Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  ‘That Bear’ Contents

  Prologue

  Seeking Refuge

  Baptism of Fruit Juice

  Cold Comfort

  Feeding Time at the Zoo

  Man’s Work

  Wet Dreams

  Shopping

  Flying Solo

  Lesson from a Bright Spark

  A Close Shave

  Arrival of Ashley

  Room Service

  Machachi and Machita

  Dawn of the Layla

  Water Polo

  Pit Stop

  Training Machita

  Shots in the Dark

  A Wise Move

  Just Desserts

  Toby Makes an Omelette

  Bathroom Break

  The Trouble with Reptiles

  Cross Country

  Ama“Zoo”nico

  Home

  Monster

  Rescue

  Exorcism

  Bear Faced Cheek

  Flight of the Lobo

  Trip to Esmereldas

  Return of the Red-Eye

  How-Are?

  Cat-Food

  Language of Love

  Shocking Behaviour

  Men in Black

  A Method to Madness?

  A Class Act

  A Cold Stretch

  Not Suitable for Vegetarians

  Comings and Goings

  Swing Low

  Weird and Wonderful

  Cause and Effect

  Stitched Up

  Snap!

  Take Two

  Hole

  The Perils of Boar-dom

  You Can’t Handle the Tooth!

  Disaster!

  And Then There Were Three…

  An Ocelot Odyssey

  The End

  Epilogue

  Hi folks! Tony here…

  Preview of ‘Don’t Need the Whole Dog’

  About Tony James Slater

  Prologue

  “MONKEY!” I shouted, as a brown blur swung out of the cage and onto the path.

  The chase was on.

  He skipped away with incredible speed, dodging around the corner and heading for freedom as though he’d thought of nothing but this moment for years. I bolted after him, grabbing the edge of a cage to swing me round in hot pursuit. The monkey was a good way ahead of me, and far more manoeuvrable. But I was faster on the straight. I accelerated down the narrow corridor between enclosures, and was closing the distance between us when he reached the steps down to the main road through the farm. This was my chance – if he paused, if he found the stairs confusing, I’d be on him. But no. Being a monkey, he didn’t have much use for stairs. He just jumped.

  He made the ten foot leap to the ground with ease, landed on all fours, and scurried off down the road. Pounding along behind him I had less than a second to make the choice. If I slowed to negotiate the stairs even part of the way down, it would all be over. Once he reached the trees by the first bend in the road he’d be gone for good.

  Time was up. I reached the top of the steps at a dead run and launched myself over the edge.

  In the seconds I was airborne my entire life flashed before my eyes. I seemed to have spent a disproportionate amount of it chasing monkeys.

  Somehow I landed on my feet, with bone-jarring force. I was only a step behind the monkey – my leap had taken me considerably further than his – but my body was moving too fast for my legs. I managed to push off with my feet at the same moment as I started to fall headlong on the ground. The result: I bounced forwards another metre, sailing high above the form of the fleeing monkey, then crashed to earth and flattened the fucker.

  The impact knocked the stuffing out of me. It temporarily turned the monkey two-dimensional. Pain shot through me. I felt like I’d fallen ten feet onto a small primate. For the monkey it must have been like being beaten around the head with a banana tree. For a split second neither of us could move.

  He recovered quicker than I did. Amazingly he wriggled out from under me and leapt towards freedom, just as I, still lying prone, reached out with both arms and caught him.

  Unfortunately I could only catch him around the middle. Which meant that while he wasn’t going anywhere, he wasn’t particularly happy about it.

  In far less time than it takes to tell, the monkey writhed around in my grasp and sank his fangs into my hand.

  “ARGH!”

  The monkey switched his attention to my other hand and bit down hard.

  “Arrr!” I shrieked. I let go with the recently bitten hand, but I had no other options – I had to grab him again or lose him. As I tried to grab his neck he bit me again, puncturing the thick leather glove easily and scoring my vulnerable flesh. Again and again he bit down, faster than I could even register the damage.

