Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  Then he spied a little track branching off to the left, and with a cry of triumph he headed down it at top speed. Neither track nor car were particularly well suited to this, as the top of my head discovered immediately. It was a painful way to travel, but I had a feeling that the roof of the car would give out long before my skull. Thankfully after a couple of minutes we came to a group of tumble-down buildings surrounding an open expanse of concrete. We pulled up in the middle and the car shuddered into silence.

  We had arrived at a farm of some kind, and one that didn’t get many visitors from the looks of things. The car had barely stopped shaking when an enormous bearded man emerged from a corrugated iron barn and approached us at what must have been his top speed. For which I was grateful, since I was on the meter. I glanced at the dashboard. No meter. This crappy car didn’t even seem to have a speedometer. I guess I was paying whatever the driver thought his time was worth. Oh-oh…

  By the time I’d had this uneasy revelation the fat farmer and the driver were conversing at volume. Every so often one of them would glance at me as though expecting something. There was something in the farmer’s gaze that made my buttocks clench involuntarily. It was time for my broken record bit.

  “Hacienda de Johnny Cordoba?” I pleaded.

  They both just stared.

  “Santa Martha!” I begged.

  They exchanged puzzled looks, then returned to staring at me. Not making much headway, I thought. This clearly wasn’t the place, and even if it was there was no way I was staying here. To gain a gut that size, the farmer must have eaten his whole family. I was not going to be next on the menu.

  They’d started to jabber at one another again, punctuating each rapid burst of dialogue with a gesture in my direction. I felt a cold trickle of sweat run between my shoulder blades, and prayed they weren’t negotiating a price for my anal virginity. I waited for a natural pause, and interrupted them.

  “Look, this is the wrong place, let’s go,” I told the driver.

  No response.

  “Do you speak English?” I asked the farmer.

  Nothing.

  “Okay,” I addressed the driver in my mother tongue, “we’re not going to find the place like this, because you don’t have a clue where we are. I want to leave before this fat bastard tries to rape me and eat me. Please take me back to Tambillo, and if your car doesn’t disintegrate or explode before we get there I’ll give you five dollars just for being brave enough to drive the fucking thing.”

  “¿Qué?” he asked.

  “Tambillo,” I said, making ‘let’s go’ motions with both hands. He got the picture. He started the car, a minor miracle in my opinion, and with a few parting words he screeched away, leaving the farmer still standing there with his mouth hanging open. What a sight. Thank God it was receding.

  As we bounced back up the dirt track at top speed I could tell my driver was in a bad mood. This was pretty much confirmed when we shot out onto the main road again. The car skidded to a halt and died.

  “Tambillo?” I asked tentatively.

  He helpfully pointed back up the main road.

  I took the hint. I shoved my bag out the back door, then climbed after it. I dug in my back pocket for some dollars, and was grateful indeed that I had several single notes. I didn’t like my chances of getting any change if I’d had to offer this guy a twenty.

  He scowled at me as he took the cash, then turned his attention to reviving his vehicle. This left his tiny wrinkled wife to scowl at me while he coaxed some life into the engine. What a tag-team. He favoured me with one more black look before his trademark top speed exit left me choking on a cloud of dust.

  The walk back to town was an epic one. Stumbling along a rough gravel bank beside the highway, wearing what felt remarkably like a grand piano on my back, I was for the first time at the full mercy of the sun. As each bus thundered past its slipstream would drag me slightly further from my goal. It was a long, long time before I recognised a café on the other side of the road, signalling my return to civilisation. Soaked through with sweat, bent practically double and breathing in gasps, I staggered over to the payphone shop and collapsed. For a while I just lay in the shadow of the monstrous white truck, inventing choice phrases to throw at Toby when I finally got to meet him.

  I mean! Ask for hacienda de Johnny Cordoba? What an arsehole! For all I knew I was asking for a mythical character. I felt like I was standing in London asking for Mr and Mrs Smith – or worse, at Loch Ness looking for the home of A. Monster…

  My air of quiet desperation must have intrigued the locals. A couple of guys approached me wearing concerned expressions. They asked me something, and I fell back on the only piece of information I had.

