Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  “Pin-ya,” I echoed.

  “Right. See, they spell it P-I-N-A, only with a little accent over the ‘N’ that turns it into a “NY’ sound.”

  “I see,” I said. I didn’t see at all.

  “When I’d been here about a week, I asked Johnny’s wife Brenda if I should put a pineapple in the blender, only I forgot to pronounce it with the accent. She totally cracked up, laughed at me for about twenty minutes, then went and told everyone in the house, and then they all laughed at me too. It turns out I’d just asked her if I should blend my penis.”

  There wasn’t much I could say to that.

  Next into the bowl we sprinkled vitamin powder and added more fruit to cover it. By the time we were finished we had a vast vat of goo, thick and brightly coloured. With chunks in it. It did look disturbingly like it had been eaten once already.

  It smelled heavenly. All the potent fruity fragrances mingled indistinguishably, making the very air around the bowl tremble with mouth-watering vapour. If I closed my eyes, I could almost eat the stuff. If I opened them, and caught myself in the process, I’d most likely be adding last night’s supper to the mix.

  “We do it the same every morning,” Toby was explaining, “and again every afternoon at four. Sometimes Johnny’s wife Brenda likes to do it, if she wants to try adding new stuff or if she thinks we’re late getting up. It’s the most important part of the job, getting the food right and getting plenty of it out to the animals.”

  “I can guess at the next most important part,” I told him.

  “Yeah?”

  “Well, we’re pretty much feeding all these guys their body weight in mashed fruit and oatmeal twice a day. That’s gonna make for a big pile of shit.”

  Toby’s eyes gleamed. “You’re not wrong mate,” he said. “Shovel it in one end, and away from the other. For everything else, we have Jimmy.”

  Today was also the day to feed our resident big cat. Since the fat puma’s enclosure was quite a distance, Toby ordered me into the passenger seat of a white truck, similar in style to the monster four-by-four taxi that had brought me up the mountain. This truck gleamed rather less however, and appeared to be composed largely of rust. My door didn’t shut all the way and the windscreen was cracked. Death Trap, I’d have named it given the chance. But this was Ecuador. I’d already noticed that the local health and safety standards were a little behind the UK. Perhaps it was better not to ask too many questions in case I didn’t like the answers.

  I instinctively reached for my seat belt, and froze halfway through the gesture when I caught Toby staring at me.

  “Sorry! Force of habit,” I explained.

  “S’alright mate. We don’t normally bother round here.” He gave me what I had already come to think of as his trademark grin. “I’ll try not to kill you.”

  He then spent the next ten minutes trying to do just that. To say that Toby drove like a maniac was an understatement on a par with saying that he liked chillies. Toby’s love for chillies was unhealthy right up to the point of severely endangering his digestive tract. His driving was fucking scary.

  As we bounced along the road from pothole to pothole the repeated hammering of my head on the roof began to leave a dent in both. My knees were wedged under the dash and even my toes were straining for purchase on the inside of my trainers. When he finally skidded to a stop in a clearing beside the puma cage I collapsed back in my seat in sheer relief.

  Breathing. I’d somehow forgotten it, and now seemed like a suitable juncture to start up again.

  Gasp.

  Sigh.

  Unclench.

  “Nice driving,” I hissed.

  “Yeah, sweet innit! Can you drive?” He seemed totally immune to my sarcasm.

  I was a little shocked for resuming normal conversation. “Ah… no. Well yes, but no. That is, I can but I haven’t got a licence. Yet.” I could feel bruises developing on my knees, elbow and forehead. My neck had gone stiff. I think I had whiplash.

  “No licence?” Toby eyed me thoughtfully. “Ah, don’t worry about that mate. Me neither.” And he climbed out of the car.

  “His story is a bit of a tragedy actually,” Toby explained. Totally unfazed by the drive, he had already switched back into helpful tour guide mode. I climbed out of the truck and stared through the chainlink fence, looking for any sign of the tubby puma.

