She Gone Girl: The Last Crusade

all over South America

I don’t mean to startle you but…

i’m back.

How have you BEEN, girlfriend!?  I’ve missed you.

Sorry I didn’t call; I was too busy joining a cult and swan diving off the deep end.  Be honest…… diiiiiid you stop reading when I got all weird and religious-y?  Tell the truth.

In any case, welcome back to the 12-month-turned-2-year travel blog that just won’t die.  Chronicling my adventures around the globe with such newsworthy stories, it’d be a travesty if they weren’t shared.  Like that time I cried in a pyramid… or rolled down a hill in a bubble… or raked an entire beach… or gave some old Indian woman a coconut-oil scalp massage.

We’ve been through so much together these past 19 months, I wanted you to be the first to know about my latest installment of the She Gone Girl franchise, She Gone Girl: The Last Crusade.  Billed as the final act of a three-part dramedy, I wish to fulfill my ultimate travel blog vision: to ride straight into the sunset in a magnificent blaze of glory that, if you look closely enough, is actually my savings account on fire.

Where’d we leave off?  Where were we?  I think somewhere between mid-panic attack as a jungle roach danced up my thigh…… and mid-spiritual epiphany as I kumbaya’ed across South America in search of something I ‘wouldn’t know until I found’.  Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle… I found it.  Turns out my South American escapade was a 4-month spiritual awakening, inner journey, walk into the light EVENT.  It was a moment.  It was a whole thing.

actually, cancel tonight’s dinner. she’s off the reservation again.

Besides the all-encompassing ‘it’ that’s sure to lay the foundation for the rest of my life (no big deal or anything), let’s recap the past few months as painlessly as possible in (what else?) a movie montage.

Let’s see, after I left my brethren soul sisters & brothers at that ashram in Brazil, I headed over to Sao Paulo where I a.) slept on the couch of a super cool single mom whose wifi password was ‘davidbowie’ no space, b.) met my Brazilian buddies for a 12-hour live samba dance party, and c.) hit up the Coffee Lab Café cuz I heard they put the cleaning lady’s special morning roast on the menu.

brazilian lady pack

Next was Lima, Peru.  Known for its extremely underrated sandwich scene.  JK I made that up, but the steak sandwich at La Lucha Sangucheria should be given the keys to the city or something.

I watched the changing of the guard at the Government Palace, ogled the religious relics inside the Cathedral of Lima & the Monastery of San Francisco, and walked the 2-mile Malecón strip overlooking the Pacific Ocean, but let’s get real I was there to eat.

6 day eatin’ vacay heyyyyyy #gasx

After one too many dulce de leche churros and mixto chicharrons, I hurled my bloated body due east to the ancient capital of the Incan empire: Cusco, Peru.  Where the #1 selling soft drink tastes like bubble gum, guinea pigs are perfectly suited for livestock, and romantic dinners are served over illuminated bathtubs.

ahhh, the taste of peru

oh hey, joanna! when did you get here?!

i haven’t seen you since scotland! #bathtubromance

Even though my friend Joanna and I were unprepared and out of shape, we successfully hiked 18-25 kilometers a day through 9 different biozones and a cloud forest.  Hiking the Salkantay Trek through the Andes to Machu Picchu was an excellent decision.  Sleeping in sky domes, eating french fry salads & llama-shaped mashed potato nuggets, dodging rogue animals as they sprinted down narrow pathways, and filming music videos with our new hiking friends… five days went by in a blink.

v’s up, nova for life

seriously, we’re obsessed with villanova

i love this girl

our guide was nicknamed ‘the mountain king’

remember, it’s pronounced ‘mah-chu PICK-chu’ which means ‘old mountain’. not ‘mah-chu PEE-choo’ meaning ‘old penis’.

Thank you to everyone that messaged me, pre-hike, with the same polite request that I not ‘fall off the mountain’.  That was super helpful, so thank you.  I DID wipe out running to the bathroom one night (cuz I didn’t wanna miss the quinoa soup appetizer round) and jacked up my elbow so impressively I couldn’t hold anything with my left hand for 2 days.  Soooooo I guess your concerns were valid.

Speaking of concerning behavior, we all woke up at 2 in the morning to hike 17,060’ in swim trunks.

or maybe just one pair of swim trunks, but still. hey mandy!

