Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  “Yeah, yeah. Fine.”

  “Good man! Same again tomorrow eh?” And he turned and wandered back to the feeding.

  I felt violated. And not in a good way.

  The caiman didn’t seem at all impressed with his dinner. I lobbed it at him from a safe distance, but he didn’t even flinch. The drama ebbed out of the situation. We clearly weren’t about to witness a mindless feeding frenzy. All of a sudden I felt tired. And filthy.

  “Maybe you should wash your hands,” Gloudina suggested. She sniffed the air. “And take a shower.” Her eyes travelled down to the fresh blood stains spreading across my jeans. “Maybe take a shower in all your clothes.”

  And maybe you should join me in the shower, I was inspired to say. Yet somehow, standing there dripping entrails, it just didn’t seem like the right time.

  Snap!

  The end of another week loomed large. We were all booting up for work when a couple of taxis pulled up, crammed with school kids. They’d arrived as they usually did – a complete surprise to everyone but themselves, and Johnny, who clearly thought that the imminent arrival of a school outing at his centre was ‘need to know’ information. We lowly volunteers did not need to know. Despite the fact that we were the ones who would have to control this rampaging horde of sugar-fuelled mayhem.

  I was over the moon when Gloudina volunteered to lead the tour. I’d led a couple of them when there’d only been Toby and me to do it, fielding rapid fire questions from a hundred directions whilst constantly hooking stray limbs and poking fingers away from cages full of hungry monkeys. They were not amongst my fondest memories.

  As I trawled the cleaning rake around the top cages I noted her progress past the parrots and monkeys, and was expecting her to lead the kids down the steps to the crap encrusted main road and off to visit Osita. Instead she turned aside and took the narrow path towards the greenhouse where the caiman now lived amongst the ruins of Toby’s garden.

  Those kids shouldn’t be in there, I thought with a mental growl. It’s not like they were in any danger – I was more worried for the caiman actually – but something just told me that we should keep this area off limits. For one thing, the caiman was hardly in a condition to receive visitors. I jogged over and caught the group up just as the last of them squeezed into the greenhouse. I shoved my way in, and through the pack to the gate. I opened it and stepped through, which act alone brought everyone’s attention on to me.

  “We need to take them out of here,” I told Gloudina in English. She nodded her agreement.

  I addressed the group. “You cannot stay in here,” I said, trying to sound authoritative.

  None of the kids seemed particularly impressed.

  “See the caiman?” I looked around the group, making eye contact where I could. “El es muy peligrosso!” (He is very dangerous!)

  Which, of course was a lie, but it had the desired effect. With a few gasps and nervous glances the children retreated ever so slightly from the fence. I crouched down at this point, to take a quick look at my charge. He seemed unchanged. I looked back at the kids and opened my mouth to impart more reptile based wisdom. As I did this, I gestured behind me at the motionless croc.

  And in the blink of an eye he surged up from the water, lashed his snout around and sank his teeth into my arm.

  I screamed like a girl. More from the shock than the pain, of course. The children also screamed like girls (which most of them were), and fled the greenhouse en masse. The croc, having made his point, released me straight away, and was once again motionless in his pond.

  I stood up, shaking, in shock and disbelief. It had happened so fast! That thing moved like lightening. I took a few seconds to breathe. Gloudina ducked her head back in through the doorway. She’d kept her cool completely, and had gone after the kids to stop them running wild. Now she had a moment to check on me. “Are you okay?” She asked.

  I kept my arm behind my back, clutched in my other hand. I could feel blood trickling through my fingers. “Yeah, I’m fine. Bit surprised though!” All I could think of was not to make a scene. Much as I wanted her sympathy, I didn’t want her to see my face when I finally looked at the injury. “He didn’t really get me,” I lied.

  “Woah, that was scary!” she said, and shot me a worried look. “Sure you’re okay?”

  I managed a nod, and a feeble smile.