  I lay on my belly, flat out on the floor, both arms outstretched in front of me and both hands wrapped around a frantically flailing ball of teeth and rage. There was sod all I could do – without my hands free I couldn’t get to my feet, and without standing up I had no way of controlling the beast. It was not the first time I had the thought; what the hell was I doing in Ecuador?

  Seeking Refuge

  All I’d asked for was a little more adventure in my life. Now, I appreciate that in hindsight this was obviously a huge mistake. There’s even a proverb designed specifically to warn against it. It goes something like ‘Be careful what you wish for – you could end up with your fingers in a monkey’.

  The thing is, I’d spent several years trying (and failing) to be an actor. I’d been forced to give up when, after a lot of soul-searching, I realised I wasn’t getting anywhere because I was crap. It was not my happiest hour. But to console myself I bought a book called ‘Work Your Way Around The World’.

  It seemed like the answer. All the dead-end jobs I’d done whilst pursuing my theatrical dream suddenly revealed a glimmer of potential; translate any one of them to a different country and they became a lot more exciting. Why work in my local pub when I could do the same job in a bar in Bondi Beach or Miami?

  And so I set out on my grand tour, aiming to do a different job on every continent. I would visit the far-flung corners of the world, explore their secrets and discover all there was to know about life in the process.

  I got as far as France. After three months of picking prunes on a baking hot plantation south of Bordeaux, having lost the ability to walk normally due to spending sixty hours a week on my knees, I decided to give up.

  It wasn’t that the place broke my spirit, though it came perilously close; it was when the boss got drunk with us one night and confessed to drugging a gypsy who worked for him, and feeding him into the prune-drying furnace. That made up my mind. By daybreak his entire workforce had evaporated. By midnight the next day I limped through the door to my parents’ house, exhausted, malnourished and penniless.

  All in all it had been a bit of a shitter.

  So on my list of preferred career choices (the one they get you to make in school) I’d already crossed off ‘Actor’ and ‘Explorer’. Number three was ‘Astronaut’ and to be honest, I didn’t fancy my chances. So I did what I usually do when I get depressed; I bought a book. This one was about volunteering abroad. And that is how I found Santa Martha Animal Rescue Centre in Ecuador, South America.

  Santa Martha’s website described it as a volunteer-run wildlife refuge perched high in the mountains of the Avenue of Volcanoes. At any given time it was home to monkeys, parrots – even big cats – plus dozens of other creatures I’d never even heard of. All of them had been rescued from cruelty; chained up in market places, kept illegally as pets or destined for the black market. The job of the volunteers was to accompany the police on raids, rescue the animals, look after them and eventually release them into the Amazon rainforest! It was the most amazing job description I’d ever read.

  I signed up instantly and Toby, the English co-ordinator of the refuge, approved my application despite me having absolutely no
relevant experience. I convinced myself that this was the shadowy hand of Fate, rather than a blanket policy of employing every idiot that sent them an email. Surely there would be some kind of training programme before they sent me in to feed the lions…

  And before you could say ‘eighteen hour flight’, there I was in Ecuador. Heavily in debt to my credit card company and strapped into a rucksack the size and weight of a chest freezer full of dead rhino. I wish I could say I was happy about it.

  Nestled into a hollow in the Andes mountains, Quito is the highest capital city in the world. Even the airport is over nine thousand feet. Planes that land there don’t need to make a descent, they just go straight on. It’s a banana of a place, curving halfway around the side of a gigantic active volcano. And nestled into the centre of Quito is the ugliest bus station in the world. Terminal Terrestre it’s called, which has a disturbing ring of finality about it. This is where I found myself on Day One of my adventure.

