What Did Your Pet Eat That He Ought Not Have?

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 11:44:00 -0600

I probably ought not tell this one, but what the hell. This is about one of our tour guides in Dominica -- a colorful character who went by a colorful name. And all of the herbs that he sent us back with.

I was scrolling through Bluesky this morning, and this post reminded me of something:

I probably ought not tell this one, but what the hell. All of the extra followers who picked up my feed while we crossed the Atlantic, so it's just us friends now, right?

When I wrote about our stay in Dominica, I mentioned some of the stuff we saw, but I didn't give much detail about the people. The night we arrived, we met a local who went by the name Yella, who spent a long time showing us cool things to see and do on the island from his phone's photo collection. So soon after, we spent a long day with him showing us around. I just did a quick search, and my only mention of Yella was in a caption on a photo, and I'm sure no one even ever noticed it. He took us to a lot of sights and waterfalls, gave us interesting information.

He also smoked pot absolutely nonstop.

Yella leads us to a waterfall.
He had a friend driving us -- a guy who had a massive set of dreadlocks stuffed up into one of those colorful knit hats. I asked Yella his name at the end of our long day together, and he told me, "I don't even know his real name. I just call him Rasta."

Despite the apparent lack of background verification, Rasta was a good driver and a nice guy.

A couple of nights later, we were prepping to sail on to the next country. We went to a pig roast on the beach for a bunch of tourists, and Yella came by. He brought us a bunch of herbs. Normal stuff that we recognized, and a lot of leaves that we didn't. One was something leafy. The instructions were to boil it into a tea. It wouldn't be intoxicating at all, but it would prevent mosquito bites and also make you feel mellow for a while. I did that a few nights later, and whatever that stuff was, it was amazing.

Yella had also given us a joint as a parting gift after our tour, and this is where I start to get reminded of the post above.

While we were at the pig roast on the beach that night, Maks ate the better part of the pot.

But he's a cat. Who could tell whether he felt anything?

Perhaps being a cat is a lot like going through your whole life really, really high.

Relevant links:

Big photo set

What I wrote about Dominica at the time.

Index page for the big trip. I'll take that feed off of the home page before too much longer.