THE GODS ARE CRAZY (or What Goes Around Comes Around)

This morning we finished the jar of honey from Germany that Axel had packed into the bulging container that had arrived as big as a circus. As I was about to throw the jar away, my eye fell on one word on the German label: Kanada. This jar of German-bottled honey that had been filled courtesy of Canadian bees, had finally made its way home to Canada after sitting for years in Axel’s cupboard in Cologne.

I loved the movie “The Gods Must be Crazy,” the story of a Kalahari Bushman who while hunting is knocked unconscious by a Coke bottle thrown from a passing biplane. Never having seen anything like it, and falling from the sky, the Bushman surmises that the bottle is a gift from the gods. As such, it soon becomes a symbol of power and object of jealousy amongst the otherwise congenial tribe members. The Bushman, seeing the trouble the gift was brewing undertakes to return the dangerous it to the gods by traveling to the end of the world to give it back.

This movie and the jar of honey remind me that once I too returned a bottle to its ‘source.’

In 1993, I was in Puerta Vallarta at my first-ever Society of American Travel Writers’ convention. We were being hosted by a beautiful, new property in Nuevo Vallarta which had, much to our surprise, potable water flowing from their taps. Many of us had judiciously brought bottled water with plans to buy more as needed. One member out of Houston, Texas, had gone one step further. Obviously, a man with foresight as well as a thirst, the journalist had brought two cases of large bottles to the convention. But there was no need for the bottled water so by the end the week, he still had a cache of forty-two bottles.

There was no way he was taking them back home. So rather than waste the precious resource, he plunked himself down in the lobby on the day we were all checking out, and gave away bottles to all takers. Thinking ahead to how long and arduous my day was going to be with a flight schedule that would bounce me from Puerto Vallarta to Guadalajara to Mexico City to Chicago and finally, to Montreal, I thanked him for his generosity and quickly stuffed a bottle into my bag.

I sipped a little from that bottle all along the way and finally finished it off just as we were coming in for a landing in Montreal. At the time, it was Mirabel Airport that served international flights to and from Montreal. I was exhausted from a day of take-offs and landings, and had finished reading everything I had brought. Out of boredom, I turned the bottle around in my hand to read the label. It was a bottle of Naya Spring Water, a brand name that was just beginning to become familiar. And then I saw where it was bottled. Mirabel, Quebec.


The Naya water had travelled from Mirabel, Quebec to Houston, Texas to Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco and back to Mirabel. Before heading to customs, I dropped the bottle in an airport bin and waved a mental goodbye, content in having played my part in bringing it back to its source.