Hi On Boards,
Scariest and most surreal experience:
Riding down the Amazon on a tiny boat in the middle of the night, where the only source of light is a flashlight the “captain” has–well, that and the lightning crashing around us. Oh, and there was one flickering light bulb in the back of the boat. We were rocking all over the place and regularly getting the motor stuck in vegetation, turning a two hour ride into something much longer.
The impenetrable darkness and violent storms around us were pretty frightening, but I knew it was time to be scared when all the locals on the boat pulled the life jackets from the roof and put them on, leaving enough for each of the rest of us to share with another person. My friend and I clung to the shared vest and just sat praying we wouldn’t die. If all that wasn’t enough, I had also been ill before we got on the boat, thrown up over side, and drank so much water to rehydrate myself that I ended up having to pee in a bottle so that I wouldn’t explode before we reached our seemingly impossible-to-reach destination. It’s definitely one of those experience that I look back on and think, “Wow, did that really happen?” 🙂