Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  An unprecedented amount of swearing accompanied the erection of the final sections of fence. Three people were hanging off the fence by their fingertips trying to put tension on it from every possible angle. Everyone left was frantically nailing it to their nearest post over and over. The swearing came when the hangers-on released a section too soon due to arm fatigue, or on time only to find it wasn’t as securely nailed as the nailer had led them to believe, or released a securely nailed section only to watch it spring back into its natural shape – leaving a rather unfortunate gap along the bottom of it. By the time we were nearly finished, the super-secure perimeter of the enclosure looked like nothing so much as an enormous, green… well, pile of shit sprang to mind.

  I pointed out a few jaguar-sized holes where the mesh met the ground. The entire fence sagged like a pair of eighty year old boobs. No-one was particularly impressed with the fruits of our labour.

  “Jimmy, this isn’t going to work,” I said.

  He looked around the enclosure and shrugged the criticism off. I hated to admit it but I had a feeling that we’d wasted a lot of time, and a huge amount of that bloody green mesh. We’d had better days. Meanwhile the jaguar brooded. In a cage ten feet square there was sod all else she could do.

  It was another day of work to put the roof on. Working with yet more mesh we cut off strips, each as long as the cage is deep. Or, in hindsight that’s what we should have done. It would have resulted in far fewer casualties. What we actually did was fasten one end of the roll to the top of the fence on one side, then three willing volunteers hefted the bale over their heads and walked across the enclosure, paying it out as they did. Every few seconds two people would pay out a length of mesh that still had the third person’s fingers threaded through it. A scream would split the air, usually followed by a variety of choice oaths and a round of increasingly frustrated apologies. Then the process would begin again, and continue until the loose soil slid out from under someone else, bringing the whole bundle down on top of them and their co-workers, and pulling the fingers off the poor sod who was coming along behind them stitching it to the top of the fence. This was my job. I still bear the scars.

  Sewing neighbouring sections of roof mesh together with bendy wire was also rather tricky. The seams would naturally come in the middle of the enclosure, where they were all several feet out of reach, and there was nothing to lean our ridiculous ladder against. It fell to the others to take turns at being the thing to lean the ladder on. It was a job that invariably involved being stepped on quite a lot and left its mark in the form of two top-of-ladder shaped bruises on the upper torso. For me, frantically bending wire on a wobbling ladder of extremely dubious construction, high above the head of an unwilling and rapidly tiring volunteer, the major concern was not to shit myself with every sudden lurch as there was someone below me who might notice.

  It was a long day. By the end we had a completely mesh covered enclosure, though it was still sagging like a bouncy castle with a puncture. Despite the variety of minor injuries no-one was bleeding beyond their ability to control it. No-one was dead. And I hadn’t shat on anyone’s head, which I guess qualifies it as a victory. The feeding cage, an extra section which could be shut off from the main enclosure by a gate worked from outside, was a triumph. Unless the rope toggles used to operate the gate fell inside of course, at which point it’d be down to drawing straws to see who went in to fetch them.

  As for the rest of the structure, I still had my doubts.

  “Imagine I’m a jaguar,” I said to Jimmy. I had a sneaking suspicion he wasn’t taking this seriously. “Really,” I said. “Me – Jaguar.” Best not to look for his reaction. I backed up, and trying to avoid looking too much like a complete pillock I pantomimed throwing myself against the fence. To prove my point I followed up by prodding the same section with a stick I was carrying. It bellied out alarmingly. “The jaguar is much stronger than me,” I finished.

  Jimmy thought this was hilarious. I had a sudden urge to dig a post hole on his head.

  “He’s not taking it seriously,” I complained to Emer, who was watching the exchange in fascination.

  “Ah, yer man doesn’t give a shite. I know what you mean though,” she agreed. “This cage is slacker than Marie!”

  As we gathered our tools and made our way back up the hill I offered to take bets on the length of time the jaguar would remain in captivity once we let her into her new enclosure.

  “On the bright side,” I pointed out, “next week we get to do something really cool. Catch an escaped jaguar.”

  Emer chuckled. She hadn’t been here during the Great Bear Hunt. One thing was for certain – if that jaguar climbed a tree there was no way in hell I was climbing after it.

  A Class Act

  “Hoo–jah, hoo–jah, hoo–jah!” The noise issued from a room full of throats. “Hoo–jah, hoo–jah, hoo–jah,” it came again.

  “Very good,” said Alice, addressing her class in English. She was standing at the front of the room next to a cheap table of the designed-to-stack variety you only see in schools. I lounged back in my matching plastic stacking-type chair, trying to look nonchalant without really understanding the meaning of the word, and shook my head at the peculiarity of the situation. I had to hand it to Alice – whether by fortune or design, we never met in what one could call conventional circumstances.

  She pointed to the blackboard where a simple phrase was neatly and precisely written. “Hoo–jah go out with last night?”

  “Hoo–jah go out with last night,” the students chorused.

  “Very good,” Alice said again. “Now this one – Ware–jah.”

  “Ware–jah, ware–jah, ware–jah!”

