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  PRAISE FOR TRAVELERS’ TALES HUMOR BOOKS

  Sand in My Bra

  “Ridiculous and sublime travel experiences.”

  —San Francisco Chronicle (Grand Prize Winner, NATJA)

  “Sand in My Bra will light a fire under the behinds of, as the dedication states, ‘all the women who sit at home or behind their desks bitching that they never get to go anywhere.’”

  —Publishers Weekly

  The Thong Also Rises

  “The Thong Also Rises is a shoot-margarita-out-your-nose collection

  of travel essays stretching across the globe and into every area of

  embarrassment that you’re thankful didn’t happen to you.”

  —Playgirl

  Whose Panties Are These?

  “Freakin’ hilarious…destructively funny stories of everything that

  can go wrong on the road for women, from having to buy

  velour panties in a very public Indian market to pondering the

  groundshaking question, ‘Is my butt too small?’ in Senegal.”

  —Student Traveler Magazine

  More Sand in My Bra

  “These true stories are full of bust-a-gut laughter.”

  —Powell’s Books

  What Color Is Your Jockstrap?

  “Some stories are howlingly funny, and one, about a bot fly,

  will gross me out forever.”

  —Goodreads

  There’s No Toilet Paper on the Road Less Traveled

  “Anyone who plans to travel should read this book.

  And then stay home.”

  —Dave Barry

  Last Trout in Venice:

  “Traveling with Doug Lansky might result in a shortened

  life expectancy…but what a way to go.”

  —Tony Wheeler, founder of Lonely Planet

  Not So Funny When It Happened

  “Noted travel writer Tim Cahill has collected the best

  humorous travel pieces in one funny-bone volume.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  Hyenas Laughed at Me and Now I Know Why

  “Great for killing time waiting in the car.”

  —Goodreads

  A Rotten Person Travels the Caribbean

  “P.J. O’Rourke and Paul Theroux in a blender.”

  —Luis Alberto Urrea, author of The Devil’s Highway

  FICTION

  Akhmed and the Atomic Matzo Balls

  “This book is very sick. Highly recommended.”

  —J. Maarten Troost, author of The Sex Lives of Cannibals

  Copyright © 2015 Travelers’ Tales. All rights reserved.

  Travelers’ Tales and Solas House are trademarks of Solas House, Inc.

  2320 Bowdoin Street, Palo Alto, California 94306. www.travelerstales.com

  Credits and Permissions are given starting on page 256.

  Art Direction: Kimberly Nelson Coombs

  Cover Photograph: © Kirsten Koza

  Page Layout: Howie Severson

  Production Director: Susan Brady

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wake up and smell the shit : hilarious travel disasters, monstrous toilets, and a demon dildo / edited by Kirsten Koza.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-60952-109-7 (paperback)

  1. Travel--Anecdotes. 2. Travel--Humor. 3. Travelers’ writings. I. Koza, Kirsten.

  G465.W358 2015

  910.402’07--dc23

  2015014940

  First Edition

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Kap’n Cy

  GARY BUSLIK

  Amsterdam

  You Go in the Morning, I Go at Night

  EMMA THIEME

  Caribbean Sea

  The Wind that Shakes the Barley

  JOHANNA GOHMANN

  Dublin

  If Pigs Could Fly

  MEGHAN WARD

  Goa, India

  When the Empire Strikes Back

  PAULA LEE

  England and France

  Costa Rican Red and a Golden Shower

  BETH MERCER

  Nosara, Costa Rica

  A Real Good Deal

  DANA TALUSANI

  Cancún

  The Battle of Waterkloof

  GERALD YEUNG

  Namibia

  Cold London Summer

  NIGEL ROTH

  London, England

  Going Feral in Filoha

  VANESSA VAN DOREN

  Filoha, Ethiopia

  Because It Was a Sunday

  REDA WIGLE

  Foz do Iguaçu, Brazil

  The Chocolate Egg Bomber

  ELIZABETH TASKER

  Japan to Vietnam

  Friendly Skies

  GAZELLE PAULO

  International

  The Córdoban Crap

  SHANNON BRADFORD

  Córdoba, Argentina

  My Night in a Shipping Container

  DAVE FOX

  Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

  A Bad Day

  JON PENFOLD

  Tennessee

  The Holy Grail

  SPUD HILTON

  Valencia, Spain

  The Spittle Express

  SCOTT MORLEY

  China

  “’Allo! ’allo, ’allo, ’ahhhhhllo!”