  Through clouds of exhaust fumes I could just about make out… well, nothing actually. Visibility was about three and a half feet. Petrol was clearly not too expensive in Ecuador, as the drivers seemed keen to leave the buses revving the whole time they sat in the station. Or maybe they were just afraid that if they ever turned them off they’d never start again. A squint through the haze told me this was the more likely of the two reasons. Thick black smoke was coming out of the back of every bus. In fact thick black smoke was coming out of the front of quite a few of them.

  Their destinations were displayed on little signs in the windscreens, ranging from a ‘proper’ plastic thing to bits torn off a cardboard crisp box and scrawled on with a felt-tip pen. I was looking for somewhere spelled ‘Tambillo’ – though how it was pronounced could be anyone’s guess.

  The central island of the station was filled with dingy little shops and stalls. It must have been fairly obvious to any casual observer that the added weight of a carpet on my burden would have snapped my spine like a twig, yet that didn’t deter the carpet stall owners from bawling the benefits of their carpets at me as I passed. I was alone, downcast and dangerously overburdened. Even if a colourful woolly carpet had been just what I needed to brighten my day, what the hell was I supposed to do with it, shove it up my arse?

  A little way ahead of me I spied a whole gang of young guys hanging out, doing nothing. They had the look of people who did that a lot. Their clothes had started to take on the colour of the atmosphere. Maybe I should ask them, I thought. What’s the worst that could happen?

  “Um… Tam-bee-low?” I ventured.

  “Tambeejo?”

  “Yes! Yes, Tambeejo!” I’d studied Spanish intensely for almost an hour on the flight over and it was already starting to pay off.

  Suddenly the youths were racing around me in all directions, shouting constantly to each other as though it was some form of echolocation. A couple of them dodged right into the traffic and flagged down a pair of shuddering buses. A quick glance in the windscreens and they started shouting and gesturing wildly at me. This could only be good news! The guys were standing in front of one of the buses and not letting it move. I took my life in my hands and sprinted between the cars. Arms reached down through the doors and I was simultaneously dragged and pushed on board. My helpers banged on the side of the bus as though to reassure the driver that no more walking rucksacks needed crow-barring through the door. Then they generously stepped out of the way and the bus lurched off.

  It had worked! No matter the difficulty, I had overcome. I felt elated. Or possibly I was going into toxic shock from the smog. But I was on my way!

  It was a lovely journey. It would have been lovelier if I hadn’t been wedged between several kneecaps and an armpit, but with about two hundred people on a bus built to hold forty you really have to appreciate the small things. I had a turn at breathing every so often, and the involuntary motion of my nose against the filthy window cleaned a spot through which I could see a tiny part of the scenery I was travelling through. The foothills of the Andes mountains were thick with vegetation. Their sharply sculpted flanks were tamed into fields despite ridiculous, near vertical slopes.

  I saw a land so wild, so incalculably vast; I saw tin-roofed concrete shacks, sprinkled liberally throughout it; and occasionally I saw a piece of tinsel hanging from the roof of the bus. It draped itself across my face every time the driver flung us around a hairpin bend. I never did figure out the Ecuadorian urge to decorate the inside of a bus like a Christmas tree. I even saw one with a mirror ball in it once, which begged the question: just what part of my anatomy had room to dance?

  After forty minutes of the most intimate bodily contact I’ve ever had with half a dozen strangers simultaneously, my journey neared its end. I caught a glimpse of a sign saying ‘Tambillo’ and the bus skidded to an almost stop. The door flew open, and I was helpfully rolled out of it by the driver’s assistant. Further up the bus another door had opened and people were leaping courageously out, as more people from the bus ‘stop’ matched their jogging speed to the bus’s and grabbed for outstretched hands which hauled them on board. “They don’t waste much time around here,” I said to myself as I picked myself up out of the dust. Only I said it with a few more four letter words. I’d landed on my stomach, which was lucky, as if I’d ended up on my back I’d quite likely have died of starvation before managing to turn over. I dusted myself down and gazed across the road at my new home town.

