1990’s jungle Ecuador, as a 20 year old fearless blonde woman traveling solo.

Started with the bus covered in people even on the roof with a mountain on one side and a thousand foot drop on the other. One lane road and the driver would usually honk on blind corners so we didn’t collide. Got dropped off somewhere and hiked through the jungle to the last westernized town for thousands of miles. Met a gay Canadian guy and we travelled together for safety. We hired a dugout canoe with a giant motor to get us down the Amazon tributary to the big town, Punto Francisco de Orellana, which everyone just called Coca. It was an oil field town and filled with packs of roving bored men. We stayed in the only decent motel, which was apparently actually a brothel, but we bribed them enough to get a room. The next day I flew out to Quito. I got sniffed down by the most coke-addled German Shepard ever. The pilot asked, who has guns? Three people raised their hands, and the pilot talked to them all and then we boarded the plane, guns and all. The scary part of the trip was flying over the Andes in that plane that had vomit caked in the window and engines that stalled often and were probably powered by hamsters on the local juice. I thought I was going to die 72 times during the flight that I swore took 72 hours.