I took a trip to Quillabamba on the ol’ Bumblebee last week.
4 hours from where I live in The Sacred Valley, up through the Abra Malaga mountain pass (14,160 feet / 4,316 meters), through the shadow of the snowy Nevado Veronica mountain and then down into the lush jungles of Peru.
It was a hell of a ride… though painfully cold while going through the pass 🥶
Once I arrived at my hotel in Quillabamba, I decided to “clear the air” in my hotel room with some Agua De Florida and epsom salts.
It’s just like burning incense or essential oils…
It makes the space or room smell (and hopefully feel) a bit nicer.
I grabbed a saucepan from the hotel kitchen, tipped some epsom salts into it and then covered the salts with Agua De Florida, an alcoholic perfume that they use here in Peru, especially in Ayahuasca ceremonies.
Once the stage was set, I took my lighter and lit that thing on fire 🔥
Then I walked around my hotel room holding it while it burned and spat and spread its scent around the room.
Everything worked perfectly at first…
…but eventually the saucepan got a little too hot 🥵
See, the problem was…
This saucepan didn’t have a long handle.
Instead, it had 2 little handles on either side… good for cooking perhaps, but not designed for filling with alcoholic perfume and then setting it on fire 🤷♂️
So being the genius that I am, I decided to blow it out before the saucepan handles melted into my fingers.
That was a BIG mistake!
Instead of going out, the alcoholic perfume exploded out of the saucepan 💥
The flames enveloped my face as if the saucepan was one of Daenerys Targaryen’s dragons and I dropped the saucepan in surprise.
Then the salty alcoholic perfume mixture went all over the floor where it continued to burn and spit and spread it’s flowery scene through the room 🤦♂️
Now thankfully, it didn’t burn my face…
…but it did set the bin on fire…
…and there were burning patches on the floor which I had to deal with…
…though curiously, not a hair on the bed or the wall despite the fact that I’d dropped the saucepan in between the bed and wall 🥳
I could deal with the floor and bin easily enough… but if the blankets on the bed had caught on fire…
🫨
So like the subject line says…
I almost burned down my hotel room 🏨🔥
The moral of the story?
Don’t burn alcoholic perfume and epsom salts in a saucepan that doesn’t have a long handle…
…and join me inside to The Rageheart Academy so you can stay calm under pressure (like when you set shit on fire):
Cheers,
John Wood
P.S. Here are some pics of my journey through the mountains:
P.P.S. Know anyone who needs better tools for staying calm when their hotel room is burning down?
Refer them to The Daily Growl (this email newsletter) and show them a better way to dance with the pressure of modern life.