  “He was being kept as a pet by some guy up in Quito. Like, kept in the back garden! The guy didn’t want to get hurt accidentally, so he had his claws pulled out, his teeth pulled out… fucking sick, man. And to stop him being aggressive, he had him castrated. So when Johnny rescued him he was in a really bad state, living in a tiny garden in his own filth. So they brought him here. He was one of the first animals to arrive, after Johnny saw what was happening to the local animals and decided to do something about it. This was one of the first enclosures they built.”

  “Was he always fat?”

  “Yeah. It comes with having your bollocks chopped off. Of course now he gets plenty to eat, and still doesn’t move much, so he’s just getting fatter! His belly drags along the ground. It’s pretty bad – he’ll never be able to leave. Can’t release him into the wild without teeth or claws, so he’ll be here ‘til the end.”

  Following Toby’s outstretched arm I could just make out the massive tawny head, surrounded by scraggly bushes in front of what seemed to be a natural cave. Fat Puma was asleep.

  “I guess he sleeps a lot…?”

  “Yeah. I call him Garfield. You’ll get to see him a lot better when we go inside.”

  “Wow! When do we go inside?”

  “Every week. We get to pick up what’s left of all the chickens he’s eaten, and pull ‘em out.”

  “All the chickens he’s gummed you mean?”

  Toby gave me an exasperated look.

  “What? I was only wondering how he could eat chickens. I mean, does he suck them like a fruit pastel?”

  “You’re not supposed to make fun of him, you tight git! It’s sad!”

  “I know, I know. Ha! He’d probably kill himself, but he hasn’t got the balls…”

  “Just feed him the chickens.”

  The back of the truck had a hideously stained tarpaulin covering a small pile of chicken carcasses. Toby directed me as I chose a couple in slightly better condition and lobbed them over the fence into Garfield’s enclosure. The great golden head didn’t move at all.

  “Have you ever seen him move?” I asked.

  “Oh, he can move,” Toby told me, “and it’s pretty freaky when he does. He’s not little. When he comes towards you when you’re in the cage, it’s like… shit!”

  “But he’s got no teeth or claws,” I pointed out. “What’s he going to do, sit on you?”

  By way of punishment Toby drove back extra fast.

  Man’s Work

  For my first proper day’s work I was led into a rather dilapidated-looking garage beyond the monkey cages. The floor was presumably poured concrete, though it was impossible to tell. Like a boulder sitting in the jungle, this floor had attained its own ecosystem. An inch of dirt gave the impression of bare earth underfoot. Scrawny weeds fought for growing-room with mechanical debris of every possible description. I remember thinking it would make a perfect TV set for a post-apocalypse style bombed-out factory. Or a torture chamber. I placed my feet very carefully. It wouldn’t do to trip over some ancient pipe and impale myself on a decomposing scarecrow. Not on my first day. Gigantic cog wheels leaned against the stone walls at random intervals. Why? Who could say. Perhaps Jimmy was the crazed inventor type? It didn’t seem likely. Within seconds of meeting him I had figured that Jimmy was as hard as nails – and about as bright as one. I’d nicknamed him Mighty Mouse.

  He was sorting tools out from several piles behind one of the barn-like doors. Toby took a narrow shovel and a pickaxe. I was handed something unchristenable – two gigantic spoons, hinged together where the long wooden handles protruded from the business e
nd. Beyond delivering a mean ass-pinch from six feet away I couldn’t begin to imagine what they were for. Luckily I had Jimmy to enlighten me.

  Next door to the coatamundi cage was an overgrown garden, the back of which butted up against the side wall of Johnny’s house. We followed Jimmy there and dropped our tools alongside the brace of lethal-looking machetes he’d been carrying. It was time for my first lesson.

  “Excava-dora,” Jimmy named my peculiar burden. He picked it up and, with a practised arm, drove the spoon ends deep into the soil of the garden. With a swift wrench of the handles he pulled the tool free and deposited a double spoonful of earth next to the hole he’d made. It was a digger!

  Jimmy grunted and passed over the handles of the ‘excavadora’. Copying him, I took up a wide-legged stance and threw the thing at the ground, with the predictable result that it bounced off the iron-hard dirt and smacked me in the mouth.