  “Ware–jah go last night?” She indicated the board again.

  For an English teacher she was teaching some pretty weird English.

  Alice had invited me to guest star in one of her lessons. Actually, to say she’d blackmailed me into it would be more accurate. I’d accidentally stood Lady up on a date in Quito, on account of me throwing up several pints of blood on the way into town. The rest of the volunteers had had a whale of a time, after laying me to rest in a darkened room in a youth hostel. They’d had so much fun that none of them had remembered to meet Lady and explain my predicament to her. Alice, who saw Lady quite often in town, had very kindly offered to make amends – saving me a truly difficult and stressful phone call. Her price was my body; she wanted me in her class for one whole afternoon, for her pupils’ viewing pleasure.

  Alice had a room full of university age students to entertain for several hours a day, and the last time she’d told them she was bringing a friend to class it had turned out to be a stuffed toy monkey. And not just any monkey – it was an English speaking one. The students had been understandably underwhelmed when she’d announced another visitor to their lessons, so she was determined to make the most of me. It had gone well so far….

  First she’d instructed me to create a character. Not that Tony, penniless backpacker from England working as a volunteer because it was cheaper than staying in a hostel, wasn’t an interesting persona, but she wanted to add some genuine interest to the lesson. Or fake interest, since I’d be making it up on the spot.

  Enter: James Anthony Romeo. Actor, lover, action hero; my alter ego was all the things I pretended to be whenever I was trying to pick up a hot chick in a night club. With one major difference – this time I’d be talking to someone who actually gave a shit. About twenty of them in fact, all with questions to ask and reports to write, and I was to be the subject of all of it. God, I hoped I’d do better than that stuffed monkey.

  My dramatic entrance couldn’t possibly have gone better. Following Alice’s directions I’d arrived at a locked door surrounded by a handful of her keenest students. Both they, and I, were early. Alice herself had been stalking the surrounding corridors vainly looking for someone to unlock her classroom door. She didn’t look happy.

  “They’re so bloody d
isorganised here!” she complained. “My class is here every week day, but half the time I still have to find the bloody supervisor to open the door!”

  The supervisor’s office was the barest I’d ever seen. One chair, one table, one filing cabinet. No artwork, no carpet and no supervisor.

  “So what can you do?” I asked her.

  “Nothing. Just wait till he shows up. This is so annoying, my students are paying for their lessons too, and they get to spend half of it stood around in the corridor.”

  We walked back to the classroom and stood outside the door in question. The window above it was open as if to taunt us.

  “Shame you can’t open it from the inside,” I said, “or I could just climb in through that window.”

  Alice looked surprised. “You can open it from the inside! It’s a like a yale lock. Can you get through that?”

  I took another look. The window was a decent size. “Easy,” I said. A quick glance around the gathered group told me that most of them were already waiting, and more than a few were studying me suspiciously. I could hardly believe how perfectly the circumstances had conspired. I waved a couple of guys away from the door, made a quick show of stretching and flexing my arms, then jumped up and caught hold of the window frame. In what I hoped was one smooth motion, I pulled myself up and through, swung my legs around and dropped to the floor inside. It was like breaking into our loo, something I’d practised several times since the first, largely because every new volunteer managed to lock themselves out at least once on their first day. Some learnt straight away never to close the toilet door with no-one inside, whilst some (no names mentioned!) always seemed to remember this rule just after they’d done it. Either way, I was getting good at breaking and entering. And it had all been for this moment. I flipped the latch and held the door wide for the surprised students. By now they were really confused. My legend was growing.

  I’d been sitting in a corner listening to gibberish ever since. It had never really occurred to me before just how difficult it must be to learn English as a foreign language, when even the natives don’t speak it properly. Whereas the beginners class would obviously start by learning questions with the words ‘Who, where, when’, they’d be screwed if they came to England and expected to be asked a perfectly annunciated, and thus understandable, question like “How are you this morning?” Just listen to yourself one day; “Ware-ya bin bro?” or “Wossyername?” – questions completely unintelligible to the untrained ear. The whole language is so laced with contractions and slang that most of us don’t even know we’re using them. First we complain when foreigners don’t speak English, then when they try to learn we move the goal posts. Aren’t we a bunch of bastards!

  Surprisingly enough the English aren’t well liked abroad.

  A last chorus of “Wenja wenja wenja,” followed by glowing praise from Alice, seemed to wrap up this utterly bizarre section of her lesson. Now it was my turn. Alice glanced over at me and I stood up to join her at the front of the class.

  Twenty confused faces looked back at me. Some of them were cute too. It’s official, I thought. I’m going to hell.

  “This is Mr. James Anthony Romeo.” Alice told the class. “He’s an actor from England. He is very famous there. And because he’s my friend, he’s offered to come here and let you interview him.”

  Silence descended in a heartbeat.

  “Hi!” I waved.

  No-one spoke. Tough audience.

  “My name is James Anthony Romeo,” I said by way of getting into character. “Do you want to ask any questions?”

  I really hoped this wasn’t going to be a bust. Alice had been so looking forward to it. As had I, to be honest. I needn’t have worried. She was more than up to the task.

