Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  This week the chickens had arrived late and been dumped into the back of our white truck under cover of darkness. I’d watched them tumble lifelessly into a heap, fascinated. The next morning Toby hid indoors, only coming out at the last minute to climb into the cab with me and drive our stinking cargo down the track. We would feed the Fat Puma, then dump a couple of carcasses in to the eagles just opposite, and finally deliver an eagerly awaited feast to our ocelots by throwing the dead birds over the fence.

  Toby hated touching the chickens. We’d somehow managed to bring only three gloves between us, which was unfortunate for Toby as he normally liked to wear two pairs himself. Thus, I took it upon myself to do the lion’s share of the dead chicken flinging. It was kind of fun in a rather twisted way, a gross new sport I’d invented. I threw underhand, lobbed overhand, fired off two at once – dead chickens soared through the air on every conceivable trajectory. I fast bowled a chicken; I juggled a brace of chickens (three being too heavy).

  “That should be enough for now,” Toby called. He was standing a healthy distance away from the truck and its mangled, feathered contents, and he still sounded sick. I was starting to appreciate why the bosses heaped so much scorn on vegetarians. Although skinny Toby was a good bit stronger than me, but having a weak stomach around cat food can’t have been good for his reputation.

  “Last one mate!” I announced, and dug down through the pile for a huge, smelly old bird that was starting to fall apart. I assumed a stance, legs shoulder width apart, knees bent, and tested the wind. Then in an explosion of power I whirled the carcass around and around like the weapon of a ninja, and launched it into the sky above the cage at super high velocity.

  “AAAaaaarrgh!” Came the scream from Toby.

  “What’s up?” I raced around the truck, all thoughts of gold medals at the chicken flinging Olympics instantly forgotten. “You okay?”

  “Urgh!” Toby spat on the ground, and swore at me. “Fucker!” Then he spat again. He was rubbing frantically at his face with the bottom of his t-shirt, pausing only to spit and swear. Then it hit me – or rather, it had hit Toby! Some flying, gelatinous glob of goo from deep inside the chicken had liberally splattered his head at some time during my record breaking throw.

  “In my fucking mouth, you sick fucker!” Toby was muttering.

  “Oh, sorry mate! Did I get entrails on you?” It instantly occurred to me just how amusing the situation was to anyone less squeamish. “Don’t worry mate, it was only a bit of the juice!”

  Toby made gagging sounds.

  “It hasn’t gone far, just a bit in your hair. Good protein, that.”

  “Was it… water?” He panted, struggling to control his stomach.

  “Oh yeah, the birds were pretty wet from the rain last night,” I remembered. “Probably just water.”

  Toby took a few deep breaths and straightened up a little.

  I gave him a moment. “Oh, but that last one though, it was mostly mucus. Coz it was decomposing, you see?”

  Toby spewed. I could just make out a weak “You bastard!” between retching.

  He was strangely quiet on the drive back.

  Toby Makes an Omelette

  Toby poked his head out of the door. “I’m making an omelette for breakfast. You want some?”

  “Yeah, cheers mate,” I replied. I stretched and lay back in the hammock with my little dog asleep on my belly. All was well with the world. Sunny. No work. Two new volunteers had arrived mid week and were settling in quite well. Carrie, a pretty American girl with straight black hair, tanned skin and oriental features; and Richie, a gangly, scruffy white guy with a birds nest on his head. He could only be English. Though they didn’t know it yet, they were a perfectly matched pair. She was open and likeable, with a delightful modesty that complemented her exotic looks. He was crazy. Everything he said made me laugh – hell, even the way he looked made me laugh. I’d never met anyone quite so… rumpled. Fresh out of bed and wearing his cleanest clothes, Richie still looked messier than the rest of us did after a full day scrubbing shit off parrot perches. The guy was born to be a student. Having them around was a breath of fresh air. Two such breaths in fact (which was a rarity, as anyone who has worked on a dairy farm can attest). For the first time in ages I felt comfortable in my own home and to top it off we were having an omelette for breakfast. Why didn’t we have them more often? I wondered. We’d last had one… A stray memory clicked in my head.

