We burst from the bus like two big bubbles from a mouthful of chewing gum. The air tasted sweet and body odour-free.
All around us was a bustling market like a scene from a film with a very small bustling market in it. A very small market. In fact, if there had been two less stalls I would have called it a hot dog stand. That’s when it hit me.
“Ashley, I think this is just a hot dog stand.”
And it was.
Not to be deterred, we thoroughly explored both stalls and even gazed at the hot dog stand itself for a moment or two. Then we noticed a petrol station a little further up the road. You’d think we’d have noticed it sooner, what with it being the only building for miles in any direction. We wandered over, looking casual, or at least trying to look casual whilst frantically searching the dictionary for the Spanish equivalent of ‘market’.
An ancient little woman held court on the forecourt.
“Hola,” Ashley began. “Dónde está el markaroo?”
It sounded dubious but it was the best we’d come up with.
“Mercado? Machachi?” the old woman asked. She seemed to be the only person there, so all our eggs were in her basket.
“Sí, sí, Machachi!” we both chorused.
She gestured down the road in an offhand manner. Intense concentration on her hoarse mumbling paid off when I caught the words “Diez minutos”.
Only ten minutes further down the main road… if the old dear was to be believed. We set off, keeping to the dusty hard shoulder as there wasn’t anywhere else to walk. The road stretched on for miles. The hot dog stand slowly receded behind us. Ten minutes later and the view hadn’t changed much. The ten minutes after that brought nothing new either.
Twenty minutes after that…
“I think that old crone lied to us,” Ashley said.
I had to agree. “Bollocks to it. Shall we try to flag down a bus?”
Ashley considered. “If we don’t we could die of starvation here. Or old age.”
A bus was charging towards us at that moment. This was hardly surprising, as buses had been charging past us every thirty seconds or so. For a road to nowhere it sure was busy. We waved. The bus charged past. So did the next three. Apparently we’d discovered the one place in the country that buses actually couldn’t stop, either due to some primitive traffic law or, more realistically, because they didn’t have good enough brakes.
“We could try cars?” Ashley suggested.
Eventually a shiny blue pickup pulled onto the hard shoulder just ahead of us and we piled into the tray back. On a hot sunny day, through flat green countryside, this was the only way to travel. Almost ten minutes had passed when our driver pulled off the main road and turned into a town. Aha! It occurred to Ashley and me at the same time – ten minutes by car, the old woman had meant. Clearly she hadn’t expected anyone to be stupid enough to try to walk down the freeway.
Machachi! The place was an assault on the senses from the moment we squirmed out of the back of the pickup. My nose immediately registered the presence of something frying. In garlic. The air was rich with the aromas of strange and spicy foodstuffs a-cooking! The entire town was thronging with people. Everywhere I looked hung racks of crazy trousers, blotched, striped and tie-dyed in dozens of colours, woolly cardigans to match, and thick, blanket-like ponchos. The scent of leather exuded from stalls selling wallets and belts, only to be overwhelmed by cloying floral perfume from the next stall over. For the first half hour neither of us spoke beyond the occasional exclamation of “Woah!” or “Look at this!”. My head was a periscope, spinning from side to side trying to take it all in. Dodgy Spanish pop music blared from a dozen sources. An agonised wail seemed to be the vocal choice of the day, overlaid with rapid beats so heavy they made my teeth vibrate. Everywhere were hats and bags, indecipherable t-shirts, ornaments in glass and china and stone-faced stallholders sweltering in the heat.
It must have taken us an hour to do the first full circuit. Lines of people straggled up every alley, pushing through the narrow corridor between stalls shoulder to shoulder with the line pushing the opposite way. Every so often we’d break out into an open space or a junction with a slightly wider street. In the thinner crowds we could pause for a few seconds to wipe sweat the from our brows (I was dripping like a melting ice lolly) and check our pockets hadn’t been picked. Then one or the other of us would choose a direction and we’d plunge into the human stream once more. In one of the slightly more spacious areas we came across an old woman frying little cakes on what looked like a big metal bin lid.