  KATKA LAPELOSOVÁ

  Budapest

  A Bed of Fists

  KEPH SENETT

  Moscow

  The Big Forehead of Newfoundland

  DAWN MATHESON

  Newfoundland

  A Real Piece of Americana

  SARAH ENELOW

  Moscow

  The Bone Breaker

  KASHA RIGBY

  Guatemala

  A Tale of Two Toilets

  LEANNE SHIRTLIFFE

  Ambalangoda, Sri Lanka

  Spanking It in the South Pacific

  TOM GATES

  Yaqeta Island, Fiji

  Biannual Belgian Blowout

  KIMBERLEY LOVATO

  Brussels

  What I Did in the Doll House

  SEAN O’REILLY

  Massachusetts

  Love in a Black Jeep Wrangler

  KYLE KEYSER

  Hawaii

  Africa à la Carte

  JILL PARIS

  Lamu, Kenya

  Postcard from Kenya

  ANDREW SCHWARTZ

  Kenya

  I Had a Passion for the Christ

  MELANIE HAMLETT

  Florida

  Acknowledgments

  About the Editor

  Introduction

  DON’T PUSH THE BUTTON!

  Schadenfreude: (noun) delight in another’s misfortune.

  —Collins English Dictionary

  WHETHER YOU’RE BEING MUGGED BY A MADWOMAN USING her pubic hair as a weapon (yes, this is in the book), are fleeing from maniacal baboons, or have to catch your loose stool sample in a thimble in a third-world hospital—it’s never funny at the time. The beauty of travel is, like children, we stumble naively into these strange situations that don’t happen in the familiar settings of our homes. This great unknown in a foreign country leaves us vulnerable to another kind of trip as well—the head trip.

  I was utterly gleeful when Travelers’ Tales offered me the job of compiling and editing the stories for Wake Up and Smell the Shit. I was in Kyrgyzstan when I started receiving the bulk of story submissions. On the wall of my hotel room was a button and beside the button was a sign that said, “Don’t push the button.” All I could think
about was that button. What did it do? Did I have the room with the faulty room service button that delivered a deadly electric shock instead of vodka and caviar? What if I accidentally hit the button in the dark—would I wake up the next morning to find I’d nuked New York (and the magazine I write for) before being paid for my article?

  At a hotel at home, I’d never have taken that head trip. I’d have called the reception desk and asked, “So what happens if I hit the mystery button?” But I couldn’t work anything in my room in Bishkek—not the phone or the lock on my door. I pushed a button on the air conditioner and my room filled with cigarette smoke.

  Some head trips in this volume are perfectly reasonable: a writer wakes in a hotel room in a pool of blood and has to piece together what happened, and another imagines murdering her annoying trip partner. Some head trips are just insane fun. Gary Buslik (who isn’t paying me to say he is a master of this genre) has an imagination that makes him deserving of a free ticket on a one-way trip to Mars. Elizabeth Tasker (an astrophysicist who builds galaxies in her computer) will keep your plane safe if you’re on her next flight, using the powers of her mind.

  I disembarked my flight from Kyrgyzstan in Toronto to discover the managing editors at Travelers’ Tales were filling my inbox with the most wonderful embarrassments, misadventures, and filth on planet Earth for Wake Up and Smell the Shit. Without thinking (the way we don’t when we fire off an email), I responded to them:

  I’m back from Kyrgyzstan. And I blame you all for not only the fact that I pooped my pants for the first time in my life but that it was so explosive that I back-sprayed the toilet seat lid behind me and Jackson Pollock-ed the rear wall of the outhouse (no hyperbole). I was so shocked when I shone my headlamp on that wall at 4:00 A.M. that I thought the vandalism of feces must have come from someone else, and I was disgusted that I hadn’t noticed the state of the outhouse when I’d entered. Then I felt the wetness up the inside of my coat and all the way up my back. I realized the stucco of excrement that painted the interior of the outhouse was mine—it was all mine. At 4:00 A.M. I started cleaning the building with my limited supply of Kleenex Splash ’N Go! wipes and revolted myself so much that I also vomited on my bare feet and flip-flops. At 6:00, I was pretty sure the hosts at the yurt camp knew it was me who’d reeked destruction because they offered me vodka and chili peppers for breakfast.

