Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  Doubts assailed my mind as the shops began to close around me. Maybe she wasn’t coming. Maybe she’d caught sight of me already and left in shock without me even noticing. Maybe I was just paranoid, I thought, stifling a yawn. And very, very tired.

  And then there she was! The sight of her rushing towards me, high heels clicking madly on the marble floor, took my breath away. Straight from the office, smartly presented in a black pencil skirt and crisp white blouse, my girlfriend looked stunning. Her long, midnight black hair was piled elaborately on top of her head. And there was me looking like I lived in a cardboard box. But she didn’t even notice – she was far too busy apologising to me, for being held up at work due to some late deliveries! “Don’t worry about it,” I told her charitably. I really didn’t deserve a woman of this quality.

  We watched a film, ‘El Día Después de Mañana’, about a global ice age. It was glacially cold outside the cinema, not substantially warmer inside and we were watching a film about people freezing to death. I thought I was going to be one of them. Even my goose-bumps had goose-bumps. I lost all feeling in my arms and legs. Only the sensation of Lady’s warm body pressed tight up against me kept me from losing the will to live. If only she could warm me overnight! Alas, she had already told me that she had to go home to her children, which meant that I too was going home. By the time the movie finished my whole body was numb and we had no option but to huddle together outside while we waited for a bus.

  And waited.

  I had a horrible thought – had we missed the last one? Of course we had! She’d arrived so late that we’d had to catch the last showing. It had to be close to midnight. No way public transport would still be operating, even in this bus-crazed country. But Lady still wanted to wait.

  Eventually we gave up and flagged a taxi.

  We hugged each other tight all the way home. I’d have tried to kiss her, but between shivering and the car bouncing along Quito’s uneven highways I’d probably have ended up biting her lips off. Instead we saved our passionate embrace for after we got kicked out at Tambillo town. I pressed myself against her and kissed her for as long as I dared – another few seconds and our lips would have frozen together. Then she was off down the road into town, towards her mother’s house on the square.

  Had I been back in civilisation, another taxi would have been just what I needed, delivering my shivering self to the warmth of my bed with the minimum of delay. But this was not that place; the volunteer house and everything in it would be the same temperature as the surrounding atmosphere and the only thing warming my bed would be my body heat. Or lack thereof. So I decided to walk. A forty minute hike on a forty-five degree incline was bound to get some blood pumping. There were no street lights of course, but it was a wonderfully clear night. I walked as fast as my trembling legs would carry me, edging past precipices and setting frantic dogs barking every time I skirted a ramshackle residence.

  By the time I reached the refuge I was feeling much better. The date had been successful, the night was beautiful… and Johnny was walking down the driveway towards me. The solitary light outside his house threw his shadow into the darkness between us. It was not a happy looking shadow.

  “Tony?” There was caution in his voice.

  “Sí Johnny. It’s me.”

  He didn’t waste any words. “It’s not safe for you to walk up the mountain after dark. It’s very dangerous – lots of bad people around.”

  “Hey, it’s not a problem, “I told him. “I can look after myself quite well.” I was considering telling him ‘I know Kung Fu!’ when I caught the look on his face. I stopped mid smart-arsed response.

  “Walking around here in the dark is not clever,” Johnny explained. “I thought you might be a burglar. I nearly shot you.” It was only then that I noticed the rifle in his hands.

  “Please don’t do it again. Okay? If you stay late in town, spend the night there, or come up the hill in a taxi. Danielo is on guard too. Next time you might get killed.”

  I nodded mute acceptance.

  Next time, I thought, perhaps I should get a taxi. Three dollars seemed like an unnecessary extravagance until I weighed it against my life. It occurred to me that if I explained this state of affairs to my mother, she wouldn’t need much persuading to send me some extra cash to cover taxi fares…

  Toby was still awake when I got in, sitting alone at the table wrapped in at least fifteen blankets.

  “How was the date mate?” He asked sleepily.

  “Developed pneumonia and Johnny nearly shot me,” I told him. “So pretty standard really.”

