Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  It was three quarters of the way around the enclosure that I got my first shock. I’d become complacent by then, having long since gotten over my initial fear. Thirty plus sections of fence had surrendered themselves to my embrace with less drama than a Quito football match. My ears had registered the slight ‘click’ as I stood at the lowest point of the enclosure, surrounded by bushes on the bear’s side of the fence, but my mind paid it no heed. I’d convinced myself that this whole ridiculous task of scrambling around the enclosure ‘testing’ the fence would come to nothing. There was probably a burnt out generator somewhere that needed a good kicking, but nothing more.

  I reached lazily out towards the wire. There was a massive BANG! and I was lying in a bush a few feet away, impaled on thorns and utterly confused as to how I’d gotten there.

  Johnny helped me up and put his finger to his lips.

  I plucked a thorn from my backside and listened.

  click. click. Click.

  “Click! The fence is working!”

  Johnny nodded. “Aquí,” (here) he pointed. There was a short pipe jutting out of the closest fence post, with a strip of rubber wrapped round the end. The electric wire was looped tightly around the pipe, only not around the rubber bit. It had slipped down a fraction, and was now directing the rest of its voltage straight through the metal post into the ground.

  We studied the problem in silence for a few seconds. It was obvious what had to happen to solve it – just not how to do it. Not to me anyway. Johnny had that worrying look in his eyes, like he was about to explain something he considered very simple to me. He made a gesture that I’d used in high school to signify sex, then pointed to the offending pipe. There really was no need for any more graphic illustration. The horror of what was expected from me was already sinking in. I felt the blood drain from my face.

  “Can’t you… turn it off?” I almost pleaded.

  “Ah, no. But it’s okay. Be strong uh?”

  “But… why? Why can’t you turn it off?”

  “Ah. Because, the power, it comes straight from the house.”

  Aha! From… the house? Johnny’s house? So… it was wired into the mains! Holy Shit! “Big… um, Grande electricidad!”

  “Ah, no problemo,” he soothed. “Stand on one foot!” He pantomimed to aid the translation. Except it wasn’t the translation I had a problem with.

  “UNO pie?” I struggled to put my amazement into words. “Matar… Mato…” I couldn’t quite conjugate the verb for death. Which was surprising, given how long I’d been at Santa Martha. “Quiere Mátame!” I finally came up with – literally “You want to kill me!”

  Johnny laughed and waved a hand vaguely. “It’s okay, stand on one foot. You have rubber boots!”

  I looked down at my wellies doubtfully. I had a feeling this wasn’t going to end well. “One foot,” I muttered as I turned to face the wire. It clicked maliciously at me. No amount of deep breathing was going to help me this time. So as Johnny urged me along, giving constant advice from just behind my left shoulder like a biblical devil, I fixed the electric fence.

  I held the dead end, hauling on it to give sufficient slack, then coaxed the wire loop back over the rubber strip. BANG! A flash accompanied my return to the thorn bush this time, as did a string of four letter words in a selection of languages.

  “Let go more quickly,” was Johnny’s suggestion. Of course, the instant the wire became insulated from the fence post the fence was effectively fixed – leaving me holding it. The wire had of course slipped back off the rubber as I flew backwards, putting us both back to square one.

  “Quickly!” Johnny reminded me as I lifted one welly boot off the ground and reached for the fence again.

  It was a long, long time before that fence was fixed. I was so dazed I could hardly remember what was going on around me. Time and again I’d looped that wire, sometimes letting go too quickly, sometimes holding on far too long. Eventually there came a time that it stayed.

  “Finished,” I reported to Johnny, and I didn’t just mean the job. I swear there was smoke rising from my boots.

  Together we trudged back up the paddock to the gate. The Irish girls were helping Leonardo pack up his gear. They’d obviously spent most of the morning refilling the pond, since Osita’s last act of defiance before escaping had been to cunningly extract the latest plug Toby had fashioned. Scraps of rag balled up in plastic shopping bags had been pushed back into the outlet pipe and seemed to be holding for now, though once the bear was back to normal it was only a matter of time before she managed to fish it out. Again. It was a good job we loved her so much. Toby was still checking her progress as she tried groggily to sit up.

