Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  “Oh SHIT!” I shouted at the grass outside the window. “Johnny’s gonna KILL ME!”

  The walk back took a long time. I finally met up with the girls a few bends away from the house. They’d assumed that I’d turned around, then somehow gotten past them on the road and was sitting laughing with Toby about how long they’d wait there before realising I’d abandoned them.

  Jeez! How paranoid were they? But it did sound like the kind of thing I’d do. Come to think of it, it was one to remember for the future… If I got out of this alive. I miserably explained the situation to the two stroppy women. An identical incredulous expression grew simultaneously on both faces.

  Ashley was the first to find her voice again. “You got… stuck? But… So… Where’s the car?”

  Clearly I hadn’t done a very good job of explaining the situation. I tried again, more slowly this time: “It’s S-T-U-C-K. Stuck. As in, can’t go anywhere.”

  “But where?”

  This was the crux of the matter. “Well, it’s kind of hard to describe. You know the ocelot enclosure?”

  “Holy shit! You went that far?”

  “Yeah, well, a bit beyond that there’s this place where the road gets really narrow,”

  “Further? How far?”

  “Well, beyond that the road sort of goes up, and then there’s this ridge, and below that there’s a field…”

  “Tony, how far?”

  “Um, about two miles.”

  “WHAT?”

  “Yeah, about that. Ish.”

  “Oh my God!” Layla couldn’t contain herself any longer. “Johnny’s gonna KILL YOU!”

  Toby’s face was a picture as he saw us hiking back up the path towards him. Confusion, then disbelief, which gave way to a half-smile as though he thought maybe we were playing a joke on him. He hooked his thumbs in his pockets and sauntered down to meet us. As he got closer he could read my expression. I watched his change rapidly into something approaching horror.

  “Where’s the car?” He asked fearfully. “What have you done?”

  “Oh, nothing much,” I tried to grin to put him at ease. “Just got it a little… stuck.”

  “Stuck? Oh shit! Is it okay?”

  “Oh yeah, I didn’t hit anything.” At the memory of his earlier advice I could smile again. “Yeah, absolutely nothing wrong with it at all. Just got the bloody thing stuck, is all.” I braced myself for the inevitable question.

  “Where?”

  “Well…”

  I told him.

  “Oh my GOD!” He wasn’t impressed. “I don’t even know where that is! Are you sure you went past the ocelot enclosure?”

  “Yeah, pretty sure yeah.”

  “’cause that’s where I normally turn around.”

  “Yeah, I thought it might be,”

  “So past the Ocelots, then.”

  “And a bit further up the path. See, it gets really narrow, then starts to rise…”

  “I don’t know that bit,” he admitted, “I’ve never been that far. How far is it in total?”

  “What, you mean from here?”

  “Yeah, from here. How far?”

  It was my favourite part.

  “About two miles.”

  “Two MILES! The farm isn’t even that big! That’s not even Johnny’s land!”

  “Um, yeah. So, can we take the other truck, or something, and pull it out?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to tell Johnny.” All of a sudden his eyes twinkled. “Oh mate, he’s gonna…”

  “I KNOW!”

  Johnny was fairly pragmatic. Toby had hardly gotten through the first few sentences of his explanation when Johnny glanced over at me, then away again with a muttered curse. That world-weary look he did so well came over him, as though he really wasn’t capable of coping with the stupidity of foreigners. He listened in silence to the rest of it, until Toby ran out of words and started to study the tile floor. I’d been doing the same since we’d come in.

  I could feel rather than see Johnny’s gaze travelling from one of us to the other, then back again, as though weighing up who was the most likely to blame for this disaster. Then, all of a sudden, he walked out the front door. A few seconds later we heard the engine of his truck fire up, and ran out to join him.