  The bastard.

  It took several tries before I achieved the right balance of control versus letting go. I hauled on the handles and grudgingly the ground gave up a pathetic amount of soil, which I proudly added to the pile.

  “That’s right mate!” Toby said. He’d been watching the procedure with a smirk. “Keep doing that in the same spot and you’ll end up with a post hole.”

  I eyed the spoons doubtfully. “How long does it take?”

  “Quite a while at first.”

  This was true.

  The hole grew deeper and wider at the same speed as if I’d actually been using a spoon. A teaspoon. By the time it was done my palms sported a couple of nasty blisters from the dry wood of the handles, but Jimmy made a careful examination of the hole and gave me a little round of applause. I basked.

  Then he indicated with one foot the spot where he wanted the next hole digging. It was alarmingly close to the first one. And covered by the pile of dirt I’d just extracted. As I shovelled this off to a more convenient location behind me I muttered a few expletives, and sneaked a peek at the rest of the garden. “What are we doing anyway?” I asked Toby.

  “We’re building a new enclosure,” he explained. “We’re gonna put posts in all round, then fasten wire mesh to it.”

  “And the posts go in these holes…”

  “Yeah.”

  With two sides of the garden already bordered by the house and the coati’s cage, that left two sides in obvious need of post holes. Neither side was more than ten metres. And it looked like the holes were going to be spaced about a metre apart…

  My first day was shaping up to be a long one.

  “Keep at it mate!” Toby encouraged me. And left.

  So I dug. And dug. By the fourth or fifth hole my blisters had burst, and new ones had formed in the less trafficked areas of my hands, and burst as well. The loose flaps of skin were clogged with dust. Two holes later they even stopped hurting. Instead my hands throbbed in time to my digging. Or was it my heartbeat? The two had married their rhythms – beat, thrust, release, beat, grasp, twist, beat, remove.

  That’s when it occurred to me that I was getting good. Instead of a constant inner diatribe on the unjustness of my situation and the dubious birth circumstances of Jimmy and Toby, I’d attained a kind of mental calm. My mind had drifted to other things – cheese sandwiches featuring strongly – and without even realising, I’d dug hole number eight nearly twice as deep as necessary. I smiled to myself as I moved one long pace to my left and raised the excavadora again. ‘When those lazy bastards get back I’ll show them,’ I thought.

  I didn’t have long to wait. Both men returned carrying a whole tree trunk each – the daddy of all fence posts! They must have hacked the trees down with machetes. I started to wonder if I hadn’t gotten the easier job after all. For every hole I dug, one of these guys had to cut down a tree! A skinny tree for sure, but both machetes had very thin, fragile-looking blades and cheap plastic handles. I could imagine them standing up quite well to clearing jungle vines, but deforestation was really pushing it.

  With a bit of gentle persuasion from a shovel the first fence post soon occupied its hole. Soil was filled back in and we all got to do our best Riverdance impersonations to compact it. We now had the beginning of our new enclosure. It was going to be very tall.

  “What the hell are we keeping in here?” I had to ask. “A T-Rex?”

  Toby wasn’t sure himself, so he quizzed Jimmy. It didn’t seem to do much good though.

  “I think he wants to put a deer in here?” He sounded confused. I could understand why. Whilst evidently tall enough to prevent a deer from escaping, the enclosure would be nowhere near wide enough to house such a creature. Not if it was fond of exercise anyway.

  Toby shrugged the mystery off. “You get used to it,” he explained. “I never understand what’s going on around here. Getting info out of these guys is kind of like using the excavadora. You dig, and dig, and get a little bit out here and there.” Then he grinned at me. “Welcome to Ecuador!”