  “How is the chubby monster?” I asked him.

  “Good mate, good. Whatcha been up to?”

  “Oh, we fixed the electric fence.” My weary sarcasm must have alerted him.

  “Erm, nice one mate…” He eyed me for a few seconds. “You alright?”

  “Just ready to lie down,” I told him.

  He clapped me on the back and turned to follow me up the hill. “You look fried, mate.”

  Men in Black

  The day’s shocking events had driven me to drink. My feelings were a mixed bag; gratitude that I had survived, vague triumph that I had done so against all the odds, and a weary resignation that it was bound to happen again. The alcohol, building on these emotions, had brought me a sense that I was invulnerable – well, temporarily. Regardless, outside, at 10pm, was a seriously hostile environment. The last of the rum, which had sustained me inside and dared me to venture out, was long gone. It had been dark for hours already, and it was colder than a penguin’s testicles. I stubbornly sat there anyway, looking up at the stars, and wondered why they were trembling.

  Ah. It was because I was shivering so violently that my head was shaking. There was no two ways about it – I was going to have to go back in. I’d been completely defeated by the cold, which is only fair seeing as how it’s bigger than me. I glanced idly over at the main house. No lights were showing upstairs. Even the boss didn’t have central heating, so he was likely in bed by now too.

  But someone was standing in the doorway looking over at me. That was a surprise. Had Johnny nipped out for a last cigarette? I looked at the shape. The drive and doorway were a tangle of thick shadows. I couldn’t make out a face – in fact as I looked closer it actually seemed like the person there might be facing towards the door.

  That was very unusual. And not in any way good news. Then I caught movement. A second person, dressed in black, was squatting beside the truck a few feet away from the door.

  Oh shit. Invasion. I froze in the hammock – not a difficult task in subzero temperatures – and stared at the silhouettes. Please, I thought, please let it be Johnny. Neither figure seemed to be moving. They obviously hadn’t noticed me. I had some thinking to do. If these were bad guys there was no way I could let them get into Johnny’s house. His horror stories of normal burglary procedure in Ecuador were whirling through my mind at high speed. If they were the men who’d tried to break into our house previously… They’d definitely be armed.

  Spiders, scary music, even lawyers, hold no fear for me. Beautiful women? Well, that’s a bit touch and go. But I’m shit scared of guns. It must be due to my desire to keep my internal organs internal.

  My mouth was dry. Neither person had moved yet. I had to do something. Shout, raise the alarm? Johnny and Jimmy could handle these guys for sure, if only they were awake…

  Very, very slowly I slid one leg over the edge of the hammock. I had to challenge them, at least vocally. I would shout ‘Hola!’ at them. Both men seemed to be facing away from me. If they weren’t friendly I would have the time it took them to turn around and draw their guns to get behind the porch wall. If I made it, hopefully the gunfire would wake Johnny – if not, my screaming would.

  I’d managed to get both legs over one side of the hammock. All I had to do now was stand up. “Jesus Chris
t,” I thought, “I’m going to die.” Nothing flashed before my eyes.

  I stood up and opened my mouth. “Hola,” I croaked. Hardly any sound came out. Both men spun to look at me.

  “Hola,” whispered the figure in the doorway. It was Johnny.

  He motioned at me to be quiet. Not a problem. My arse had done the talking for me anyway – time to wash my underwear tomorrow.

  I edged along the side of our house, then tiptoed to the gate. Johnny was coming to meet me. The figure crouched near the truck approached too. He was wearing full body armour, overalls and a balaclava, all in black. It looked like Johnny had hired the SAS.

  “There are people here,” Johnny told me without preamble. “We’re looking for them.”

  The highly trained counter terrorist look-alike proved to be Danielo. Both men had shotguns. I suddenly felt very glad that they were on my side.

  “Do you need help?” I asked. I was wired on adrenaline.

  “No,” Danielo told me. “Go inside and lock the door.”