  “Please,” I begged, “where is hacienda de Johnny Cordoba?”

  “Johnny Cordoba?” one asked, looking alert. “You want taxi?”

  “Yes, yes!” I told him.

  “Ah, hacienda Don Johnny. Sí, sí.”

  He walked back to the gleaming white truck and pulled open the door.

  No! Was I about to get a lift? Then I noticed. Numbers on the side. Identical truck parked behind it. And another a bit further down the road. Well bugger me backwards with a greased vegetable… this thing was a taxi! The mother of all taxis. This corner was a taxi rank.

  And I’d been dropped off right opposite.

  About two hours ago.

  And so I set off on a journey which would astound me every time I made it. Pretty much every day for the next three months I would marvel at the tenacity of people determined to live on the side of this mountain. The single track road was more pothole than surface in some places, it twisted and turned across the face of the mountain in a series of hairpin bends and switchbacks, and the gradient was insane. We passed people (and donkeys!) walking up and down, and at one point another massive four-wheel drive taxi swung past us with inches to spare and at least three of its wheels hanging over the precipice. My driver didn’t even bat an eyelid, which was just as well because I was concerned that if he blinked too often we’d end up nose first in one of the half-finished concrete block houses scattered along the route. Amazingly he knew every crumbling chunk of road, every gaping chasm (of which there were several), every protruding boulder and lethal bend. We raced past the lot, making decent speed despite the angle of the truck. Yet about ten minutes into the journey we’d still not arrived. We were so high I was starting to feel faint. Back home this journey would already have cost me £20 – and done at least £250 worth of damage to the car!

  If anything could handle this punishment, the truck could. No wonder the taxis here were bigger than most of the houses. All of a sudden it hit me – the insanity of trying to coax a crappy yellow city cab up here! I felt quite glad my previous driver hadn’t known of my destination and tried to attempt it. It’d have been easier to carry his car up there than to drive it!

  We crested a long, straight section of road and arrived at a huge pair of rusty wrought iron gates. The driver winked at me as we turned in down my boss’s driveway, and another few minutes of twisting and bouncing brought us to a small cluster of buildings perched tenuously on the hillside, surrounded by fields.

  This was Santa Martha.

  And it was gorgeous.

  Baptism of Fruit Juice

  The view that was to greet me every morning in this country never lost a smidgen of its impact. This first sight of its rugged beauty took my breath away. Before me the land fell away dramatically, lush green pasture plunging out of sight down the mountainside. Beyond rose the far side of the valley, at once seeming impossibly distant yet almost touchable; scruffy white wisps of cloud decorated the space between us. A tangle of trees straggled here and there across the land, dividing rough fields so steep that it would defy all laws of gravity to work on them.

  I hardly paid any attention as the taxi executed a smart three-point turn behind me, and totally unfazed by the incline of the driveway, sped off in a cloud of dust. I
only had eyes for this storybook panorama. It beat the snot out of London.

  Unlike most of the houses I’d noticed thus far in Ecuador, the building in front of me looked finished. Deliciously so in fact. Three stories with real stucco on them gleamed white in the afternoon sunlight, topped by a wide flat sun deck. There was no doubt that this was an expensive dwelling. Next door sat a cheery yellow cottage with a certain homemade quality to it – and a sheet of what looked disturbingly like asbestos for the roof. A path connected the two, and the most pointless fence I’d ever seen separated them. It was three strands of wire running on a series of posts around the entire cottage, an obstacle only mildly more forbidding than the long grass beneath it. I struggled for a few seconds trying to think of any animal on earth to which this would form a barrier. A really big penguin was the only thing that sprang to mind.

  Plonked seemingly at random into the surrounding grass were a couple of more typical buildings – a tiny breeze block shed with a washing machine outside it, and behind me a rusting sheet of corrugated metal on stilts, which seemed to serve as a carport.

  A skinny white guy in a stained t-shirt was just coming out of the cottage. I could tell it was Toby as soon as he opened his mouth. He was one of the few people I’ve ever met that types an email exactly the same way he talks.