  My turn at the machete work was more to my liking. True, by that point I’d already lost most of the skin on my palms, but I do love sharp things. My first attempt, with a white-knuckled death grip on the handle, resulted in score one for the tree. I deployed all my strength in one brutal swing, only to find that contact with the solid wooden trunk simply redirected most of the force back up my arm. As I staggered back clutching my shoulder the machete didn’t even have the good grace to remain lodged in the tree. It clattered to the ground, a steely ring of defiance from my adversary. “Take that!” the tree said. After a bout of extreme eye-rolling Jimmy demonstrated the proper technique again. With much exaggerated looseness and a precise swing he smoothly embedded the blade three inches deep. It looked effortless, as though he knew which parts of the tree were secretly made of painted foam. To me the problem was insurmountable – the tree was clearly harder than I was. But it was a sitting target! Could I really lose a fight with an inanimate object? Even if it was bigger than me?

  I swung loose and was rewarded with a bite. Not quite a Jimmy, but a start – the narrow edge of the blade had chopped clear through the bark and on into virgin wood!

  And it took nearly five minutes for me to get it back out.

  Score two to the tree.

  By the time I chopped down my first tree, Toby and Jimmy had cut enough posts between them for the rest of the enclosure. I consoled myself with the thought that there had to be a knack to it and it had to be learnable. Jimmy might actually have been a machete in a former life, but Toby was a Londoner. He had to have picked up his skills since he got here – I couldn’t see him hacking his way through rush hour on the tube train.

  Felling a mighty giant of the forest made me feel a bit guilty. A proud living entity had been callously cut down in its prime, hacked to pieces by an arrogant youth with a knife fetish. But it was for the greater good, I told myself. And anyway, it served it right for being so cocky.

  I reclaimed the machete and wiped my blood off the handle as the others eyed my handiwork. Jimmy’s critique was a simple, two-stage process; first he pointed at the log he had just finished with. its end was a neat point, as was the corresponding end still rooted to the ground. Slivers of wood were scattered in a rough circle around the scene. Then he gestured towards the fruits of my labour. My tree had been severed by sheer violence. The length that lay on the ground was badly wounded by cuts ranging up all sides. The rooted portion showed evidence of the same treatment. It looked like Edward Scissorhands had had an epileptic fit in front of it. Everywhere lay chunks, shards, splinters of wood. I was ankle deep in the stuff. Between the bit that was cut and the bit that was left, there had once existed a clear foot of tree trunk that I had reduced entirely to sawdust.

  By the end of the day our new enclosure was finished. We’d hauled logs, raised logs, and jumped around the bases of them like wasted druids. Finally Jimmy had shown us to an area opposite the garage where several huge rolls of wire mesh lay slowly disintegrating. With much cursing in a mix
ture of languages we’d dragged the mesh over to the new enclosure, unrolled it, and nailed it firmly around the posts. It was, of course, a lot more work than that, but describing it is not even as much fun as doing it was. Suffice to say the cage was built. Apart from the door; that would be tomorrow’s job.

  The day had been one hell of a learning curve. In addition to turning half a tree into kindling I’d begun to understand the true meaning of the word ‘manpower’. I’d learnt that Jimmy, though tiny, was clearly made of the same stuff they built The Terminator out of. And that when people back home talked about making something with blood, sweat and tears they really had no idea. None.

  I wasn’t going to let it defeat me though. Today had been a triumph! I had taken all the punishment thrown my way and asked for more. I’d dug, chopped and nailed harder than I’d thought possible. Work here was obviously going to be painful, but I could handle that. I was going to prove it. I would become a MAN!

  The upwelling of pride carried me all the way back to the volunteer house and lasted right up until I put my hands into a bowl of hot, soapy water.

  Wet Dreams

  It was some time before I dared consider whole body immersion. There was nothing wrong with my body – other than intense pain in every major muscle group. Bruising to the arms, legs and mouth. A few chunky splinters, the occasional laceration and a stink like something that’s been dead for three weeks. But it was my hands. They burned with a fiery agony I had never known before. Toby charitably called it ‘hard work’. How was I supposed to hold soap? To rub it against my body? To sweep the suds off myself, when my hands could hardly bear to be opened?

  But then, there was the stink.

  The shower, when I dared brave it, was awesome. For about three and a half minutes. Then for no immediately apparent reason it decided to hate me. The water instantly turned icy cold causing me to shriek at high pitch and high volume. I leapt out backwards with a speed I never knew I possessed, and swore violently.