  It was the most sensible thing I ever heard him utter. I did it straight away. “This weekend,” I whispered to myself as I once again took the biggest kitchen knife to bed, “I am going to Machachi and I am bloody well going to buy that machete!”

  Though sleeping with one of those came with a high risk of waking up circumcised – or worse. I thought I’d scared myself sober, but apparently not. A deep, drunken sleep soon enfolded me.

  And this time I slept through the gun fire.

  A Method to the Madness?

  Work on the new jaguar enclosure was taking forever. The poor cat was still stuck in her fiendish steel cage, and no matter how much time we threw at the project it just didn’t seem to be getting any closer to completion.

  It had taken days just to dig the post holes. No prize for guessing who did that. My skill with the big spoons was now legendary. (They needed no skill at all to use by the way. It’s just that no-one else was dumb enough to want to dig post holes, and they all pretended I was better at it to avoid having to do it themselves.) I could now wrench the excavadora around all day without getting a single blister. My hands were so used to the tool that they made unconscious curling motions when I wasn’t looking. I had the feeling it made me look like I was continually contemplating murder by strangulation.

  The site for the new enclosure was halfway down the hillside, a bit further around from our carefully carved stairs. It was in severe danger of giving a purpose to our previously pointless path. If asked, Johnny would be sure to claim it was the result he had intended all along, as though his superior logic had predicted the need to house the most dangerous predator on the continent. So I didn’t ask. Quite a way back from the river and the pitiful remains of our attempted bridge was a clearing of sorts, which we had enlarged by the simple expedient of cutting down everything in sight. This still left ground at quite a steep angle though, and it had taken one day of colossal effort to turn the sloping hillside into a two-tier enclosure like a pair of enormous steps. We would enclose a bit of sloping ground at the left and right edges to allow the beast to move freely between levels.

  The difficulty lay not just in the size, but in the complexity of the structure. To feed such an impressive creature without becoming the meal yourself required some clever planning. ‘Clever’ and ‘planning’ are two words which don’t translate very well into Ecuadorian. Eventually Jimmy had surprised me with his ingenuity. He’d come up with the idea for a cage within a cage, controllable from the outside. Well, theoretically it was controllable – I had my doubts. He wouldn’t explain exactly how it worked, and it goes without saying there wasn’t a technical drawing sitting at home in a filing cabinet. What he had done was pace out the area it would occupy on the side of the main enclosure, and asked me to dig post holes around it.

  After a week of hard, hard graft from everyone (except Toby who had suddenly remembered some urgent website work that needed attending to half way through the second day), we were almost ready to attach the wire mesh. Jimmy and me were hauling the last few logs up to the site – so big that we had to carry them between us. Even Jimmy had taken a good ten minutes to cut one of these giants down, and for once he didn’t even suggest I carry it on my own. The lightest of them weighed as much as a medium-sized volunteer. The biggest ones, like the one we were carrying now, were heavier than the both of us put together. It was the biggest piece of wood I’d had since my arrival, including the night I met Lady.

  We tried three times to pick it up without success. We just weren’t strong enough. In the end Jimmy managed to get his shoulder under one end and I crouched under the middle and, legs shaking, stood up. The effect was immediate. It was like walking balls-first into a concrete bollard. The breath was instantly gone from my lungs. My body just wanted to fold in half. Instead I leaned forwards and staggered a couple of steps, hoping that the motion would allow some air to slip into my flattened chest. Jimmy matched my first few stumbling steps and we turned it into a kind of rhythm. I found I could breathe a tiny amount as I rolled to the log-side and took a step with my opposite leg. Not a word from Jimmy, which was totally unprecedented. I could only imagine he was struggling for oxygen too. Somehow we made it up the hill. Even with the steps it was incredibly steep, and our repeat passages earlier carrying so much weight had abraded them quite dramatically. We now shuffled up a kind of dirt ramp we’d worn through the middle. This probably helped – at least we didn’t have to raise our feet very far. By the time we got to where the path branched off, and there was a little patch of level ground, I was seeing stars. Coloured blurs danced around the edge of my vision and the back of my scalp was tingling. Jimmy gasped enough breath to wheeze “Down.”