  “Alright mate!” he called, and threw me a casual wave as he closed the gate behind him. I looked him over as he walked towards me. Average height. Relaxed. A bit dirty. But better looking than me, damn it. He was wearing a pale red baseball cap, so faded that it verged on the pink.

  “Hi!” I greeted him enthusiastically. “Nice place you got here.”

  “Yeah. Sweet, innit? Did you have a good trip?”

  “I, err…” Suddenly it didn’t seem right to launch into a massive rant about the shocking inadequacy of his instructions.

  “Yeah, not bad,” I told him instead. I shook his hand vigourously and grinned back at him. It was infectious. I could afford to wait a few days before explaining just how close I’d come to being shagged up the bum by a Sasquatch.

  “Good to meet you mate. Right, well I’ll show you around shall I?”

  As Toby was leading me back towards the pointless fence, a middle-aged Ecuadorian man emerged from the back door of the main house. He was tall, nearly my height, and powerfully built – practically a giant compared to the locals I’d seen so far. His black hair was thinning and closely cropped, and he wore a watch that looked big enough to control the national nuclear defence.

  This had to be the legendary Don Johnny Cordoba, who had founded Santa Martha on his own land, and with his own money, after realising just how widespread the problem of illegal animal possession and maltreatment was in Ecuador. The website made him sound like one part humble animal lover, three parts crusading superhero. The man himself looked calm and confident – indisputably in charge, yet approachable. A sly smile and a gleam in his eye told me he was finding something amusing. It was a fair bet that that something was me.

  “Johnny, esto es Tony,” Toby explained. Then “Tony, this is Johnny,” he added helpfully.

  “Mucho gusto,” Johnny greeted me with a manly handshake.

  Words danced in my head. My chance to make a first impression!

  “Me gusta mucho!” I responded enthusiastically.

  Johnny’s arm froze mid handshake. Just for a second. A slight confusion quirked his bushy brow, and then was gone. He smiled widely and surrendered my hand. He glanced over at Toby, and some unspoken jest passed between them. Then he cleared his throat, looked back at me and rattled off a few comments in rapid Spanish.

  “He said, good to have you here, and he’s off to do something with the cows,” Toby explained. “He’ll be back later.”

  Johnny waited for the end of Toby’s translation, gave me one last measuring glance, and strode off down the path.

  “That went well,” said Toby.

  “What did I do? Did I say something?”

  “Nah, mate. It’s all good.”

  “He said mucho gusto… that’s ‘Nice to meet you’, right?” I asked.

  “Yup.”

  “And I said…?”

  “Me gusta mucho. Slightly different.”

  I could tell he was trying not to laugh. It was the first phrase I’d learned from my one-hour audio course. Actually it was the only phrase I’d learned. But something wasn’t quite right. “Toby…”

  “Ha!” He couldn’t resist any longer. “It means, ‘I like you – a lot!’ I think you surprised him.”

  “Oh shit!”

  “Yeah, that’s probably what he’s thinking! Maybe he’ll put it down to bad grammar.”

  “So he said hello, and I…”

  “You came on to him, yeah. Well you’re the first new volunteer to do that!”

  “Oh. Shit. I should probably go home right now…”

  “Don’t worry mate. He thought it was pretty funny, I’d say. Or else… maybe he likes you too!”

  Toby I did like, and straight away. He was a very smart guy, with a ready wit and a readier smile. His attitude was very laid back, as was his manner of speaking. He rarely seemed worried or annoyed – and even when he did it was amusing. From the beginning I never felt like I had to impress him, or that he was judging me in any way. He seemed genuinely honest, though remorselessly sarcastic, and he became one of my best friends.

  But he couldn’t cook for shit.

  Especially not an omelette.

  That first afternoon he took me with him as he fed the whole menagerie of animals. I was amazed. Surrounding a small garden next to Johnny’s house were a series of smaller cages containing monkeys of every possible description. Black, red, brown, ranging in size from tiny little balls of fluff to something that looked like it could pull your arms off and beat you to death with the wet ends. There were bendy-nosed beasties so daft-looking they could have been glove puppets sewn by glue sniffing school kids. I swear they had an E.T. in there somewhere, and at least one of The Wombles.