I pointed at one and asked “Qué?”
They were cheese. I bought one and ate it. It was like the answer to all my prayers! I bought ten more on the spot and started to cram them into my mouth. Absolutely delicious! Cheesy, maizey, fried thing. Ten for a dollar. Why weren’t these things more popular? I looked along the row of stalls ahead and realised that every single one of them was frying cheesy maizey things. Popular enough then, just not in Tambillo.
Even without any meat in it my stomach was feeling a lot happier. The meat, when we came to it, looked a little less appetising than it smelled. Another row of stalls just beyond Fried Cheese Row were the source of the delicious aroma. In front of each stall was the ubiquitous metal bin lid, this time fully ablaze; above it a whole guinea pig was roasting rotisserie style. And when I say whole, I mean whole. Eyes, teeth, claws and tail. The sharp front teeth a sickly yellow and longer than my little finger.
Hm. I’ll pass on that, thanks.
We wandered through what looked like an aircraft hangar, full of dripping red body parts bleeding onto the floor and fat men waving cleavers at each other. Flies swarmed over everything in sight. I decided not to buy any meat just yet. I could sense the onset of plague. We hurried out into the daylight once more to be greeted by the ever-present sight of yet more crazy trousers. Strangely enough I never saw anyone wearing them.
We found a huge fruit and veg market and an entire square devoted to tool stalls. I’d already passed enough knives and machetes to make me drool. I have a deep-seated love of sharp things and couldn’t wait to get a two-foot-long blade all of my own. But not quite yet – I’d better wait until my language skills were good enough to bluff my way out of police custody just in case. The sun was baking hot. We bought an icy can of Coke each from a guy sat on a cooler and let ourselves drift with the flow of shoppers for a while. We washed up in a livestock area and were quickly surrounded by baskets of live chickens, rabbits, kittens, a pair of goats on a leash – it was like a petting zoo with price tags. I could only hope they were intended as pets. I mean, if you were served kitten in a restaurant, how would you know?
In between the forest of legs something caught my eye – a little patch of light brown fluff on the ground. I headed that way, and as the number of legs between me and it diminished, the shape resolved into a tiny ball of fur. Ashley pushed through the crowd beside me, and we knelt down either side of the most pathetic looking puppy I’d ever seen. It was about the size of my palm, and looked as though it had been stood on. It was flat out on its side, eyes closed. I reached down and stroked its head. The creature twitched slightly, but that was all. I looked at Ashley and saw that she too looked distraught. Surely there was something we could do? We were supposed to be animal rescue workers! She tried to persuade it to sit up, and I tried to tickle some life into it.
Then out of nowhere a bony pair of hands thrust down and grabbed the dog, lifting it up to our eye level. We both stood up as a decaying old woman with a wisp of beard jabbered loudly at us. Ashley dug for the dictionary, then stopped and looked at me. “I think she’s trying to sell it to us!”
Both of us began to shake our heads, holding up our hands palm outward in that internationally recognised gesture of ‘No thanks’. Internationally recognised did I say? Apparently not in Ecuador. The old woman shoved the dog into Ashley’s hands and vanished into the crowd. She was gone so fast it was eerie. We scanned the press o
f people in all directions – nothing. The old woman was clearly a ninja.
Ashley was left holding a half-dead, runty-looking little dog and neither of us had a clue what to do with it.
She voiced the question first. “Should we keep it?”
I stated the obvious. “Johnny will go crazy. He’s got about a hundred dogs. What the hell are we gonna say to him?”
Just then the little beast stirred in Ashley’s hands. It lifted its head about a centimetre off her fingers and made a pathetic attempt to lick its nose.
That decided it.
“We’re gonna need some milk,” I said, “and puppy food. Oh God, how the hell do you say that in Spanish?”
“I think I saw a stall up there that had baskets for sale,” Ashley said.
And just like that we’d become parents. Of the most feeble, microscopic, excuse for a dog the world has ever known. I couldn’t help but love it.