  I sat up suddenly and swore. Poor Machita was catapulted out of the hammock at high speed. Luckily she landed in a pile of stolen socks. She glared at me and yipped, but my mind was fully occupied with the impending disaster.

  Toby’s omelettes were a clear violation of the Trades Descriptions Act. Because there was no egg in them. Toby didn’t like egg, but he did like vegetables. What he referred to as an ‘omelette’ was inevitably about half an egg drizzled lightly over a colossal pan-full of raw vegetables. And chillies. It tasted even worse than it sounded, and left me with a mouth so burnt I couldn’t eat anything else for two days.

  If I did nothing else to aid my continued survival, I at least had to remember not to let Toby feed me any more omelettes. My throat wouldn’t thank me today, and my asshole wouldn’t thank me tomorrow. The foul stuff burned nearly as bad on the way out as it did on the way in. I bolted for the kitchen.

  Toby was chopping assorted veg into large chunks. The contents of his pan already looked like a massacre in a market garden.

  “How many people are having omelette?” I asked innocently.

  “Erm, Carrie, me, you… And Richie. D’ya reckon I should use two eggs?”

  “Nah,” I said, “I’m not too hungry, I think I’ll just get a bit of bread. One egg should do three of you.”

  Toby nodded his agreement. “Can you pass the chillies out of the fridge?”

  Phew! Disaster averted. For me in any case. I handed him the bowl and went back outside to snigger at my cleverness. Well, I’d had to experience it once, I figured, so why shouldn’t the others? We could look on Toby’s omelettes as a kind of initiation. Classifying them as an experience would also clear up a lot of confusion.

  They certainly didn’t qualify as food.

  The Beaten Track

  With so many of us working together we powered through every task that came our way. Two days digging steps into a random hillside? No problem! Six volunteers carving a set of, say, thirty six steps would only have to dig out six steps apiece. Pah! barely a morning’s work. It only took us two days because a) Richie kept telling ludicrous jokes, and b) there was a bloody lot more than thirty six steps to make. As to why we were digging the steps? Not a clue. Why does the wind blow? Well if you were anywhere near the back end of Richie it was probably something to do with his all-bean diet, but that’s beside the point. The sun rises and the suns sets, without question; we made steps based on a similar rationale. They were very pretty.

  Next we built a path. The procedure was remarkably similar to stair cutting only on a horizontal plane. Dig a big-assed chunk of the hillside away. Move it three feet over. Pack it down again. Shore it up with dead trees. Then move two paces forward and repeat. Jimmy singled me out to help murder trees for the project which I have to admit was guiltily satisfying. My blade work was definitely improving. As the trail grew longer and more secure I seemed to be finding a rhythm, swinging with a loose arm and relaxing my grip just as the blade bit home. Inevitably I relaxed slightly too early on a couple of occasions and came frighteningly close to turning Jimmy into Stumpy.

  Our glorious earthwork, when finished, traced the contours of the hillside roughly parallel to the road far above. It linked the new steps with a small clearing in the undergrowth, where a river sprang from the base of the cliff face and plunged away into the cloud forest far below. A kind of soily beach led down to the waters edge. That at least was the path’s geographical location. From a practical point of view it started in the middle of nowhere, and went nowhere in particu
lar.

  It could have been a monument to life in Ecuador.

  And then there was the bridge. Because that small river had to be crossed. WHY? Why did it have to be crossed? Was their a leprechaun stashing his pot of gold over there? I never found out. But many more trees contributed their promising young lives to the cause.

  The trouble was, the more we cut the further we had to go to find them. It was deforestation on a very small scale. Carrying the first logs across the road, down the steps, along the path and down to the river required an inhuman amount of effort, which was all wasted when they were too short. Hard to believe we were looking for trees when we were surrounded by them, but we needed exactly the right shape of trees. Very tall, yet slim enough to cut and carry. Sturdy enough to walk on without being heavy enough to crush my spine whilst trying to pick the fuckers up.