  Toby didn’t even blink. “You get any action?”

  “Nope.”

  “Oh, mate! Your night really sucked!” Evidently this was too big a disaster to be merely shrugged away. He put down the book he’d been scrutinising at point-blank range. It was Spanish vocab. “On the floor by the fridge, mate,” he gestured. “Fetch that rum.”

  Comings and Goings

  Toby did love vegetables. Luckily, as he wouldn’t eat anything else. He was sick of rice (we were all sick of rice). He hadn’t dared eat a lentil since Alice had accidentally poisoned him when they’d snuck away for a weekend at the beach. He didn’t like eggs. Basically the guy’s options were pretty limited and he was getting skinnier by the day. So it was with great pride and hope for the future that he finally established his vegetable garden in a tiny greenhouse behind the parrot cage. He cleared it and cleaned it, dug the earth and carefully fertilised it. I mean, I never saw him squatting bare-assed over the soil with a handful of bog roll or anything, but I had it on good authority that his garden was well and truly fertilised. Maybe Jimmy told me. He was always full of shit.

  Toby had been hoarding seeds from our dinner vegetables almost since I arrived so by now he had enough to kick-start the market economy of a third world nation. He lovingly buried half of his precious stock and returned several times a day to water the ground. He even did one very clever thing. He didn’t ask me to look after it.

  The girls were delighted when Toby entrusted care of his pet project to them. He gave them very specific instructions and a watering schedule he’d drawn up on a scrap of paper. Because Toby was leaving for England. He’d been living at Santa Martha for close to a year by this point and he was fresh out of money. He was also suffering from borderline malnutrition and probably a fistful of deficiency disorders. Johnny had grudgingly accepted his need to return to England, just for a few weeks, to earn more money. “And bring back a gun,” he’d said.

  I think he had England a bit confused with somewhere else. At any rate Toby was leaving me in charge of the volunteers. It was a pretty scary prospect as it meant that I would now be the lone conduit through which Johnny poured his wisdom upon us. In Spanish. I was getting much better since I’d been dating Lady, but I was nervous as hell about being the sole point of contact between the boss and his entire workforce. Especially when Toby’s parting advice included nuggets like “Don’t let Johnny kill that ocelot!” Even though the cat had HIV, she wasn’t suffering and neither of us wanted to see her euthanized unnecessarily. Would I be fighting Johnny for her survival? I wasn’t going to argue with a shotgun. So it’s fair to say that I was relieved and delighted when in the same discussion Toby informed me we were expecting a new, Spanish speaking, volunteer. What he failed to do was to tell me anything else about her. Hence, I was totally unprepared when she swung her smooth legs over the side of the taxi and dropped lithely to the ground. A slender, tanned young girl with tumbling blonde curls and hypnotic blue eyes – I’d never regretted so strongly not having a shower after mucking out the monkey cages.

  Gloudina. What could I say? Her arrival on the farm was a sudden revelation of the cosmic beauty of the universe. Was she merely an extension into this dimension of a being so infinitely beautiful as to redefine our paltry human concept of perfection?

  Possibly. And she had a great ass.

  Gloudina had been working with Leo
nardo for weeks (which probably explains why we hadn’t seen him for so long) and now she had come to Santa Martha to be my wife. She didn’t know that yet of course, but I felt it strongly enough for both of us. Or rather, I wanted to feel it. Every time she bent over I wanted to feel it. Only time would tell whether she would give me the opportunity. And whilst I was waiting in hope I decided to make Gloudina the official picker-up of anything that I had mistakenly placed on the floor.

  Best of all I had the perfect excuse to ask her to marry me. No! I mean ask her to be my assistant. That’s right. My complete and total inadequacy for the task I had been appointed to would be both an honest-sounding reason to get close to her and would simultaneously cease to be a problem just because I was close to her. She would hear the commands and I would give them – together we would rule Santa Martha as King and Queen! Naked.

  Gloudina’s lithe beauty was also good for one more reason. All joking aside, in the last few months Toby had become one of the best friends I’d ever had. We’d spent more time together than most newly wed couples, working, eating and occasionally passing out drunk together. And now, almost without warning, he was leaving. I was really going to miss him.