  Toby deposited a heaped ladleful of bright orange slop into each animal’s food dish while I guarded the cage doors against escape attempts. The creatures loved the stuff, although to me it looked like the contents of the toilet bowl the morning after ten pints and a dodgy curry had fought their way back out of my stomach. Toby kept up a running commentary on the feeding process, listing off the names of the animals in English and Spanish and explaining a bit about where each was from. I heard none of it. Somewhere behind me about a million parrots were screeching. Monkeys howled. Things I couldn’t even name turned back flips or poked sticky fingers through the bars at me. More than once I was hit in the back of the head by a monkey flinging something which I hoped and prayed was part of its breakfast.

  With the slop bowl finally empty and every animal totally focused on rooting through their food to find the best bits, Toby told me a little about Santa Martha’s larger denizens. The centre was home to big cats that looked like scaled-down leopards, eagles with shotgun holes in them, a puma with a weight problem, a deer and one chubby bear cub.

  And a horse.

  “Maybe you can ride him,” Toby offered in an offhand manner. The horse didn’t look up to much. It probably would have been easier for me to carry him. He eyed me nervously as though he’d just had exactly the same thought himself, and edged a little further away. I didn’t feel inclined to intimidate the poor beast, so I filed the possibility of riding under ‘things to consider later’ and followed Toby on down the path.

  The path, referred to by Toby as ‘The Road’ (which I still maintain was entirely unjustified) ran from the end of the driveway, past Johnny’s house, then twisted back on itself as it ploughed downhill past a large cow-milking shed. Santa Martha was primarily a working dairy farm; that was where the money came from to feed the growing refuge. It was a financial balancing act which, I would come to discover, constantly teetered on the brink of disaster. Johnny used every ounce of his formidable prese
nce to bully favourable deals from local producers. Somehow, it worked.

  The ‘road’ was lined with cobblestones and heavily textured in shit. If this was the mess the cows made every morning on their way to being milked, well, I could only be glad they weren’t led past the puma cage first…

  After another switchback the road cut a rather meandering line across the hillside, past a series of massive enclosures for the bigger beasties. Sooner or later I’d be getting to know them all, but for now Toby wanted to give me a special treat. Tall trees lined the path for most of its length, draping their leafy tendrils across our shoulders as we wound our way deeper into the landscape. He was taking me to meet his favourite animal of all.

  I could hardly believe my eyes. Enormous, ancient, placid… the Giant Galapagos Tortoise was all of these things. And a cheeky bugger to boot. I knelt in awe beside him as he sprayed me with chunks of his breakfast.

  Toby would offer him a peeled banana, and he would slowly, ponderously, stretch out his neck and yawn for it. Toby stuffed as much inside as he could, then pulled his fingers out quick before the beak-like jaws ground shut. The excess – assuming it was banana – would slide down the tortoise’s chin and add to the soggy mash of remnants on the floor. After the first time Toby fed him an apple I learned to kneel slightly further away. When he bit into one with crushing force it had a tendency to explode in my direction. I could almost see the old git smirking slightly as I wiped the pulp off my forehead.

  But what a magnificent animal! He was almost waist high at the top of his shell, and if I’d had to lug that thing around I wouldn’t be moving too fast either. The mottled green and brown dome of solid bone looked like it could withstand a direct hit from a cruise missile. And a series of shallow indentations scattered across the surface of the shell stood testament that at the very least it was bulletproof.

  Toby had helped rescue the tortoise, whom he had christened ‘Meldrew’. A six-strong crew of volunteers had brought him back from Quito in Johnny’s truck, knackering the suspension in the process. The tortoise had been poached as a youngster, and could never be returned to his natural home in the Galapagos Islands because of their extremely stringent quarantine regulations. Meldrew had been discovered by the Quito police in the back garden of a very bored, very wealthy man, who had evidently been using him for shotgun target practice.