  “Más, más,” Toby shouted from the back of the truck. He was telling an amazed Johnny that we still had further to go. He’d been repeating this at every bend in the path since we’d passed the ocelot enclosure, in response to ever more violent-sounding questions coming from the cab. Jimmy was sitting in the back with us, grinning madly. Nothing could possibly have amused him more, though he was struggling not to show it in front of Johnny. Safe in the back of the truck he’d spent most of the trip asking me to repeat bits of the story, as though he couldn’t quite understand my attempt to explain in Spanish. Every so often he would shake his head, then point at me and draw a finger across his throat. The joke was wearing thin.

  Even from the back I could hear the incredulity in Johnny’s voice as the truck sat before the final rise in the path. I glanced at Toby and nodded. Mirth was shining in his eyes as he relayed the message in Spanish back through the cab window.

  “Yes, up there!”

  Johnny muttered a few choice curses and started up the hill. He drove right up, and over, and stopped the car at the top of the meadow. It was several seconds before I heard him speak.

  “Choo-cha madre!” He thundered. It was a uniquely Ecuadorian way of swearing, invoking certain parts of one’s mother’s anatomy that are reserved for occasions when no other words are adequate.

  Toby stood up to get a better look over the cab. There, far, far below us, facing up, was the tiny white outline of the missing truck.

  It was more than he could take. “Oh my God!” He exclaimed in total disbelief. Then he collapsed back into the truck, laughing so hard he was crying. From up here it did look pretty ridiculous. I couldn’t help it. I started to chuckle, and before long the pair of us were wetting ourselves, rolling around holding our sides in hysterics. Good God, but it was funny.

  Johnny was of a slightly different disposition. Faced with an almost impossibly steep hill and what from this distance appeared to be a two-inch scale model of his white truck parked two hundred metres down it, he positively growled, favouring both Toby and myself with the blackest look I’d ever seen him deliver. I could guess it’d be a while before he’d let me drive again.

  Without telling us his plan he fired up the engine and roared down the hill to where the white truck was mired. I surveyed the mess I’d created. Huge muddy tyre tracks had been carved through the long grass behind the wheels by my efforts to persuade the car to keep moving. All to no avail. Johnny and Jimmy had already set about tying the two trucks together by the time Toby and me jumped out to help. We couldn’t do much in any case – neither of us had managed to stop laughing long enough to breathe. Toby was the first to regain the power of speech.

  “What I don’t get is why you didn’t turn around sooner,” he spluttered, “like at the ocelots.”

  “Well,” I explained between sobs, “there wasn’t enough space! Not for me.”

  “So why did you… why did you come down here?” He broke into new convulsions of laughter.

  “I figured what the hell, it’s a 4x4, it can probably make it.”

  Toby’s laughter stalled mid guffaw. “Whaddaya mean?” He demanded.

  “I tried to get enough speed up on the way down to swing round and power back up. I thought a 4x4 would be up to it. I guess not.”

  “Um, Tony, mate, that white truck?”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s not a 4x4.”

  A string of expletives from Johnny startled me from the revelation. He was swearing at us, and pointing at the back of the stuck vehicle.

  “Oh, I think he wants us to push,” supplied Toby. We braced ourselves against the bumper and strained as Johnny gunned his engine. Wheels spun. The trucks lurched forward.
Toby and me both staggered and fell flat on our faces. Jimmy laughed. Wheels span again. The rope between the two trucks sang. And slowly but surely the white truck began to roll back down the hill towards us. Toby jumped up with a shout, alerting me to the immediate danger of being reversed over. I jumped out of the way, but the car never got near either one of us. Its brief bid for freedom was over almost before it began, arrested by the rope fastening it to Johnny’s tow hook. The white truck could never pull Johnny’s, even downhill – but neither could Johnny’s pull the white. He was stuck too.

  A few choice oaths accompanied Johnny’s realisation that his prize vehicle was going nowhere. He floored the accelerator and span the wheels violently for a few seconds as a substitute for kicking something. Then he got out and roared something indecipherable at Jimmy. Jimmy quit grinning at us and ran to help his boss untie the rope between the two trucks. It seemed the battle was over – for now, at least – and the hill had scored the first victory.

