ROBERT SIEGEL, HOST:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED.
Once again, we invite a fellow listener to take you on a bad trip in the segment that we call Vacation...
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SIEGEL: ...Horror Stories.
GABRIELLE PASCOE: My name is Gabrielle Pascoe. I live in Hollywood, California. I was working for a dotcom that kind of - well, it laid off the entire staff. And so I decided to go to Thailand.
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PASCOE: I went with a fellow member of my staff that had been laid off. We didn't know each other really well.
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PASCOE: I went with a fellow member of my staff that had been laid off. We didn't know each other really well. We'll call him Bob. And Bob was a really nice guy. He had a lot of charm. You know, we were good travel companions. But one night, he came back from the red light district in Bangkok and the next day asked me if I could get him to a clinic.
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PASCOE: Luckily, he was able to get medications that he could then bring on to the next leg of our journey, which was to the south of Thailand where I had plans to go get my certification in scuba diving. Bob, apparently, has every intention of scoring some weed, which he proceeds to do right away.
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PASCOE: Finally, I take leave of Bob on the island of Ko Tao, and we go our separate ways. And from Thailand, I went on to Vietnam, where I spent some days traveling, and then I flew to Cambodia. So I was lucky enough on that flight to meet this really nice gal. She was my age. We decided that we would go on and travel together.
And we found a hotel. We kind of followed the proprietor into the hotel, and he's showing us around. And he points to the toilet, and he says: Be sure you don't flush anything down the toilet because the plumbing is very weak here. It'll just come right back up.
And sort of case in point, he said: There's not any toilet paper there for you to even flush. He leaves. And, of course, I immediately pull out my roll of toilet paper. And I have my toilet paper in hand, and I go to put it on the toilet paper dispenser, which is there is there, and what falls out of the center of the roll of toilet paper but Bob's supply.
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PASCOE: If I flush it down the toilet, as the proprietor just said, it would come back up. If I put it in the greenery, someone could find it and bring it to me. And, like, everything I knew about how Southeast Asian governments dealt with drug dealing or drug buying, I knew from that Joaquin Phoenix movie where Joaquin Phoenix gets executed in the end.
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PASCOE: So my travel partner, to her, it's a very easy proposition. You take it, throw it into the bushes. For lack of a better way to dispose of this wad, I decide that that is a reasonable thing to do. So we set out for the day, and we're on our way out to see Angkor Wat. Everywhere we go, there are shrines, and the shrines are so lovely. And people have left incense, and they've draped the Buddhas. And then as I'm kind of looking at the incense and I'm thinking, wow, you know, that's an offering, and offerings burn. I pull out Bob's supply from my bag, and right then and there at the shrine, I find the perfect place to leave it.
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SIEGEL: Gabrielle Pascoe of Hollywood, California. She sent us her story by going to npr.org, clicking on Contact Us and putting vacation horror story in the subject line of the message. You can do that too.
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AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:
You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.