Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  Toby was obviously passing by outside. Actually he could have been anywhere – I reckon they heard my scream in Tambillo.

  “Alright mate?” he enquired. “Water gone off?”

  “Fucking cold, is what it’s gone!”

  “Oh, yeah, no problem. The boiler’s gone out. Hang on.”

  I heard the back door open and close, then Toby’s voice bellowed through the window.

  “Try now!”

  My big toe ventured back into the water stream.

  “No!”

  “Right.” I heard the crack of a match being struck. He was obviously standing right under the bathroom window trying to relight the gas boiler.

  “Okay. Try now!”

  Straight away I felt the heat returning to the water. “Cheers mate!” Thank God for Toby, I thought. And for showers. I stood under and let the piping hot water flow over my aching body. Sheer luxury. I could have stayed under there all night. Except that two minutes later like the flick of a switch the water turned to ice again. “BOLLOCKS!” I shouted as I repeated my earlier feat of bathroom agility.

  “TOOOBEEEE!!!”

  There was no chess that night.

  The next couple of days passed in a blur. Having proved what real men got up to in an average day, both Toby and Jimmy had decided to take it a bit easier on me. The almost-finished cage, fruit of our ground-and-back breaking labours, was largely ignored in favour of cleaning the entire refuge from top to bottom. As I may have mentioned, there was a long way between those two points.

  I got to visit the miniature leopards, which I’d been eager to do ever since seeing photos of them on the Santa Martha website. Ocelots, they were called, and we had a six-strong pack of them. We fed them over the fence with the last of the dead chickens and spent much of the next day inside their enclosure, clearing away the scraps. One ocelot emerged straight away, purring like a house cat on steroids, and proceeded to wind her way around and between my legs as though begging to be petted. Which was pretty surreal, since she was the size of a German shepherd. My entire hand would fit comfortably in her mouth, so I resisted the urge to give her a stroke.

  We had one more ocelot in solitary confinement, reigning supreme over a maze of an enclosure with ramps, walkways, tree trunks and kennels. She was a regal-looking creature, the black swirls standing out like fresh ink blots on her gleaming golden hide. Toby (very daringly, I thought) led the way inside as she growled a deep, throaty warning. He stopped just out of arm’s reach and levelled a finger. “Stop that,” he told her. She ignored him. But she seemed content to grumble, threatening our backs as we stooped to collect her leftovers. The other cats were beautiful sure enough, but this lady was nothing short of magnificent. I paused for a last look as Toby searched for the door chain in the long grass. My body thrummed with the danger inherent in being this close to something so powerful.

  “She’s incredible,” I told him. Within earshot, in case she was listening.

  “Yeah…” Toby’s voice had a melancholy edge to it. “She’s got HIV. The feline version of course – caught it from a street cat before we got her. We have to keep her separate, but… Johnny wants to kill her. Put her down, like.”

  “No? That’s… harsh.” I had nothing better to say.

  “What else can you do though? He suggests it every time the vet comes around, and I argue with him every time. Sooner or later I’ll lose.”

  He was right about one thing. There was nothing I could do.

  Next there was a trip to Garfield’s enclosure and, as promised, inside it. We each took a homemade tool called an azadón with us from the garage. They were rough lengths of steel pipe, with flat trowel blades welded onto the bottom at right angles. A kind of rake/hoe/pickaxe, they would also crush the skull of a woolly rhinoceros with a single blow, were we ever in such need. Relatively few of Jimmy’s tools were not weaponized.

  We worked our way across Garfield’s enclosure, collecting chicken corpses from the undergrowth as we went. Garfield himself was asleep. The shredded remnants of one bird lay mere inches from those gigantic forepaws and the head nestled comfortably on them.

  “Go on – get it,” Toby said.

  “Fuck off! You get it!”

  “Oh, so now you are scared, eh? I thought so.”

  “I’m not scared.”

  The puma stirred slightly, grunted in his sleep. We both recoiled instinctively.

  “Go on!” Toby urged. He was loving every minute.

  “You gotta be kidding me,” I muttered.