  Gloudina shook her head and went back out to the waiting children. I heard my name featured a couple of times in her rapid Spanish explanation, then she lead the group away down the path, and down the steep steps to the road. Soon they’d be too busy dodging poo to worry about me. I allowed myself a few more calming breaths and stepped slowly, very, very slowly, away from the caiman’s pond. He never moved a muscle. Once through the gate, but still in the greenhouse and so fairly well hidden from the rest of the area, I risked a quick look at the injury. It had bled a lot. But the blood flow was slow, and not quite as dramatic as I’d imagined. Standing there with it tucked out of sight behind my back I’d gone through every variation of extreme croc damage my mind could summon up. I was expecting terrible gashes and blood sheeting my whole arm. Thankfully, small croc means small teeth and in fairness this was a very small croc. I could tell there were a few punctures, and enough blood to soak my hand, and that was it. It didn’t even hurt! That’s when I realised I was in actual shock. As opposed to just mildly ticked off. I tucked my arm behind my back again and headed to the volunteer house for a closer look.

  I’d only been there for a few minutes, sitting at the kitchen table and prodding myself, when Mel arrived.

  “Oh dear, what happened then?” She slipped instantly into Concerned Mother mode as soon as she crossed the threshold. “Gloudina said you got… Oh, blooming heck!” Mel, bless her, wasn’t big on swearing.

  I was hunched over, fixated on my arm and probably still a bit white. “It’s not too bad,” I told her, hoping it was the truth. “It doesn’t even hurt.”

  “You’re probably in shock,” she pointed out. Full points to Mel. She held my arm gingerly, bending over it and muttering under her breath; “Couple of stitches in the big ones… Must have missed the major blood vessels… maybe sutures…”

  “I’ll be okay though, right?”

  “We’ll see. Go wash it.”

  “Aw, but I wanted to show everyone while it still looks gruesome!”

  “Oh, you silly… Get it washed!”

  My moment of glory was over so quickly. I went to the bathroom and tried to cram my forearm under the tap. There was no chance it would fit, so I cupped handfuls of water and spilled them down my arm. I wiped the blood, old and new, away from a series of quite small, yet quite deep, punctures. They ran in a very satisfying pair of parallel lines up to my elbow. I went back to show Mel, taking a handful of bog-roll with me to mop up the fresh leakage.

  She frowned over the injury, twisting my arm back and forth and studying it with a practised eye. When she concluded her examination with a despairing sigh, I braced myself for the kind of lecture which, having a nurse for a mother, I’d become well used to. Instead Mel’s serious facade broke all at once. “You’re going to have some lovely scars there!”

  “Yeah!” I grinned back. “When I get asked ‘What happened there?’ I’ll be like, ‘Oh, got bitten by a crocodile…’ Hah! My parents will go mental!”

  It wasn’t long before the story got around, and everyone came to watch Mel patch me up. The best thing of course was that the Caiman had moved at all. He was alive! Well okay, the best thing was how cool my scars would look when they healed, but right after that came the fact that the Caiman was alive. I was really, genuinely, happy. For about two hours.

  “So,” Mark asked after he’d finished examining my injury, “are you still going to catch him after?”

  The ground dropped away from under me. It was now afternoon. The four ‘o’ clock feed was finished. And Mark had come to fetch me for my favourite part of the day – when I, and I alone, got to
handle the caiman, to catch it and hold it while he injected it with antibiotics.

  I’d caught the thing twice a day, every day, since it had arrived, but ‘caught’ was a bit of a misnomer. The first time since the operation, as I approached the pond, I’d been scared. The fact that the beast had been largely immobile the whole time we’d had care of him meant nothing – he’d been dying, and I was surrounded by vets and bosses. Here I was on my own, at least as far as the catching was concerned. I’d felt brave when I’d been awarded the job, and I knew no-one else wanted to do it. Actually summoning up the balls to do it was a little different. I’d taken a good few deep breaths, put on and taken off the thick gloves a couple of times, all to buy myself time while I decided how best not to lose a limb. In the end I’d just held my breath and grabbed. No problem. He’d seemed to strain a bit in my grip, but that could have been my imagination. It was certainly nothing I couldn’t handle.

  But things were a little different now. Mark led the way to the greenhouse. I walked slowly, and chatted to him, whilst inside I felt like I was walking to an execution. Mine. We entered the greenhouse and Mark held the gate open for me as I stepped through into the enclosure. He busied himself with his syringes and bottles while I looked at the instrument of my death.

  I was terrified.