  The Ecuadorians piled back into the good truck, and with me and Toby panting through the twin efforts of pushing and laughing, we managed to get the tyres back onto unspoilt ground. As soon as the wheels stopped spinning and started to bite the truck surged forward. Better prepared this time, Toby and I both stayed on our feet and watched, as without a pause Johnny roared off up the hill. It was a truly impressive display of what a real 4x4 could do, and was marred by only one thing. He didn’t bother stopping for us. He gained the crest of the hill, shot over the top of it and disappeared out of sight. By the time we’d jogged to the top ourselves we could just see the tail lights disappearing around a bend a good way further down the road.

  “How far you reckon it is back to the house?” I said unnecessarily. I knew the answer.

  “Two miles.” Neither of us was laughing now.

  “You think he’s coming back?” I knew the answer to this one too. Toby didn’t even bother answering. He just gave me a resigned look and started walking.

  Half an hour later we agreed we were almost halfway home. It was going to take a while, but not forever, and it was a nice day. It would have been a lovely walk if I hadn’t been more than a little worried about what kind of a welcome awaited me at the end of it. We pressed on, and before long started to hear a noise in the distance.

  “What the hell is that? A plane?”

  Toby’s guess was better; “The chain saw. He’s probably practising for when you get back!”

  I noticed he’d excluded himself from the equation this time. Well, it was my fault. The noise grew louder. And closer.

  “Oh no!” Toby exclaimed suddenly. “I know that sound!” The tractor hove into view round the next bend, heading towards us like a bat out of hell. “It’s the tractor’s engine!” He finished helpfully.

  No shit! So that meant… Toby as usual was almost a whole heartbeat ahead of me. “He didn’t leave us! He just went for the tractor!

  The same thought occurred to us both simultaneously. I know this because after years of being scared of looking stupid I can instantly recognise the same fear in others. And how stupid would we look having walked all this way, bitching the whole time about being abandoned… As one, we turned and sprinted back the way we’d come.

  By the time we made the top of the hill sweat was pouring off us. This morning had turned out to be a lot more work than I’d anticipated.

  Jimmy had just finished hitching the white truck to the back of the tractor. He jumped up into his cab and put the tractor in gear. It strained – for almost an entire second – then ripped the truck free of the muddy skid marks and dragged it straight up the hill. The two bound vehicles pulled up next to us as we stood, dripping and panting, on the crest of the hill.

  Jimmy leaned out of the cab. “You like to walk eh? Or you want a ride this time?” Not only could I understand the Spanish – he’d said it simply on purpose – I could also hear the sarcasm dripping off every carefully enunciated syllable.

  Toby’s breathless reply brought a snigger from above.

  The tractor edged forwards, taking up the slack in the line. “What was that, I didn’t catch it?” I asked.

  He looked at me with the same resigned expression he’d offered me earlier. “I told him I’d untie the truck and drive it home.”

  “Oh. Cool.”

  Toby shook his head. “No. He told me to leave it tied. He said we could ride in the truck, but Johnny doesn’t trust us to drive anymore.” He sighed. “Either of us.”

  Training Machita

  Over a week after Ashley and I had brought her home, Machita was still trying to impress us. Several times a day she would proudly present us with a curly fresh turd, usually laid right in the middle of the room to allow us to appreciate it more. She tended to wee behind things, be they fridge or bookcase, but she always came racing to fetch me straight away, yipping in anticipation as she led me back to her latest masterpiece. For such a tiny beast she had an unbelievable bladder capacity.

  Toby would shout at her, storm and rage, and threaten to fling her out of the house. I would give a loud “Oi!” But she was always so pleased to show me that her little tail would start wagging, and then I could never stay cross at her long enough to punish her. I’d mop up the mess with bog roll, pausing every now and then to give her a very stern look. This wasn’t proving to be a very effective training method. Either she was incredibly clever, and knew she could get away with anything so long as I was around, or she was just too stupid to realise she was doing something wrong in the first place. I had my suspicions as to which theory was correct.