  “Come on. Be a man.” It was a phrase I already dreaded. Jimmy used it to convince me to dig deeper, chop harder and carry things that weighed more than I did. It had resulted in the distinct lack of skin on my palms.

  “That shit’s not going to work on me forever you know.”

  Toby wisely kept his opinions about that to himself.

  I edged forward, almost close enough to touch the beast. Then I knelt and slowly extended the pole of my azadón. I winced as the flat blade glanced off a rock in its path. I hooked the carcass and dragged it backwards – whereupon it split into several smaller chunks. I swore and Toby giggled. One by one I retrieved the chunks, gathered them in my hands and sprung back to a safe distance.

  The puma slept on.

  “There,” I told Toby. “Now I’m a man.”

  He wisely kept quiet about that, too.

  The eagles were also due a visit. We had a pair of them – black-chested buzzard eagles to be precise. Both displayed large, ragged shotgun holes in their wings. Shot by farmers fearing for their chickens, a tragic yet understandable act. We’d been doing the same in England a little over fifty years ago. The birds shared a vast enclosure, stretching many metres up into the cloudless sky. Which seemed a little cruel, since neither of them could get more than waist height off the ground. There were perches of course, but they couldn’t be placed too high up. There was the ever-present danger of the birdbrains forgetting the reason for their incarceration, jumping from a height, flapping pitifully, then hitting the ground with a thump – and possibly a broken leg or two. They couldn’t understand that they now had the same lift generating potential as a sack of house bricks.

  But Toby had left the best ‘til last. Osita is a contraction of the Spanish ‘oso’ (for bear) and the diminutive ‘~ita’ (meaning something small and cute). Osita lived up to her name in all ways but one; for a small, cute thing, she was about the size of wheelie bin. She was the bear equivalent of a teenager and almost fully grown, but she lolloped around her enclosure with such enthusiasm that it was easy to think of her as a boisterous child. Just not the kind you want sitting on your knee. Toby passed her a few chunks of fruit through the bars, which she gobbled up instantly. Then he scratched her nose. “We’ll have to come and fill her pond up pretty soon.” He pointed out a deep depression, lined with concrete, some way down the hill. “No matter what I do, she always manages to drain it. I’ve tried everything to plug the outflow pipe, but whatever I stuff in there she removes and eats. It’s like a game she plays, but to be honest I’m getting a bit sick of it. It takes hours to fill the damn thing.”

  Osita knew that. You could just tell. But it was a game that she was not even close to being tired of. She might have radiated innocence and cute, fuzzy lovability, but I could see through all that. She was crafty, that bear…

  Shopping

  When Toby had first described the living arrangements to me via email he’d explained that shopping for groceries was a weekly affair, with all the volunteers coughing up ten bucks or so to buy supplies from a local market. I’d been looking forward to this trip more and more with each passing evening. I didn’t know how long it had been since Toby’s last shopping trip but all he seemed to have left was vegetables and rice. Toby couldn’t cook rice, which was a bit of a shame since he was living almost exclusively on it. His cooking of vegetables was also questionable. Not that I was much help – beans on toast was really pushing the limit of my cu
linary abilities, so it hardly seemed fair to complain. I couldn’t have cooked a thick, juicy steak even if we’d had one.

  Toby could have. But he wouldn’t have. Because Toby was a vegetarian. Discovering that not only was I living with such a deviant, but that I was also largely reliant on him for my food, was possibly the scariest thing that had happened to me so far. At times, as I lay beneath Mount Blanket fighting back the sleep-inhibiting cold, I fantasised about meat. Good, grain-fed animal flesh. Fat, crispy-skinned sausages and the heavenly smell of frying bacon. In those times, with the memory of crunchy carrot and even crunchier rice laying heavily on my tongue, I tried not to think that as a herbivore Toby was technically lower on the food chain than me. Sure he was skinny… but he had nice firm buttocks. I think it’s fair to say that I was considering eating him.

  I wondered if vegetarians were like Pringles – once you pop, you can’t stop? Was it a valid lifestyle choice to be a vegetarian-ian? The madness had to end. And so as Friday night rolled around, marking the end of my first week at the centre, I got to celebrate in the best way possible. I went shopping.