The basket was perfect. A little wicker thing not much bigger than the dog itself, though it was a long time before we could bring ourselves to actually put her in it. Instead we took turns in holding her. Every few minutes one of us would come up with a pressing reason to confiscate her back – “Buy some of those cheesy things,” I’d say to Ashley. “Here, I’ll hold the dog.” And she was mine again!
The cheesy things were a big hit. Nutritionally I’m sure they’re terrible food for very small dogs, but it was all we could find that looked edible. I pulled a little bit off one, blew on it for a few seconds, then held it out to her (Ashley had handed me the cheesy things – “Here, break one up for her,” she’d said, “I’ll hold the dog for you”). I touched the mushy cheese to her nose (the dog’s, not Ashley’s) and she stirred slightly. Her eyes opened, and her mouth did, and she took a bite. Mmmm, good!
Over the next half hour we took it in turns to feed her two and a half cheesy things. Holy crap, this creature ate like me! She probably could have managed even more, were it not for the twin facts that a) we’d decided not to overdose her on day one, and b) I’d already eaten all the rest of them. But small dogs cannot live by cheesy thing alone. I helpfully relieved Ashley of the dog, on the pretext that she needed to use the dictionary to discover how to ask for puppy food. What we ended up with was milk – only available in litre cartons, and about as fresh as my socks, which is to say it was that everlasting UHT stuff which hasn’t seen a cow since they’ve been domesticated. Ashley took the dog (”Give me the dog while you open the carton,” she’d said. Subtle, Ash!) and I held a finger dipped in milk up to her nose.
She sat up and licked me!
Other things probably happened that day, but buggered if I can remember them.
I do remember that despite how crowded the bus was, the people made room for me to sit on the floor with the basket of dog in my lap. I remember wincing as the bus bounced into and out of every pothole. I remember a little lad on the seat above me talking to me and grinning at the dog the whole way home. I didn’t need to speak his language to understand what he was saying. And of course, I remember the reactions back at the refuge, when I gingerly handed the basket down to Ashley before jumping out the back of the pickup taxi that brought us up the hill.
“What’ve you got there?” Toby asked as he wandered over. “Oh my God!” he said, then laughed. “It’s fuckin’ tiny!”
My sharp eyes spotted straight away that Toby was hooked. Big girl’s blouse.
And Johnny who had, quite literally, the power of life and death over the little beast? It wouldn’t last a day if he made us leave it somewhere outside the farm. He looked into the basket for a long time, then spoke briefly to Toby, turned and walked off. I looked at Toby for a translation.
He grinned as he told me. “He said she’ll have to have her shots!”
“Woohoo!” I hugged Ashley in glee as Toby poked a finger at our new pet.
“So, what DVDs did you get?” he asked me.
Ah. Bollocks.
For the next few days my little dog became the centre of my world. I lined her basket with a skanky t-shirt. I set up a pair of saucers for her, one with milk, one with water. I even introduced her to the cat. She soon learnt to fear that cat. This was only to be expected though – we all feared the cat. He was called Don Juan, though we more often referred to him as ‘Satan’ – and not without reason.
Whenever I wasn’t working I was playing with the dog, or more accurately, letting her sleep on me. I’d have let her sleep in my bed at night but for the results all those cheese things had on her. Her digestive system had been jump-started, with the predictable result that she shit her own body weight every half an hour.
Ashley and me, loving parents, and Toby, already hopelessly addicted, cleaned up every mess without complaint for days. Until one day the mess was in Toby’s shoe.
Naming the tiny creature was somewhat more of a struggle. That first evening I’d suggested we call her after the place we’d found her. Machachi had a grand ring to it. It was a name she could grow into (since it was considerably bigger than she was) and it certainly beat calling her Blondie or Spot. Ashley had agreed until the following morning, when she tried out the obvious shortened version we would end up using. The subsequent argument had been fierce.
“We can’t call her Cha-chi”, Ashley repeated stubbornly, “that’s what we call cheesy guys in Canada.”