  James O’Reilly (Publisher) replied:

  Kirsten, perhaps this outrageous little “tail” of yours could be deftly inserted into your own preface/intro. It is so good, and such a great example of how shit happens even to the most experienced of travelers, and with such reward—the memory, the humor. I still regale my daughters with my slabs of concrete shit in the Khumbu, back in 2002, when I had the misfortune to spend too many days sharing a tent with Larry [Executive Editor at Travelers’ Tales].

  Sean O’Reilly (Editor-at-Large) replied:

  You want her to insert her tail into this? After hearing about what her tail is capable of I would treat her ass like Chernobyl.

  Sean has a tale in this book and you’ll soon all know what his tail is capable of, too, which brings me back to schadenfreude. I don’t want bad things to happen to people, but it’s a joy when a bad thing happens and they share the story afterward. The writers in this volume reveal their hugest humiliations and trip disasters. Don’t feel guilt as you enjoy their horrors. It’s no longer “at the time” when it wasn’t funny. They’re delighting in “regaling” you now.

  KIRSTEN KOZA

  Ontario, Canada

  This book is dedicated to my friends.

  GARY BUSLIK

  Kap’n Cy

  Amping up in Amsterdam.

  TRYING TO REIGNITE THE OLD FLAME, I BRIBED MY WIFE WITH A TRIP TO Europe. Because her family, grim-faced Aryans with the collective personality of measles, believed they were descended from a super-race of Germanic geniuses, including Wagner, Goethe, and the guy who invented beer, and further believing that the high points of human achievement were Heinz Ketchup1 and Christmas ornaments made out of dried schupfnudels and jägerschnitzels, I thought it might excite my wife’s passion to visit Amsterdam, the city that represented, in effect, the Teutonic tiki bar, where those wacky fascist partygoers almost made it under the genocidal limbo pole.

  I use the term reignite the old flame generously, the “flame” having been one of those chemical glow sticks that you have to crack and shake to generate a cold, eerie light. In fact, my wife had not spoken to me for the prior six months because, as near as I could figure it, I had forgotten to rinse out my coffee mug before putting it in the sink. Germans fucked up the twentieth century, but they do tend to be tidy. My own people are too busy controlling the world’s banking system to worry about Formica stains.

  In any event, it being clear that I had something to grovel for, I offered to take her to Europe, and she said, “What about my mother?”

  Fortunately, old Affenpinscher Face died a few weeks before our trip date, and, just as with the Nuremberg trials, in which Hermann Goering swallowed a cyanide capsule the night before he was to be executed, saving the Allies the cost of a post-hanging reception and union musicians, I was able to secure a complete refund on my mom-in-law’s airfare and hotel, said refund, as you shall see, providing me the extra cash to purchase a colossal vibrating dildo.

  Our first night in Amsterdam found us, minus croaked Bavarian Mountain Hound, wandering the Old Center’s picturesque cobblestone streets and quaint canals. It was the first week of December, and the gingerbread houses and ancient footbridges were twinkling with holiday lights, reflected celestially in the romantic, swan-dotted waterways. We stopped at a cozy restaurant (de Oesterbar, Leidseplein 10—pricey but pleasant) overlooking an ice rink etched by a dozen Hans Brinkers and warmed ourselves over steaming bowls of sherry-pooled lobster bisque, during which I kept thinking, If this doesn’t finally get me laid, Hitler’s dream of world conquest was a total waste.