  Johnny’s truck rolled into town and dispensed a pair of hungry volunteers. I had no idea where we were in relation to Tambillo or Quito, and to be honest I didn’t really care. We left the truck parked in a gas station and threaded our way through the colourful crowd to a row of battered-looking shops. Night had fallen on the drive into town, so it surprised me that the street was so busy. There wasn’t another foreigner anywhere in sight as we ducked into a room lined with shelves and stacks of products on all sides.

  Every square inch of space was crammed full, either with the goods for sale or with Ecuadorians trying to buy them. It was like trying to stand waist-deep in white water rapids. The tide of shoppers surged around us, frequently crashing against one of us like a wave breaking on the shore. Toby struggled to stay upright whilst balancing an armful of smaller groceries and digging in a tight jeans pocket for his shopping list. Sacks and bags hung from every square inch of ceiling. Every time I turned my head, one bounced off my skull. I swear they were filled with lead ingots. The air was thick and warm. The shopkeeper had fixed me with a black look as I entered, and continued to stare at me in spite of the torrent of sound hurled at him by his other customers. I was starting to feel a little nervous. I wasn’t prepared for such an invasive shopping experience. Back home the supermarkets have aisles so wide you have to go out of your way to accidentally ram raid the trolley of someone reaching for the last packet of marked-down bread rolls. This was like being at the epicentre of a hot, sweaty tornado. Every time some hairy midget jostled me I had to stifle the urge to seize an overgrown cucumber and beat my way out of the crowd.

  From across the mob Toby was calling me.

  He was telling me we needed sugar.

  This at least was progress. I turned to the shopkeeper and met his glare full on. Then realised he wouldn’t understand ‘sugar’ no matter how sweetly I said it. My mind groped for an answer. I knew the words for ‘small’, or ‘white’…

  I glanced back at Toby and made a shrug with my eyebrows.

  “Sucre!” He supplied the word.

  I rotated back to that thundercloud face. “Sucre…?” I asked hesitantly.

  BANG! A sack of what must surely be sugar hit the counter like a… sack of sugar. With force. I turned again to Toby.

  “Rice,” he explained.

  “Urr…?”

  “Oh. Arroz.”

  “Thanks. Arroz!” I grinned nervously at the shopkeeper.

  A sack of rice slammed down next to the sugar. I raised an eyebrow in Toby’s direction.

  “Hang on a sec,” he told me, reading with eyes and fingertips, “Umm… chickpeas…?”

  It was at this point that I realised this wasn’t going to work. I mean, what the fuck? I didn’t even know what chickpeas were in English. I wouldn’t recognise them if I was drowning in a vat full of the bleeding things. I shot what I hoped was an apologetic look at the shopkeeper and retreated back past Toby, relieving him of some of the sundries.

  “Sorry mate, I’m about as much help as a poo sandwich. Plus I think this guy wants something really bad to happen to me. If I mispronounce something and end up asking for his hand in marriage… I think you better take over.”

  Beyond the shop the whirling melee of the market assailed my senses. I could hardly take it in as I had to devote all my attention to not standing on any of my fellow shoppers. Toby waded through the crowd with minimum difficulty, stopping here and there for a lightening-fast acquisition of some basic necessity. It was here that I first began to appreciate just how well Toby had integrated himself into the local environment.

  “Cuanto bal-e?” he asked, sounding casual. It wasn’t a phrase I knew. I recognised his shrug of feigned disinterest at the quoted price though. With a shrewd ‘Uno mas’ (one more!) and on occasion by actually walking away from a stall mid-negotiation, he managed to skilfully shave a dollar here and there, and build up the bags and piles of supplies we were carrying until neither of us could walk easily. Then he led the way again and cut through the swarm of brightly-clothed bodies back to the gas station where Johnny’s truck sat alone, squat and powerful. The tray back was already overflowing with a dizzying array of bags, loose fruits, cloth, boxes and bric-a-brac. I thought we’d been moving pretty fast – Johnny must have shopped like greased lightening on roller skates.