  I walked carefully over to the pond and stood there, looking down. I half expected him to go for my ankles in a blur of green scales and teeth. He didn’t. Mark announced he was ready. He also seemed a little apprehensive, but not dramatically so. Mark knew his stuff, and must have seen plenty of nasty situations in twenty-odd years of vetting. He was also an exceptionally smart and brave individual.

  I was feeling neither of those qualities as I contemplated the task ahead of me. I managed to kneel down in my usual position – well, perhaps just slightly further away than normal. My mind kept dredging up helpful snippets of information, like the fact that kneeling further away would make the whole process more difficult, and therefore more likely to result in the loss of a hand. It was also reminding me of just how fast the croc had been. Faster than me, I’d bet money on it. In fact I was betting my fingers on it.

  Since that first time I hadn’t worried about missing the catch. But what if, said my mind, what if you’re so nervous now that you flinch at the last second and miss completely? Then you’ll be in the shit!

  Ever noticed how utterly, perversely and inescapably negative your own mind can be at times like this? Maybe it’s just me. I’d have given anything for an internal monologue that ran ‘hey, no problems, this guy’s asleep anyway! And your hand wouldn’t fit in his mouth even if you were so slow that you gave him half a chance!’ But no. It said ‘you are going to die. You may only lose some fingers, but once he gets his teeth into your wrist? They don’t have helicopter ambulances here. You’ll bleed to death before they get you to the bottom of the mountain.’ It was the pain I was most afraid of though. Shock can be a wonderful thing, but I don’t think it works if you’re expecting it. This time I was waiting, and when the bite came…

  “Come on!” I said out loud. To myself. I’d been crouched over the pond for a couple of minutes while all this ran through my head. This whole trip had been about conquering my fears from start to finish, and so far I was doing well. Every time something crazy needed doing, my colossal mouth was there to volunteer my services before I had the chance to think too much about it. The one positive side of having a cake hole like the rift valley is that life is never dull. And yet this was something else entirely.

  “Come on,” I told myself again. Mark looked at me in honest sympathy. He was letting me take my time.

  “Just grab,” became my mantra. “Just grab! Easy. No problems!” I looked back at Mark. “Just give me a minute,” I apologised.

  “Don’t worry. Take your time.”

  “Right. I’ll do it now. You ready?”

  He nodded.

  “Okay, I’ll do it now.”

  I did nothing.

  “Well, this time. Now I’ll do it.” I took a deep breath. Then another. “Right, now!”

  I started to reach, then stopped abruptly.

  “Holy shit,” I said to Mark, “I am so fucking scared!”

  Mark smiled and said nothing.

  “Okay… I’ll do it now. Just grab! Here we go.”

  A few more breaths. The croc eyed me with evil intent.

  “Oh crap,” I muttered, and grabbed.

  Four feet of lethal reptile, scaled, clawed and largely composed of teeth – did absolutely nothing. With one hand around the nose full of fangs and one gripping the powerful tail, I lifted the caiman out of its pond and held it up triumphantly! “YES!” I couldn’t resist an exultant shout. I had conquered the beast! Or more accurately had conquered my fear of it. Again. The creature itself became once again a rather small, seriously ill thing, and something to be pitied. Mark came forward and administered the jab, and I returned the caiman to the water. It gave a little wriggle as I released it, and I stepped calmly back. ‘That water’s too cold,’ was my first thought. Poor little critter.

  As we left the cage I felt a weight lift from me. I looked back and realised just how scared I’d really been. Truly, honestly, the most scared I’d been in my whole time in the animal refuge. I’d had time to think about it, to worry at the situation like Machita at my socks – the ten minutes between being reminded of the duty, and arriving in the greenhouse to do it, had been the longest of my life. But I’d managed it. Eventually. This was definitely a story to tell Lady! Which suddenly reminded me of the next item on my agenda – phone Lady. Might as well do it while I was feeling invulnerable!

  “And by tomorrow morning,” Mark pointed out, “you’ll have forgotten all about it. It’ll be easy again!”

  Tomorrow morning. And that afternoon. And the next morning. It was a good job I enjoyed overcoming my fears, came the chilling thought. I was going to get a lot more practice.