  In the end Toby solved the problem by deciding that Machita would be an ‘outside’ dog. This also neatly solved the problem of her trying to escape every time the front door was opened. Toby opened the front door and Machita immediately bolted for freedom. Toby let her have it. Then closed the door behind her. Machita had moved out.

  We found an old wooden crate which was a bit more suitably sized for the rapidly expanding creature. I lined it with my recently ruined fleece, and threw her old t-shirt in there for good measure. It wasn’t long before she accumulated a pile of pilfered socks, pants and scarves. If any washing went missing it was a fairly easy guess as to where it had gone. Some days she had more clothes than me.

  Every night she whined outside the door until everyone else had gone to bed, at which point I would stealthily sneak over and open it. Opening the door produced a sound like a hundred terrified cats being molested with red hot pokers, which kind of ended the stealthy part of the operation. It didn’t matter how I tried to do it. Opening it quickly just made the cats shriek louder. Opening it slowly just seemed to prolong their agony. Assuming I had remained undetected at this point I would let her in for a little snuffle. I could only risk playing with her for ten minutes or the chances were high that she’d wee all over the place in sheer excitement.

  Satisfied that she was okay, and that she still loved me best, I would coax her back outside and lock her out. Then I went straight to bed, put my earphones in and listened to some tunes to drown out the renewed whining.

  Poor little critter.

  Eventually my dog adapted well to a life outside. But she still whined at the door all night every night for weeks. I felt like a very bad man the entire time.

  By morning she would be delighted to see us, yipping, wagging her tail and tearing little celebratory holes in the washing she’d stolen. One of us would feed her from our patented puppy food mix – a margarine tub full of mashed up rice, vegetables and tuna which until recently had been our patented cat food. She also got a handful of dog food biscuits and a bowl of water, milk or hot, sweet tea depending on who was doing the feeding. Yes, the tea was my fault.

  It was a huge relief to be free from presents in the form of big puddles of fragrant wee or small piles of vomit cunningly concealed. With the whole area around the house to play with she’d thankfully chosen a less visible toilet. Once or twice she did try to impress us with a dead mouse or bird o
n the doorstep, but it was painfully obvious they were the cat’s kills that she was trying to pass off as her own. She probably thought the cat had privileges, since it came and went from the house at will. The truth was we just couldn’t keep the bloody thing out! Not all the windows would shut properly, and while my poor Machita was about as intelligent as a similarly sized chunk of wood, that cat was an evil genius.

  We’d feed Don Juan inside and Machita outside. Don Juan completely ignored his own food for half the day, safe in the knowledge that no-one else could get at it. Instead he would breakfast on the best bits from Machita’s bowl while the tiny dog looked on, powerless to do anything about it.

  We made every effort to shut the cat out at night – out of the rooms, out of the house – all to no avail. We were no match for his animal cunning. I once caught him squirming in through the kitchen ventilation. He would crack the house without breaking a sweat, then commence the terrorisation of the dorm room in retaliation for his exclusion.

  Above the dorm room door was a rectangular hole that must once have contained a glass fanlight window. This was the cat’s primary means of access. With superhuman leaping ability it could spring from the floor of the lounge to the gap above the door in one go, a distance of at least seven feet. Rather than repeating the feat on the other side however, it had found a far simpler solution. In the top bunk nearest the door, my pillow was an easy jump for the demon-spawned beast. It landed with a very un-feline thump, which I’m sure it had calculated to produce maximum noise. Where most cats would at least have the good grace to slip in silently, Don Juan had perfected the belly flop landing just to prove a point.

  Startled suddenly awake I would lie there staring nervously around me in the darkness. About six inches from my face he would always be there, eyes shining with malice. After patrolling his territory by jumping from bunk to bunk all the way around the room he would leap back onto my pillow, climb across my face and disappear out the hole above the door.