  That night Johnny threw a dinner party to bid farewell to his most trusted aide. I was sad and happy in equal measure. Nancy outdid herself, creating a whole variety of vegetarian cuisine in Toby’s honour. Of course, that didn’t stop the real men from eating meat.

  As morning dawned on the day of Toby’s departure, a last minute tragedy came to light. Normally, scratching around in the wire pen in front of the volunteer house we had our very own celebrity. Within days of arriving at the centre I’d spotted her – a chicken that looked exactly like Tina Turner!

  The resemblance was uncanny. The fierce eyes. The huge feathery mane. The strut. I could have made a fortune on ebay. She’d narrowly avoided becoming dinner for the jaguar, and had even survived the night time depredations of El Lobo. Toby and I were both very grateful for this; after all she’d become quite a familiar face to us over the months. She added a touch of class to our dirty little world. A certain… Cluck Factor.

  I mean, who else has a chicken that looks like Tina Turner?

  So when I noticed her gone that morning I sprinted back inside to tell Toby.

  “Tina Turner chicken? No!” He was understandably aghast. “How? When?”

  “I dunno. She’s just —” A nasty thought occurred to me. “You know your good-bye dinner at Johnny’s last night? We were all eating those sort of fried strips of…”

  “Oh no!” Poor Toby was horrified. “You ATE Tina Turner chicken!”

  “I… I guess we did. I had seconds.”

  “NO!” Came the howl. “How could you?!”

  “Ah, Toby, we had no idea. How could we know?”

  “But… she’s gone… you even said she tasted nice!”

  “I know man. Hey, that’s the closest I’ll get to sinking my teeth into the real thing! She was pretty moist for a tough old bird.”

  “Mmm.”

  Then another thought occurred. “Hey Toby, you know what?”

  Toby took a few reflective seconds before he responded.

  “Mate, if you say she was ‘simply the best’, so help me I will kick your ass.”

  Swing Low

  What with Toby gone and the other volunteers being entirely female, I felt I was doing the honourable thing by moving into Toby’s room. The luxurious double bed had nothing to do with it. But it didn’t last long, as within days of Toby’s departure we had two more humans to accommodate. Mel and Mark were a proper couple, travelling together and everything, so their need for a private room was greater than mine. Unfortunately. It was hard to bear a grudge though, when they were both so damn friendly! Mark arrived wearing the most ridiculous hat I had ever seen a person wear. I mean, sure there’s anorexic supermodels strutting down the catwalk wearing half a grand piano or a live narwhal on their heads, but in real world, actual hat-wearing stakes, this had to be one of the daftest. An enormous, woven straw boater with a wide yellow brim, it shaded his merry eyes, tanned skin and unshaven jaw line. It also hid his hair, or rather his distinct lack of it; Mark was slightly older than the rest of us, and slightly thinning on top. In order to disguise his hair’s betrayal, he’d done to it voluntarily what Toby had tricked me into – had it cut so short it looked more like a coffee stain on the top of his head than anything else. To disguise this, he’d bought the hat. Of all his mistakes I held that to be the worst.

  His partner in crime, not that I could ever believe her capable of committing a crime, was Mel; a cheerful woman several years his junior, with short auburn hair and a perpetually sunny disposition. Together the two brought some much needed experience to the group. Firstly, Mark was an ex vet. I don’t mean he had fought in ‘nam or anything – just that he used to be an animal doctor. And Mel was… well, she was a woman. We had plenty of girls at the moment, for which I was grateful of course, but Mel possessed that cheerful efficiency around the home that kept us all clean and fed, and made the place an altogether more pleasant place to be. I hated to say it, but this was another area in which a lack of Toby had been showing. I’d never really thought about it before, but the more I admired Mel’s organisational skills, the more evident the comparison became. Toby had made a damn good woman.

