People Are Strange, When You’re a Stranger

I could tell you about all the absurdly gorgeous places we’ve been, but I’m a storyteller so I’d much rather tell you about the absurdly wonderful, and sometimes just absurd people we’ve met along the way. (You’ll hear a bit about the places too.)

Girl Alex and I have a un-plan in place to hunt out the weird side of each place we go. Whether it’s a back alley or a penthouse, if the strange people are there, the ones with stories to share, that’s where we want to be. Strangeness comes in many flavors, but it is always honest – those people who can’t help being themselves. So we go looking for the alternative people, the tattooed and the pierced, the artists and the musicians, the writers and the philosophers. We want side ways.

Going looking for the unexpected means we’re getting better at expecting it. We’re both already pretty accustomed to weird, being a little weird ourselves, but weird in foreign countries feels even weirder. It’s hard to read people and anticipate without a shared culture. We have to be much more adaptable now, and we have more fun when we’re expecting (and willing for) anything.

We’ll be collecting these stories on our new People page (under the Travel page). Here’s a snippet of our first person-adventure.

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From Europe, with Meth

It’s hard to not judge a book by its cover when it’s not written in your language. On our third day of being in Coron, we were walking through town looking for people with interesting covers, or as Girl Alex put it, “Where are the tattooed and pierced people?”

That’s how we met the heavily tattooed, European volunteer turned tour guide who took us to a remote, private beach on Coron Island – that much prettier island across from Coron Town, owned by the indigenous Tagbanua tribe. And that’s how we ended up in his apartment in the slums of Coron Town the night before going to said island, taking shots of vodka with mouthfuls of Extra Joss (a concentrated powder with about 10x the amount of caffeine as Red Bull), while he did shabu, South East Asian slang for meth, and shared his philosophies on the state of the world.

We stayed up drinking with him and his friend until almost 4 in the morning, when the Extra Joss no longer cut through our drunken exhaustion. We needed to get at least a little sleep before meeting him at 8 am to head to the island, and we knew that he’d be on time, since he definitely wouldn’t be sleeping.

Given the hour and the neighborhood, he insisted on driving us back to our hotel on his motorcycle, but not until he finished the hit he was doing. Not certain whether the neighborhood or his intoxicated driving would be more of a threat, we took our chances with him, hoping that the upper of meth would cancel out the downer of alcohol. The three of us piled onto his motorcycle, which barely fit him, and weaved through the poorly paved roads, dodging potholes and roosters. We let go of each other and our breath in a sigh of relief when we got to our hotel’s entrance.

Day. Fucking. Three.

Safe in our room, we burst into laughter at the absurdity we had just found ourselves in and packed our bags for the next day’s dose. Though we already weren’t on the same page as our guide, we wanted to keep reading his story – even if it would be just for the pictures.

This was the view from the private beach.