Pillaging and Plundering Pirates

I just spent the last 5 days pretending I was a pirate on the high seas of the Caribbean Ocean. I really perfected my "arrg" "ahoy matey" and my "yo ho ho ho a pirates life for me" phrases. Our german captain, Konnie, was probably super sick of hearing us pretending to be pirates (especially since every tour group he takes out probably does the exact same thing). Despite that, being the good pirates we all were, we stocked ourselves with handles of cheap rum and one good bottle of Captain Morgans-cause every pirate needs that. We also got a bottle of champagne to make a music video to "I´m On a Boat", cause we thought that was also quite fitting. Too bad we didnt have enough time in Colombia to find eye patches before we "up-anchored-arrg".

After all the build up for our departure, our excitement was quickly squashed when we realized that sailing is actually not all fun and games. The actual act of sailing is really not all thats its cracked up to be. its one of those unfortunate situations where the destination is far better than the journey. The sailing part was pretty damn shitty and the whole island seeing land and swimming part was fantastic. I pretty much felt like shit the second we started. Night time came fast and I couldnt focus my eyes on any horizon line or anything, so i got super sea sick. I was the first and only to vomit on the trip (puked in a plastic bag that started to leak right next to this girl sharing my bed with me-oops). Puked up chile dinner too, which looked exactly like what i had ingested an hour earlier. I am still super confused why Captain K decided to serve chile the first night (grossest thing ever to vomit up). He could have chosen pasta or sandwiches or something lighter. I then spent the next 35ish hours in the horizontal position. I squeezed myself into this little benth under the little shade the boat had to offer and didnt move unless I really had to pee or sit up to eat bread or pasta. And I wasnt even able to finish even one cup of rum and coke (the coke was warm and flat in like 3 hours too which was gross). Guess i am not such a good pirate after all.

However, because the journey was just shit, the destination felt ten million times better. We got to the San Blas Islands off the coast of Panama in after two days of hell got to jump into the crystal clear sea. It was straight out of a postcard. Sea stars the size of my face, perfect shells to collect, amazing coral reefs to explore, palm trees blowing in the wind, white sand beaches to do yoga on. It was like "Finding Nemo" meets "Little Mermaid". The last night we spent on an island occupied by the Indegenous Koni people. I am pretty sure we met the exact same women that is on the cover of the Panama Lonely Planet book. We spent the night eating fresh lobster that they caught for us, smoking lots of green herb (it was a good medicinal cure for my sea sickness), and roasting marshmellows over a giant bomb fire of palm tree leaves. The Germain captain and the Czech couple in our group had never had marshmellows before. They thought they were too sweet and just concluded that Americans eat way too sweet of things and are fat asses. Probably true.

Raul was our Koni friend we met who spent the night talking my ear off in spanish about how fantastic he was. Biggest frickin´ lier I have ever met. I didnt believe one word of his stories about how nice he is, how he wants to buy his own property to house his family, how he had actually died as a baby but a healer women cured him and told him that he would only be able to live till age 37 (which gives him 6 more years of life left). I fell asleep on the boat deck listening to Raul shit faced drunk swimming in the water yelling out random words in english. Nice peaceful way to fall asleep-looking up at the beautiful stars in the middle of the caribean sea listening to drunk indigenous man half drowning in the water.

Learned a new phrase: Aqua Turd. It is when you pull down your bathing suit in the middle of the ocean and take a dump and then swim away to escape the scene. The cute australian couple taught me it. Someone had laid a fat turd in the toilet on the boat that did not fit down the small little tube that was used to pressure suck the shits out. no one claimed it, so it just sat there for a while and we all got pretty desperate. So we had to resort to the aqua turd. it leaves you feeling quite clean.

Oh, so this story was definelty not in the brochure that we got before the trip left: There was a murder that just took place like 2 months ago right by the islands we stayed at. A Spanish captain who was also chartering backpackers across the sea got cuaght on a reef in bad weather and sunk his boat. Everyone on board was fine and the backpackers were taken care of by a nice American sailer man named Red Dog (thats apparently his new indigenous name). However, the Spanish captian went crazy and a month later decided to hijack someone elses sail boat and killed the captain of the boat. A while later he killed two other captains by stabbing them and tieing them around their anchor lines and throwing them into the water. He was eventually cuaght a month ago becuase he was using the credit cards of the captains. Dumb ass. I got to snorkel around his ship wrecked boat and was super freaked out that a dead body was going to float out of it. Dead bodies definetly hang around ship wrecks. True fact.

Could thing the rents didnt know about this story before I decided to go on the boat trip. They would have freaked out.

So after perfecting the aqua turd, barfing up chile, coming in close contact to Spanish murderers, and meeting indigenous chronic liers, I was more than happy to see the main land again. I spent my first night back on land showering off layers of sunscreen and salt water and eating fantastic pizza made from the crazy austrian hostel owner. she owned a really cute baby sloth that was carried by her really cute kid (none of us knew if the kid was a boy or a girl-it was hard to tell).

It took me a full 24 hours to feel like i was not still on the boat and swaying back and forth. I dont understand how these captains sail for like 5 years all around the world. I would go luney.

Arrg (that means "good bye" in pirate talk)