  Smells filtered past as we stashed our cargo wherever we could find room. Meat… Barbecue. Strange spices gave a sharp edge to the smoke. My mouth watered so much I was standing in a puddle of drool. A quick glance around showed that Johnny was still deep in conversation with what I assume must be the owner of the gas station – I briefly entertained the thought that Johnny could be a Mafia boss, visiting his ‘family’ and laying down the law. There was a certain intensity to him, a presence, that made me believe he could be anything. He was certainly a big man in local circles.

  The smell of charring meat washed over me again, and it was more than I could stand. I mumbled an excuse to Toby, waved a hand in Johnny’s general direction and bolted for the nearest food stall.

  A tiny old woman and her daughter, both heavily wrapped in scarves of wool and silk, were serving oddments of unrecognisable meat from an enormous wok balancing awkwardly on a gas burner. It smelled like heaven.

  “Cuanto bal-e?” I tried, and was rewarded with an exchange of eyebrow raises between the two. The daughter was quite pretty, I thought, with smooth skin and wide, dark eyes.

  “Uno dollar,” came the predictable response. Most things were one dollar, I’d noticed. I had the cash ready and greedily exchanged it for a wooden skewer laden with dripping flesh. I bit straight into it, causing red hot fat to spray all over my chin. The old woman laughed as I winced and handed me a paper napkin.

  My cool irretrievably blown, I slunk back to the car. It was worth every second of humiliation for the rich juicy meat. I never did find out what it was. Knowing my luck it was bound to be something’s penis. At least I’d resisted a side serving of the meatballs. Toby showed up a few seconds later with a bag of hot chips from a stall a little further away, and we munched happily until Johnny strode over to usher us back into the car.

  From start to finish the experience had taken about twenty five minutes. I was left in a state of shock. It had been the shopping equivalent of a drive-by mugging.

  “Cuanto bal-e?” I asked Toby, between mouthfuls of cock and chips.

  “Gotta speak the lingo,” he explained. “Don’t wanna sound like a tourist! Instead of asking ‘Cuanto es?’, like ‘How much is it?’, I go with ‘Cuanto bal-e?’ – ‘What’s it worth?’”

  Toby, bless him, was still a Londoner at heart.

  Flying Solo

  The next morning, just like that, Toby was gone. Officially he was trying to drum up volunteers for Santa Martha by visiting hostels around Quito and talking to backpackers. I happened to know that he had a somewhat
different agenda. His plan was to visit one of Johnny’s friends who lived on an estate nearby – and had an extremely hot daughter. After that he was off to Quito, with Hot Daughter in tow if all went according to plan. Either way I wasn’t invited, as someone had to stick around to feed the animals over the weekend. I guess he’d been fretting away, alone at the refuge, itching to blow off steam on a night out in the capital but unable to leave until some brave soul arrived to take up the slack in his absence. It goes without saying that I was nervous. The whole place seemed on the brink of collapsing into chaos at any moment. Toby took it all in his stride, calmly solving problem after problem with infallible common sense. On the feed he always knew when an animal was about to bolt, and always had a spare limb ready to hook them back inside. It was a hard act to follow – the man was some kind of psychic octopus.

  On the upside I was really looking forward to making friends with all the animals, and bribing them with an extra large dollop of food seemed like a good way to start. I sneaked an extra fifteen minutes in bed. It felt decadent simply because it was illicit. Toby wasn’t a slave driver, but rather one of those depressingly well-motivated people whose obvious dedication either inspired others to leap out of bed full of enthusiasm for the day ahead, or made them feel lazy and guilty for not being so inspired. I tended to alternate between the two positions depending on how sore I was from the previous day’s exertions.

  By the time I left the volunteer house the mixing bowl of thick fruity mush was already sitting on the doorstep of Johnny’s house. Oops! Evidently Johnny’s wife Brenda was also the dedicated sort.

  The round started with a circuit of the animals nearest the house. I tucked the bowl under one arm and made my way down the path towards the cages. In the first cage on the right (after passing the sleek black truck parked in Johnny’s drive) lived a creature called a kinkajou. It was adorable. It was a big ball of fur with eyes. I was in love with it from the beginning. How could anyone not be? The thing was almost entirely eyes! Such enormous, soulful eyes. its natural defence against predators was to be so cute that they couldn’t bear to eat it.