  Best of all, Mel was a nurse. I’d been doing stupid things to try and earn recognition from the bosses for so long now it seemed commonplace. Sometimes it even worked. But I’d promised myself that taking over as co-ordinator would mean the end of all that. Now was the time for me to be responsible, to set a good example to the other volunteers and inspire them with strong leadership.

  It was exactly this point I was making on a pleasant Saturday afternoon. Currently in between projects, we’d had a fairly slack half-day of it, and were celebrating with banana milkshakes on the porch. I was straddling a beer crate in the way that bosses do, holding forth on my new-found sense of duty, when Mark brought me up short with a wave of his hand.

  “I hate to mention it old chap, but, err… the boys seem to be out of their barracks!”

  I was utterly confused. Mark gave me a knowing nod and Mel seemed to be studying the floor. Had I missed something? Then Gloudina gave a shriek and twisted around in her hammock to stare off into the distance.

  Marie was rather more direct. “Jeezus Tony, yer balls are hanging right out o’ yer trousers!”

  I yelped. The tough conditions at Santa Martha had been fighting a war of attrition against every item of clothing I owned - and at least as far as my jeans were concerned, they’d won. A pudding-sized threadbare patch on the inside of both thighs had recently disintegrated into a pair of holes. And from one of them, possibly the left, my testicles were dangling free, swinging in the breeze. All I could do was stuff them back in, gingerly, and then make a break for the dorm room. Marie’s voice followed me in: “Cover yerself up fer Gods sake man, we’re about to have lunch!”

  Weird and Wonderful

  It had been a quiet week since Toby left. I think Johnny, shocked by the abruptness of his leading hand’s departure, was still getting used to the idea of me as team spokesman. Perhaps he wasn’t yet sure of what I could handle, without Toby backing me up. He certainly wasn’t chasing me out the door to go recruiting new volunteers, or beckoning me up to his office to go through all that computer work that seemed to keep Toby so busy whenever a particularly unpleasant task was afoot. We fed the animals and cleaned them out, repaired perches and built new ones, replaced food and water bowls and added little sections of plank roofing over as many cages as possible, to give the inmates a little more protection from the daily rainstorm. The weather seemed more polarised these days; the sun was hotter, the regular rains lasting longer and striking more fiercely. It was also, if it’s possible to believe, even colder at night. Just when I thought I’d gotten used to it, the equator turned out to have seasons. I think we were entering the one called ‘bad’
.

  The trickle of new arrivals had also slowed, which was a definite blessing. The sheer number of animals now under our care was daunting to say the least. Squirrel monkeys, spider monkeys and the ever popular capuchins, coatis – Snotty now had a brace of cellmates – plus countless parrots large and small, the cats, the bear and the tortoise. The eagles. A rather nervous looking horse. And something that fell into at least one of those categories, but was otherwise a completely new concept to me. We had a ‘jaguarundi’. Can you guess what it is? Well, it had the body of a cat, slightly larger and heavier-set than a domestic variety and so sleekly black that it was almost blue where the sun hit it. But the really peculiar thing about it (which took me several days to spot – at first I thought my eyes were going funny) was that its body was stretched, elongated for no reason under God that I could possibly imagine. It was like this: normal cat head; normal cat tail; and in between curved a long, sausage dog like body that spaced the front and back legs about half again as far apart as they should be. It looked like its back end had gotten stuck in a fence and it had tried altogether too hard to get away. Perhaps we should have named it after some Ancient Egyptian mythological beast, ‘Sphinx’ or ‘Bastet’ after the Goddess of Cats. But it would never have stuck. Instead I called it Bendy Cat. And it lived up to its name – as observed on several occasions, despite being freakishly longer that any feline of similar size, it could still lick its own balls.

  And then came the three-toed sloth. Stupid sloth. It was a crazy looking beastie, all arms and bristling grey fur; its body was a blob, the kind of shape a six year old would draw for a pig, and its face was flattened like a racoon that had run full tilt into a brick wall. A triangular stub of a nose jutted out at an angle beneath a fringe that must have been difficult to see through. In fact, from side on it looked disturbingly like John Lennon.