  After dinner we walked around some more, and I knew the sherry was working because when I reached for the blonde’s hand she didn’t scrunch her face as if she had accidentally swallowed Passover wine. Her elbow twitched, she took a half-step toward me—the wind whistled in the narrowed space between us—and cupped her mitten, but she quickly thought better of it and picked up her pace, and I fell on a patch of ice trying to catch up.

  We turned a corner, and there was a sign for the Anne Frank House (Prinsengracht 267). The Dutch, keen merchants, have turned the building into a memorial museum, the second most visited site in Amsterdam, right after the Prostitution Information Center, a 15-minute stroll east (Enge Kerksteeg 3, across from the old St. Nicholas church and the Princess Juliana Basic School for children aged 4 to 12).2

  This was not serendipitous. That afternoon, on our ride from the airport to the hotel, when our cab driver pointed out the Anne Frank House, I happened to notice, right around the corner, the neon-pulsating De Maximus Boutique, and I had a hunch it was a sex shop because its sign featured an erect penis wearing a Roman emperor’s laurel wreath and wielding a four-foot-long gladiator sword. It’s simple math: if a penis’s sword is four feet long, the penis itself has to be, what? Of course this is the kind of dimension you absolutely would want to pulsate in neon, even in daylight. So when, tonight, we got to the Anne Frank museum ticket seller, I was about to ask for two admissions, when I suddenly grabbed my butt and said, “Uh oh.”

  “What?” the blonde asked, glowering.

  “I have to make.”

  “Trust me, Germans taught these people how to install indoor plumbing.”

  I grimaced. “This is the real deal. I need to go back to our room for an Imodium A-D. Must have been the lobster bisque. You go ahead, I’ll run there and be right back.”

  “How come you never think ahead? Lutherans always think ahead.”

  Except regarding Stalingrad. But I kept my mouth shut. Instead, to prove my intentions, I bought two tickets, ga
ve her one, held up the other. “No way I’m going to blow four bucks.” I was including the cost of the Imodium, and that seemed to satisfy her. Germans may know exactly when they’re going to get diarrhea, but Jews never waste brand-name drugs.3

  In fact, I had thought ahead. I figured my wife would shuffle through the Frank museum solemnly shaking her head, frowning ruefully, pretending to be as ticked off at her progenitors as were other visitors but secretly negating this little blip of ancestral mischief by virtue of Handel having written terrific water music, Eva Braun having gotten a whole line of small kitchen appliances named after her, and Bismarck scoring a jelly roll.

  So when our guidebook (Frommer’s—I recommend it) mentioned that a typical visit to the Anne Frank House lasts about an hour, I knew my beloved towhead would take every minute of it because, for one thing, when most visitors’ mouths get so exhausted with frowning they need to rush into fresh air to oxygenate their facial muscles, my wife’s mouth had never known any other expression but frowning and was therefore incapable of becoming exhausted and needing to rush out.

  Meanwhile, while she would be milling about Otto Frank’s attic, fake-sniffling contrition, I would be meandering De Maximus’s aisles of kink, shopping for just the right potion, lotion, toy, or joy to assure long-overdue bedroom bliss. By my calculations—again, thinking ahead—my life partner, having just spent an hour admiring the evil genius of her forebears, would be in a giddily horny frame of mind. So, the moment she disappeared behind the bookcase, off I scrammed to the giant penis in the sky.

  Don’t let Holland’s principal export being the Dutch date fool you. These folks know how to run a sex shop. However much you might be pissed off at them for having to dig up your tulip bulbs every fall and replant them in the spring, once you set foot in one of these cathedrals of lubricity, all is forgiven. I don’t want to go into glorious specifics because there would follow such a run on Amsterdam that the entire country would sink into the Zuiderzee, causing a tidal wave that would inundate Jamaica, an island country I happen to like very much—which I promise to explain at the end, but don’t turn to it yet.

  De Maximus was not some sleazy, dusty, dark, sticky, rat-hole sex shop like you find in, say, Wisconsin. No sirree. It was as well lighted, organized, and—dare I say it?—spankingly clean as a Walgreens laxative aisle. It practically screamed, “We are not tight-ass Puritan Americans! We celebrate our B and D! We don’t just drink bubbly on New Year’s Eve—we stick it up our achterwerks!”