Endurance Test Or Trip Of A Life Time?

Your alarm screeches through your eardrums waking you from the thirty minutes sleep you just managed to get after being woken by the drugged up maniac next door screaming hell as the effects of his last hit wear off. It´s 4am, and the hangover from last nights pisco sours is kicking in. You stuff your now destroyed rags into your rucksack, lug it onto your back to crawl up (always up) to the bus station.
Finding your seat, behind the chair stuck in recline the paranoia sets in that you are on the wrong bus and they are going to loose your luggage. The guy behind you sniffles and sneezes as you breathe in his germs and your next cold.
For the next twenty hours your bum goes through a whole new world of pain whilst the pungent stentch of farts and fumes drifts heavily up your nose. It´s almost possible to ignore the smell by concentrarting on your whailing bladder. Sleep is impossible. You arrive at your new destination in the middle of the night seemingly nowhere near the town centre, but it´s okay, your backpack is still on the roof of the bus. Feeling like hell you try to ask the screaming locals where you are, but all they want to tell you is where their cousins hostel is and which tour you should take.
Gather your patience and walk away. Following the Lonely Planet map you arrive at the recommended hostel that is supposed to have hot showers and comfy beds all for $5. Rubbish. This used to be true until one year ago it made it into the Lonely Planet, it now costs $20, the beds are wrecked and the water is like showering under steel nails. What the hell, you´re knackered, time to get ripped off. You hit the rock hard bed only to be woken up by slamming doors. Your eyes open to see the yellow stained pillow you have been sucking on for the last hour.
Wondering into to town to see where you have arrived, you fend off the pickpocket kids like flies. Finally smelling a food stall that looks clean you move towards it only to feel a massive gob of spit sliding slowly down the back of your neck. By now you should of given up and blown your budget on a five star hotel to get away from it all, but by now you are used to it. Wipe it off and walk away. Round the corner is a decent looking resturant, a tingle of relief washes over you as you sit back and order something which you think won´t kill you.
Your mind starts to slip and you remember the warmth of your mom and dads house, the smell of bacon sandwiches on a saturday morning, a walk in the country for a few lunch time beers, then back home to doze on the sofa watching the football. Then out later for a great night eating and drinking before sinking into your own clean, comfy bed.

BANG - back to reality - that mayonnaise seemed old. You idiot why didn´t you send it back! You sprint back to your insect ridden shared bathroom and vomit until your stomach is ready to snap. The next 24 hours you spend running to the toilet trying not to pass out with fever. It´s the worst food poisioning of your life.
WHY THE HELL AM I DOING THIS !?..........because for every two days like this you get countless days of mind blowing beauty. From the sun rising over the Bolivian salt flats, snowbaording the highest mountains, surfing the worlds most remote break, tubing through the mountains of Laos, riding on the dorsal fin of a dolphin, to seeing the smile a can of cola puts on four Cambodian childrens faces.
The feel of the sun on your back as you snorkle through crystal waters over coral bursting with colour and life. The sensation of jumping of a ledge into a canyon. The taste of the air on top of 6000 meter summit. Hearing the sound of local Polynesian rhythms as you and your new new best friends drink and laugh until your cheeks ache as the sky explodes into 1000 shades of orange above another unforgetable sunset. You forget all the bad things in the blink of an eye. You wouldn´t change this for the world, this is your trip of a lifetime.
Chris & Sam