of it, and it’s all you can do to get back here. It completely consumes you.”

According to Sean Collins, founder of the hyper-successful surf forecasting website Surfline, “if you get it once you’ll never forget it…she’ll play games with you and will drive you to insanity.”

One of the first accounts of the wave being surfed is by Collins himself in November 1969 while delivering a boat back up the coast. In those days people surfing the spot off of boats being delivered were few and far between, leaving many sessions to be spent completely solo.

“When surfing Scorps by yourself the hardest thing to do is to force yourself to paddle all the way outside and to not take any waves on the way out” claims Collins.

“You may paddle over 10 perfect waves that just barrel and spit without a single section. But if a surfer ever gets the opportunity to be out there solo, remember that it’s such a long wave you need to pace yourself and ride each wave to the maximum of your ability from the beginning to the end. Anything less seems like such a waste of such a perfect wave and may be better to leave it natural and unridden.”

On a recent trip I met a man who had ridden a bicycle for two weeks through the desert from the city of Tecate back on the border just for the chance to get back to San Juanico. Stashing a board the year before and camping solo along the way, the effort could only be respected, unquestioned, and understood by all there to witness the arrival.

One construction worker from San Diego once claimed that he was due back in traffic court in three days but had decided to skip court, pay the $700 fine, and catch the next swell, because according to him, if he caught enough waves to knock it down to about $10 per wave, then the whole mission was worth it.

So was our Mexican mission an absolute bust? Absolutely not.

When the surf finally bumped up to waist high late in the trip, even being able to ride the wave at such small levels erased any doubts of our making the journey down the coast.

As Collins so eloquently waxed in a past interview, “a single wave can make the whole trip worth it. One single wave. For all the planning, the travel, the camping in the dirt, the wind, bugs, flies, bad crowd, super inconsistent swell, etc. But if you get that one wave, and you’ll never forget that one wave, what’s it worth?”

Read more of the Vagabond Tales here.

Vagabond Tales: Please check your durian at the door

by Kyle Ellison on

I recently witnessed something strange while checking into a Bangkok hotel room.

In a city that’s infamous for its sex tourism and is one of the undisputed party hot spots of Asia, there are any number of hotel activities I’m sure you would consider forbidden. Having fruit, however, probably isn’t the first one you would have guessed.

While checking into a room not far from Khao San Road, I witnessed a man being sternly told that he could not bring his fruit into his hotel room. Seemingly preposterous, this wasn’t just any old fruit, it was a durian, and not everyone in these parts is particularly fond of the durian.

Though we have recently reported here at Gadling on one blogger’s process of learning to love the durian, I never before had witnessed someone actually being turned away from a hotel room for mere possession of the fruit.

Native to Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brunei, a durian sort of looks like a coconut–if a coconut were to be used for torture. Covered in horrific looking spikes, it’s not the look of the durian that has turned people away from it, but rather, it’s the smell.

While there’s no arguing the exquisite taste of durian meat, the smell of this “forbidden fruit” is so unbelievably rancid explorers for hundreds of years have been commenting on its malodorous flesh. The 19th century British naturalist Alfred Russell Wallace commented while in Borneo “there are occasional wafts of flavour that call to mind cream-cheese, onion sauce, sherry-wine, and other incongruous dishes.”

Cream-cheese and onions? Yeah, I don’t want that in my hotel either.

Ultimately though, although it may be stinky, it’s not like the durian is actually dangerous or anything.

Or is it?

While many Southeast Asian vendors claim that the durian meat is exceptionally healthy for you, some recent events seem to suggest there are numerous ways durian might actually kill you. In 2010, a Malaysian politician was rushed to the hospital and nearly died after consuming four different varieties of durian. Similarly, in neighboring Indonesia three people did actually die when they partook in a fatal lunchtime cocktail of durian meat and distilled liquor.

Meanwhile, it’s rumored that you can kill a man simply by throwing a durian at his head.

So what ever became of the man and his forbidden fruits? He was forced to check them at the door, lest he be levied a fine of 1000 Baht ($33) for infesting the room with his fruit. In a hotel lobby teeming with massage girls, prostitutes, drunk backpackers, and a hippie who you just know had drugs on him, I feel there may have been bigger issues at hand than one man and his stinky fruit.

But after all, this is Thailand, and the “King of Fruits” deserves to be taken seriously, for better, or for worse.

Love travel tales? Follow the rest of the Vagabond Tales series here.

[Photo: Flickr; Marc van der Chijs]