  “Carlos. You have a question. Ask it.” Her tone brooked no argument. This was a side of her I’d never seen before – Alice the teacher, all grown up and responsible!

  One of the lads took a deep breath and started speaking halting English with a slightly shaky voice.

  “Why are you in Ecuador?”

  Good question. Even the real Tony didn’t know the answer to that one. I launched into my planned story about shooting a big movie in the jungle. I picked the cheesiest title I could come up with in response to another question. “It’s called ‘The Jungle of Death’.”

  The rest of the class relaxed once they realised they weren’t being tested. They asked about my home, my life, my past glories. I told them about my countryside mansion in Cornwall (lies), my hobbies breeding horses and driving sports cars (more lies) and my recent success at the box office with films like ‘Tomb Raider 3’, ‘Space Explorer’ and ‘The Assassin’ (lies, lies, lies!). It was so much fun. I couldn’t tell if they all believed me or if none of them did. That Ecuadorian inscrutability must develop from birth. One group of lads seemed to be holding a fierce debate in Spanish. In the lull between questions I caught the occasional word or phrase from them. ‘Full of shit!’ was amongst the more dramatic declarations. How right they were!

  Finally though, they caught me in a lie. When asked if I was married the power went to my head. Any one of the gorgeous celebrities I lusted after could be my wife. I suddenly remembered my first meeting with Alice, swimming ashore to escape the world’s worst boat trip.

  “Angelina Jolie,” I answered without pause.

  I mean, you would, wouldn’t you!

  At this a flurry of questions broke out, and a few of the poker faces at the back cracked a little. I described our recent meeting on the set of the new Tomb Raider movie, our whirlwind romance, her divorce and our quiet marriage ceremony back in England. This was one bluff too far and it was promptly called.

  “What nationalities are her children?” The question came from a grinning lad at the centre of the unbelievers. They’d obviously spent their time picking out a question to trip me with.

  I had no idea. “African?” I guessed, and the game was up.

  Slightly ruder questions about the nature of our relationship flew aplenty now that they’d realised I was a fraud. Alice brought the session to a close by shouting until everyone else shut up.

  “Thank-you very much,” I said.

  Laughter and a few thank-yous rolled my way as the class packed up and headed for the door.

  “And you really don’t speak Spanish?” The lad who’d outed me at question time had approached me instead of leaving.

  “No,” I told him.

  “Really?”

  “Not a word of it,” I said in Spanish.

  His eyes widened a little, then he laughed and headed for the door, calling out to his mate. “Manuel! He did hear you call him an asshole!”

  A Cold Stretch

  The rooster went off at 6am. It was only still alive because at 6am it was still far too cold to get out of bed, much less go outside. Ordinarily I would spend the next forty-five minutes fantasising about taking the bloody thing’s head off with a machete, while trying in vain to get back to sleep. Not so this morning.

  Last night, after a few glasses of rum to celebrate my successful infiltration of Alice’s world, and then a few more glasses of rum because, well, there was still some rum left, Toby had hatched a grand sounding scheme. Every morning from now on, we resolved to get up at 6am (since we were always awake already) and brave the cold like the men we were, to do an hour of calming, meditative yoga. Like the women we weren’t.

  No, that’s unfair. I love the idea of yoga – strength, balance and flexibility – I really do! At any time after about midday. Preferably in a warm room. Somewhere with a carpet.

  At 6am, in subzero temperatures, there were things I’d rather do than lie balls-down on a tiled floor and try to bend my legs back the wrong way. In fact I’m very hard pushed to think of anything I’d less rather do. But a deal is a deal. I’d offered to learn, if Toby would teach. His back was in bad shape due to a nasty diving accident years before, and he needed an excuse to stretch it out more often. I on the other h
and was merely incredibly foolish and needed punishing. That ravine-sized opening in my head, kindly termed my mouth by those that have never suffered its consequences, had struck again. In its wake my life was about to get even harsher; clearly I wasn’t learning my lesson fast enough. How many times did I have to remind myself? If I must drink half a bottle of rum of an evening, I should at least have the foresight to cocoon my head in duct tape and drink through a straw.

  I dropped off my bunk onto the icy floor. There was one thing I was sure to learn, I reflected, Toby’s teachings none withstanding: not to do anything, much less yoga, the morning after drinking half a bottle of rum.

  Toby joined me in the lounge looking equally upset with himself. But being men, and therefore extremely stupid, neither of us would admit what was surely obvious to both of us – we’d rather be in our beds, dreaming up an unpleasant demise for that bastard rooster.

  “I think we’ll do some ‘sun salutations’ first,” Toby explained.

  What sun? I wanted to ask. It wouldn’t even be visible for another hour. There then followed a very cold, very calm half hour of bending, stretching and breathing.

  “Enough for me,” I said at the first natural break point. I mean, I wanted to help Toby and all, but I was literally bending over backwards for him.

  “Yeah, me too,” Toby agreed. “We’d better get ready for the feed anyway.”

  I went back into the bedroom and climbed straight back into bed. The feed could wait until some feeling returned to my legs!