I was torn between making a polite response, or telling her honestly that that was the single most bloody stupid thing I’d ever heard anyone say in my entire life. I settled for “But I like Chachi. She’s from Machachi. It works.”
“No way! We’d be calling for her, ‘Cha-chi, Cha-chi…’ it’s like really bad. Like calling her a bad word or something.”
Oh my God. It was either compromise or strangle her. It took me a full minute to make the decision.
In the end, ‘Machita’ was the result of some letter jigging on my part. Not perfect, but I could cope. Toby, of course, had a far simpler solution.
“I’m gonna call her Chachi anyway,” he announced.
Why didn’t I think of that? That’d show her! Me and Toby could train her to respond only to us, and then teach her all kinds of tricks to play on Ashley! Ha! I watched as the tiny little creature tentatively stalked a very small stick, eyes wide with fear.
It was then that I revised my plan as being overly ambitious. We’d be lucky if she could learn her name. During this extended debate it had gradually emerged that my poor little dog was stupid.
Dawn of the Layla
Toby had mentioned that we were expecting another volunteer. Had all his hard work (and partying) in Quito come to fruition? No. This wasn’t a new volunteer, it was an old one; she’d worked at Santa Martha for a month already, before being moved by the company that arranged her placement. It was a period of time that Toby never talked about, in much the same way that ex-prisoners of war rarely wish to relive their experiences. Privately my respect for Toby dropped a notch. I mean, afraid of a girl? Really?
I’d been secretly hoping to be joined by an all-girl Swedish volleyball team who were so used to communal showers that they hardly noticed Toby and me jumping in there with them. They all had long legs, longer blonde hair, spoke broken English with an exaggerated Scandinavian accent and giggled when we mentioned words like ‘innocent’.
The reality: Layla was short and dumpy. Pasty and freckled. Eighteen years old, a soon-to-be student taking a gap year before university so that she had something interesting to talk about when it was time to make new friends. Her parents had money, obviously, or they’d never have been able to afford the ridiculous fee charged by their ‘Placement Organiser’. To my mind rich girls should be prettier than the not-so-rich ones, as they have access to expensive skin and hair products and clothes, personal trainers, et cetera. Alas, Layla’s parents must have spent their entire cash horde on feeding her.
She had drab brown hair in a short bob, and a sour demeanour. Toby welcomed her back with an awkward smile and a stiff h
ug, then went into his room and shut the door. It might have been my imagination, but I thought I could hear him sobbing. I figured it was down to me to make some kind of effort. After all, Layla was going to be here for two months.
“So, how was your last placement?” I opened. Small talk was clearly the way forward.
“Boring.”
“Oh! Why’s that?”
“Just didn’t like it. No-one ever did anything.”
“Right. Well we’re pretty busy here!” I told her.
“I know,” she gave me a flat, unfriendly look. “I’ve already been here. You dig holes and get covered in mud.”
“So didn’t you want to come back?”
“Dunno. Better than the other place. I didn’t like anyone there.”
I bit my tongue against the obvious retort. “Well, welcome to Santa Martha,” I said instead.
“Great. Thanks,” she mumbled.
“You can put your bags in there…” I pointed to the dorm room.
“I know!”
Ouch. Ashley was just coming out of the shower. “Oh! Hey Ashley! This is Layla. Come and say ‘hi!’” I said. And I ran.
Water Polo
Pulling the remains of a long-dead horse out of a swamp; it was jobs like these that kept the glamour alive at Santa Martha. We were in the middle of an epic exploration when we first discovered the bones. I was hacking away with a machete, helping to clear a path through the dense jungle undergrowth above a previously hidden river. It felt so much like I was in an adventure movie that the sudden sight of a skeleton embedded in the riverbank seemed perfectly in place. No doubt some previous explorer, reckless and unprepared, had attempted the exact same journey years before us. But he was not so lucky. I grimly pushed on past the hideous relic until a chilling scream from my beautiful assistant stopped me in my tracks.
Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set Page 33