  Take Two

  Unbelievable. Johnny had decided he wanted a new tortoise enclosure building for Meldrew. What was so ridiculous about this idea, was that we had already built one – but in the wrong place. It had always been the wrong place; right at the bottom of the valley, where the dirt was iron hard. Days of digging, tearing enough stone to build a small house out of every hole with blistered and bleeding hands under a withering hail of abuse from my least favourite person in the whole world. I had a flashback of Layla, her face like a slapped arse, as she stood watching my efforts in disgust.

  At the time I’d foreseen only one other problem with the location – well, aside from having to carry a half-ton bale of wire mesh down a hillside covered in spiky bitch plants to build it – and that was how the hell we were supposed to get the tortoise down there? Johnny had waved this away, as one well used to ignoring the pretty concerns of simple-minded foreigners.

  Now, after a bit more time thinking about it, he’d come to the same conclusion. There were only three methods by which Meldrew could ever take up residence at the bottom of the valley; crane, helicopter or act of God. We had neither vehicle and as we have already established, God hates me.

  However, complaining about hard work to an Ecuadorian is never likely to result in an easier life. In this case venting my frustrations at Jimmy merely reminded him that sitting somewhere in the bottom of the valley was a half-ton bale of wire mesh, which would need to be carried back up the hill to the site of the new enclosure. By me.

  Johnny’s latest discovery was a swamp. He reasoned that, with a little creative landscaping, it could be turned into a dry enclosure with a stream and so would give the tortoise his own supply of fresh water. Lovely idea! On the down side, it did involve several days of dredging the ickiest, slippery grey mud from the bog by the hundreds of spades-full. We were knee deep in the shit and it smelled like a sewage works. I had a brief moment of panic – what if it was a sewage works? I was under no illusion that our toilets led into a nice concrete sewer running all the
way down the mountain. And, predictably, my left welly was leaking.

  “Ah well. Shit happens!” was Mark’s cheerful response when I voiced my fears.

  I was making a trench to divert some of the water – in theory at least. Each sucking spadeful grudgingly gave way with a slurp and a blast of sulphurous stench. Then the hole filled with water and the mud oozed back in to reclaim its burrow. It was like painting with invisible ink only much, much fouler. Oh, and it involved more swearing. My boots had developed a tendency not to follow my feet out of the swamp, which had two possible outcomes. Going forwards it resulted in plunging a naked foot deep into the sickly stuff, as my socks had long since given up any pretence of staying on. Getting stuck whilst going backwards gave me chance to demonstrate my finest windmill impression, before measuring my length arse first in the bog. I’d never been happier to see that shower, even if I did spend most of the evening relighting it.

  Excavating an entire swamp by hand might seem like a ridiculously strenuous task – until you compare it to lifting a Giant Galapagos Tortoise by hand. It was like trying to lift a small scaly planet. Except that it could bite.

  “Ow! Ya bastid!” said Steve. That was the sound of his initiation as the newest member of our team. Steve had arrived from England in the morning and had already lost blood on his first day of work. In fact he’d come frighteningly close to losing a finger. Steve was already showing promise.

  Thinking of England made me miss two people; Toby, who was still over there and probably having a considerably better time than I was, and Gloudina whom I hoped to kidnap one day and take back with me. If Toby had have been here, I thought, he’d have found a better way than this. Gloudina was spending the day in Quito, working at Leonardo’s surgery. If she’d been here… well, at least I’d have been able to look down her shirt as we all bent over.

  Six men each gripped an edge of shell. Being further up the Santa Martha hierarchy naturally earned you a place further away from that beak; I was safe enough, along with Jimmy, Johnny and Danielo. Mark and Steve were less lucky. Ten second lift; it was all we could manage, ten hellish seconds of gritted teeth and burning muscles. Followed by two minutes recovery time and we’d moved about three feet closer to the road. And repeat. For three hours. I still don’t know how we pulled it off. Johnny’s truck sure wasn’t keen on the passenger, complaining loudly when a monumental effort finally slid him up into the back. Mel tried to feed him a banana as we walked along next to the slowly moving vehicle. A stray memory clicked – a crate full of small tortoises crapping like fury for eight hours solid all the way to the jungle. “Uh, Mel, I wouldn’t give him too much of that,” I warned. If this guy emptied his bowels in the back of the truck he’d probably fill it.