  And was very nearly cut in half by the next bus. It thundered along hot on the heels of the one that had so casually dispensed me. A few passengers fell out of the door in my general direction and the bus accelerated onwards towards the horizon.

  I’d never seen so many buses. And never a single bus so crowded. Where the hell were all these people going? Not to Tambillo for the most part, which was fine by me. The place seemed small and deserted, quite a relief after the Mad Max intensity of Quito.

  I was standing at the base of a mountain which rose majestically behind me. A road in fairly poor repair veered off upwards at a crazy angle, past a few half-finished buildings that clung precariously to the slope. They gave me the impression that someone had started to build one, then realised he’d never be arsed to walk all that way up to his house every day. When he’d abandoned the project halfway through, most of his neighbours thought ‘bloody hell, he’s right!’ and they all buggered off to the pub.

  Tambillo town proper began on the other side of the Quito road (which is actually part of the Pan American Highway, and is probably the main reason that road is described as ‘of variable condition’). Marking the turn-off for Tambillo was a shop full of payphones. Which struck me as a bad idea. I mean, twenty people on the phone in one room? How hard can you push your finger into your ear before you hit brain? And what the hell do you do if you need to make a call after closing time? Obviously someone was making money out of the racket though – parked outside the ‘Telecabin’ was the biggest 4x4 truck I’d ever seen. It gleamed white and chrome, like a poster child for the Size Does Matter campaign. 4x4s were popular over here I’d noticed – by my calculations they were the third most popular vehicles on the road in Quito, after knackered buses and the boxy little yellow taxis made by some company too embarrassed to put a badge on them.

  I needed a taxi for the next leg of my journey. It wasn’t long before one of the battered yellow things rattled into view. I flagged it down and half expected to see the driver’s feet shoot out the bottom of the car and skid along the road to brake it. Instead it coughed to a halt in front of me and stalled.

  In the driver’s seat was a tiny, weather-beaten man. In the passenger seat was an equally tiny, equally weather-beaten woman. They looked two weather-beaten kids short of a family outing. I almost mistook her for a paying passenger until she began to bark at me in Spanish.

  Hell, I thought, here goes.

  “Um, Santa Martha, centro por animales?” I enquired.

  The couple exchanged astonished looks.
/>   “Um, hacienda Don Johnny?” I tried. It was what I’d been told to say.

  The man squinted at me, as though checking I was not a mirage. Then he waved me towards the back seat. Finally! I opened the door and manhandled my rucksack inside. Both of them regarded it sourly. There was a creak of protest from the car’s rear suspension. And I hadn’t gotten in yet.

  The driver craned his neck to look at me as I sat in and closed the door. He looked at me for quite some time. I started to feel a little self-conscious, and his head looked like it was going to fall off at any minute. Then he spoke, which must have been difficult with his windpipe twisted at such an angle. I was thrilled that I understood his question, though a little concerned about the need to answer it.

  “Where you want to go?” he’d asked.

  “Um,” I tried again, “la hacienda de Johnny Cordoba. Refugio des animales?”

  I got a blank look.

  God damn it! I knew this would happen! Ask for ‘la hacienda Don Johnny’, Toby had told me – they all know it. What a load of bollocks! As soon as I’d read that phrase my blood had run cold, just at the potential for complete disaster inherent in relying on such a dubious piece of advice. Now I was stuck in a taxi with no way of explaining my desired destination beyond repeating the same useless statement and shrugging my shoulders.

  “Hacienda de Don Johnny,” I said, and shrugged at him.

  Inside I was starting to cry.

  “Cerca de aquí?” the driver asked. (Near here?)

  “Yes,” I said, for want of the ability to say “I haven’t got a bloody clue mate.”

  So he fired up the engine and we sped off in the same direction as the endless stream of buses. As we charged down the highway the driver occasionally twisted round in his seat to ask me “Here?” I could only shrug.