  We dropped our left shoulders and the behemoth tree trunk rolled off and hit the ground with a thud. In its passage it rather casually stripped the skin from the top of my shoulder. Then it lay still beside us as we both stood panting, heads down. The sudden rush of air into my lungs was bliss. The next second my head span, as though I’d stood up too fast. I tried to breathe slowly, deeply, and the feeling passed without me fainting. It’s the altitude, I reminded myself. We were well over ten thousand feet after all. Quite why Jimmy had decided to cut logs from the bottom of the hillside instead of the top was a mystery. Pure sadomasochistic glee? It was as good a guess as any. Jimmy was looking at me as I straightened up, back to normal at last. He mugged a half impressed look at me, then planted one booted foot on the titanic log. “Now you’re a man,” he said.

  It was as close as he ever got to honest praise. It meant more to me than a thousand thank-yous. I was still glowing quietly when the others arrived to see what was happening.

  “Jesus, that’s a big bugger,” Marie commented.

  Everyone helped to move the enormous log down the path to the enclosure. Marie impressed the hell out of me with her keenness to get stuck in. Technically she didn’t work here – we only had her for a week, until they were ready for her to start volunteering as an English teacher in the school in Tambillo. She’d still be staying with us though, and she’d promised to muck in after work, on her days off, and at weekends. Her mad enthusiasm for life spilled over onto our mission, and she went at it like a woman possessed. Emer too demonstrated a surprising strength and determination. Plastered in mud up to the knees, scratched and scraped by logs and spiky bitch plants, she still insisted on wearing shorts to work. But most delightfully of all, neither of the Irish girls would take any shit from Jimmy. Comments on the general frailty and loose morals of womankind, which I translated with mock outrage, would be met by vicious comments on the circumstances of his birth or the likelihood that his parents were related (which I chose not to relay back to him, since he seemed to consider me an ally in this battle of wits).

  Emer would take everything he said, turn it on its head and throw it right back at him – normally with a couple of four letter words in the mix. I had to admire her for that.

  Marie mostly fo
und him funny. But then Marie found everything funny. She was often to be found on her knees, cackling madly at the vehemence of her sister’s comments, whilst digging an extra post hole with her bare hands. I left her to it.

  The big log was supposed to form a central support column in the middle of the enclosure. That meant it needed another, much bigger, hole making – which the others had thoughtfully left for me to do. There was a brief moment where Jimmy almost decided that the trunk was too big to make a fence post. I made damn sure it was in the ground before he finished thinking about it. Yet another sun set as the half finished enclosure inched towards completion.

  The next morning we were greeted with several massive bales of brand new wire fencing mesh. It looked expensive, an indication of how seriously Johnny was taking our recent efforts. It was green, plastic coated and very, very heavy. We man-and-woman-handled it onto the truck with a squeal of protest from the suspension. It took a concerted effort from everyone to get them out at the other end and down to the work site. We now had everything we needed to turn this forest of poles into a house fit for the King of the Jungle. In theory.

  It was a fairly simple process – unroll the mesh, drag a section of it upright, and nail it into place on the fence posts. The difficulty was provided by the weight and flexibility of the materiel, and its tendency to rapidly unroll itself downhill with an effect not unlike a green plastic-coated steamroller. By the time we’d learnt that we needed a separate person completely devoted to controlling the stuff on the ground, quite a few people had been violently flattened by the runaway bale and were looking a bit pissed off. And decidedly two dimensional.

  A smoke break had to be called to let frayed tempers recover. The job wasn’t getting any easier with practice. In fact it was about to get harder. We’d taken our break when we reached a corner, and our next task was to continue the fence down a forty-five degree incline for the length of the enclosure’s short side. Whichever way we did this we still ended up with a triangular flap of mesh left over, which Jimmy with his usual practicality simply nailed back to the post in as many places as he could reach. I think his philosophy on life was that you could fix anything if you threw enough nails at it. Which probably went some way to explaining his rather spiky relationship with Nancy.