What’s a trip to Cusco without a stop at Rainbow Mountain for that famous multi-colored vista (created by melting ice mixed with naturally occurring minerals) or the bonus fashion show on the 3-hour train ride back to town?  Work it, twirl it, pop it, zip it… unbutton the coat… IT’S REVERSIBLE all-alpaca fiberrrrr oh my gosh heaven.

they promised there’d be french fry salad at the top

One last coca tea and it was onto Quito, Ecuador: the land of coffee chocolate & bananas… with churches on every corner and a Sacagawea in every pocket.  So, THIS was where all those $1 Sacagawea coins ended up!  I’ve always wondered which 5-or-85-year-old American was hoarding all of them… but turns out we’ve been shippin ‘em down to Ecuador, en masse, since 2002.

After a one-week stopover, I bebopped outta town, took 3 buses, traveled 10 hours, lost my laptop, and arrived at a hidden yoga lodge PARADISE nestled in the Amazon rainforest.

and i slept upstairs behind a false bookshelf. don’t ask.

For 4 weeks this May, I lived and worked alongside Hare Krishnas in a reforestation project 30 minutes outside Tena, Ecuador.  It was hard work, especially with the Hare Krishnas dedication to selfless service… but I ended up getting out more than I put in.  Plus, I had an obscene amount of fun.

The days started around 4a with solo prayer, devotional chanting and the reading of various philosophies WHICH I tried out once and decided once was enough.  I opted, instead, to get my beauty rest until 630a yoga.  Then we’d all share breakfast at 8, work from 9-1, tag team an ayurvedic/vegan lunch, take a dip in the natural cold spring, more work or an educational workshop around 330p, an ice-cold shower with at least one cockroach staring at me as I lathered my pits, and free time the rest of the day!

i work here. what of it?

yoga studio & natural hot very very cold spring

this picture makes me regret wearing spf 30

peeling cacao & battle crying with machetes nbd

not to brag… but i’m really good with a machete

and waterboarding roaches when it’s my turn to do dishes…

If we weren’t carrying big decorative rocks up a hill (to use in the new stone staircase) or wheelbarrowing mixtures of cow poop & compost, my manager Petite would teach us how to make his Columbian grandmother’s famous arepas.  Or Cah-they (my twin sister from Argentina who’s an absolute ODDball) would grab a few ingredients from the jungle and whip us up some all-natural face masks or herbal tea.

Growing next to our house, on this massive property, were scores of lemon and orange trees, banana guava and guayaba, pineapple, papaya, lulo, lemongrass, chone-ta, yuca, papachina, sugarcane, ginger, turmeric, avocado, cacao and guayusa (tea leaves with twice the caffeine of coffee).  It was a true jungle paradise and we had the whole thing to ourselves.  Except when the neighborhood kids would come to bake cookies… or when the local medicine man would help us assess the health of banana and cacao trees.

My very first day of work was shadowing the medicine man.  For 5 hours, Guillermo and I macheted cacao down from the trees and squished out the white corncob of alien fruit nuggets that lay within.  Guillermo and I got close, fast. 

• We were chased by a swarm of bees that looked more like swordfish (one bit him in the forehead and one got stuck in my shirt- that we both ripped off my body immediately)
• I tried to teach him American football by hiking cacao between my legs and calling out, ‘Azulllll!  Azulllll cuarenta y dosssss!’
• And even though I didn’t slice my arm off ONCE while I was slipping up and down muddy hills with a machete in one hand and a bucket ‘a cacao fruit in the other… Guillermo did have to bearhug my waist and hoist me up one of the hills.  Did I mention he was 58?  We couldn’t stop laughing.  That was only day one.

this is cacao. and this is guillermo.

Whether I was making chocolate from scratch (macheting, fermenting, drying, roasting, peeling, grinding, sifting, mixing, cooling, or taste testing), trying not to get grossed out every time I swept and half the pile would scatter away, or that one time Say-bah and I smoked weed before gardening… every day had something new and exciting to offer.

I think Say-bah and I misunderstood our assignment, that day, cuz we ended up (essentially) hand tweezing the jungle, one blade of grass at a time.  Sitting starfish in muddy clumps of wet earth… Say-bah muttering ‘eternitad’ over and over under his breath.  This can’t be right.

laser focus 10/10. output 3/10.

Flying through the rest of my Ecuadorian extracurriculars, I:

• Got my face painted with jungle fruit
• Sand-skied down a volcano
• Hiked a bunch of waterfalls
• Climbed a rickety ladder through a waterfall
• Learned how to blow darts through a wooden pipe
• Crossed a rushing river
• Ziplined upside down & backwards
• Held a boa constrictor
• Corrected Cah-they every time she called juice ‘jiz’… or thumbs ‘the fat fingers of the hand’
• Hitchhiked on multiple motorbikes that didn’t have passenger footholds, using all my strength to keep my feet OFF the road and attached to my body, and finally
• Took field trips to:
  • The Grand Canyon of Ecuador (with local high schoolers that kept sitting down and eating their chips and ughhhhh they were overrrrr ittttttt)
  • Talag’s Blue Lagoon (surprisingly not that blue)
  • Puyo’s Indichuris Mirador (for that petrifying plank of wood with no safety belt masquerading as a fun swing at a lookout point)
  • Cotopaxi (where I summited the Pasochoa & Ruminahui volcanoes & stuffed my face with unlimited banana bread at the Secret Garden Hostel)
  • And finally, Banos!  Where I vacationed for 3 days with my manager’s 65-year-old father.  Exploring waterfalls and guava factories… taking turns on the Swing at the End of the World… buying matching skull cups at the hot spring (with water so hot, I think my leg hair singed off)… and becoming the two best friends that anyone could have.

and we’ll never ever ever ever leave each other

cuz how could you leave this guy?

i have no idea

cotopaxi was next level gorgeous

i find scenery especially pretty while cartwheeling

if this scares you, you aren’t going to like the next one

ummmm it was lit’trally just a plank of wood

Honestly, South America was a game changer.  It allowed me to hit the reset button on all the noise that doesn’t matter in life.

I still don’t have any answers but there’s a stillness inside of me that wasn’t there before.  An absence of fear and a connection to everything.

Between living with Hare Krishnas (who admitted to praying for me every day for a month, and ‘moving things inside of me’ so I could ‘find what I was looking for’) and a 7-day ayahuasca retreat deep in the jungle (that connected me to the spirit world in such a devastatingly beautiful way)… I feel different.  And stronger.  And ready for anything life throws my way.

Listen.  I debated even bringing it up, as ayahuasca (meaning ‘vine of the soul’) isn’t for everyone and it’s not to be taken lightly.  Used by shaman up and down the Americas for 5,000+ years, it’s incredibly powerful stuff that can… reveal one’s purpose on earth, or the true nature of the universe, or guide you through any number of revelations or ah-ha moments as they pertain to your life or your faith.

For ME… especially since coming straight from a Brazilian love fest, I’m pretty sure my experience was atypical.  (Considering the shaman lit’trally told me he was ‘excited to see what would happen’…… as I was starting from such a good place and bound to get even higher.  Spiritually speaking.)

SO, what did it feel like and how did I know when the hallucinogenic masterpiece theater started?

When I realized I’d been talking to a cartoon fox for the past hour.  About femininity.  Ohhhhhh-k.

While the woman to my left was vomiting (violently) into her assigned puke bucket… and the guy to my right was ‘drowning in his own tears cuz he asked a jellyfish a question and the jellyfish just floated away’… I alternated between a playful joyous childlike energy and giggle attacks.

Surrounded by loving faces and kittens in spaceships, fields of floating elbows and roller coasters made of vanilla buttercream… everything was beautiful.  And everything was THOROUGHLY ENTERTAINING.

I played freeze dance with a frog for hourssss.

I saw reality itself.  Pure consciousness.  The universe.  People shapeshifting and then disappearing altogether.  Human form.  Human connection.  Time and space.  Kaleidoscopes of colors in constant evolution, flowing through me and around me, hyenas on seesaws, wooly mammoths bareknuckling across the room and turning into the wind, and then those darn KITTENS AGAIN in the spaceship!  Where are they going!?  They’re going so fast!  Do they even have a license?!

Anywho, by NO means am I encouraging or glorifying this behavior.  DMT is not a 5-dollar footlong at Subway.  You need to be careful; take precautions seriously; do your research; find a shaman you trust.  For every participant, like me, who can’t stop smiling long enough to sleep and who gets a flood of insights regarding their future or their approach to life…… there’s someone else in the room who’s battling a demon trying to take away their breath.

Beeee careful and do what feels right.  I’m on a 2-year quest to figure out what feels right and I. Am. Loving it.

‘Imma keep on runnin’ cuz a winner don’t quit on themselves.’ – Beyoncé, Homecoming

I leave today for my next 5-month adventure.

I thought it’d be cool to hike a volcano in Bali on the morning of my birthday, so I booked a flight 2 weeks ago and then worked backward from there.  hah

My goal (this time) is more frequent, MUCH shorter blog posts so you don’t have to dedicate 15 hours a month to read how my eyebrows are filling in… or whatever the heck I write about.

One thing’s certain: imma do me.