  We managed to make a partial raft-like structure which almost extended to the far bank. Jimmy and I were the first across (being respectively the lightest and the stupidest of the group), and it was on the other side that I had my first introduction to the Spiky Bitch Plant. Now S.B.P.s are, as their name suggests, festooned with a completely unreasonable amount of inch long thorns that hurt like buggery when they sink into soft, unprotected flesh. The far bank of that river was covered in them. I came to loath Spiky Bitches because of their knock-on effect – it hurt so much to get spiked by one that I would quite often recoil at high speed, typically stumbling straight into another one of the bastards. And so it went on.

  Cutting trees on the far side was much more successful. They had been protected from our other projects by the river we’d just crossed, so there were plenty of big guys left to decapitate. We laid the first few to strengthen and elongate our bridge before it fell to me to carry the first sizeable log across. I made it exactly halfway. That’s when the motley collection of saplings underneath me decided to take their revenge. They snapped under the combined weight of me plus log, one leg went through whilst the rest of my body pitched sideways over the edge. My log landed on top of me, an impact not unlike being punched in the kidneys by the Hulk. But I was saved from a dunking by my new favourite flora. As luck would have it I fell through the outstretched arms of a large stand of Spiky Bitch Plants, who proceeded to break my fall by wrapping themselves around my neck.

  “Ack!” I managed.

  “Are you… are you okay?” One of the girls managed to stop giggling long enough to ask me.

  Argh! I’m… Ow! Fucking spiky little… Ow!”

  “Hang on, we’ll get you,” she promised. “Just give us a sec…” And they all fell about the place laughing.

  Bathroom Break

  The toilet door was locked. And there wasn’t anyone inside. The latch had developed a decidedly Ecuadorian personality recently, choosing who could exercise their bodily functions and when with callous disregard for our comfort. Now the crafty old bugger was in crap latch heaven, and as a parting shot had decided to expire in the closed position. It was a bit of a problem. Six people, including three girls. Well, two girls and a wobblegong. And I have a bladder the size of a golf ball. Not to mention most of the bunch were vegetarians. If we couldn’t get to our one and only toilet soon, this place was going to start to smell.

  In truth it already did smell. Damn vegetarians.

  By a lucky twist of fate, or in fact my tight-fisted boss skimping on building materials disguised as a lucky twist of fate, the bathroom walls didn’t go all the way up to the roof. The room was more like a cubicle built in the corner of the dorm room. About eight feet high, the walls were capped off with a wooden ceiling nailed securely into place to keep unpleasant odours out of our bedroom. I knew how effective it was because I was frequently forced to take refuge from the smell of the bedroom by hiding in the loo.

  I got a rickety chair and balanced precariously on top. I couldn’t get onto the bathroom roof as it was too close to the ceiling proper, and would never take my weight in any case. When I said it was made wood, I was perhaps being overly generous. Hardboard is a more accurate description. Here again the consistently poor quality of local building standards might act in my favour. This roof was about as strong as Toby’s taste buds, or what was left of them.

  Richie jumped up next to me causing severe strain to the chair. “Can we pull that off?” he asked.

  “Um… Yeah. Don’t see why not.” I’d been thinking the same thing. I had to grin at the peculiarities of a life which involved two grown men trying to break into an empty toilet. It was very nearly the strangest thing I’d done all week.

  With a screwdriver someone found on a shelf in the living room I prised the edge of the roof loose. The nails this exposed, in keeping with most of the nails we used, were very big and very rusty. With the main roof beams less than two feet above the bathroom ceiling we couldn’t open it very far. The thin board was fairly flexible, so by bending it upwards we managed to create a slim gap, edged with rusty nails. It looked disturbingly like a mouth. But being hardboard and therefore only a few generations removed from actual wood, the ceiling resented being bent out of shape and was doing its best not to be. So it was a spring-loaded mouth full of rusty teeth. In I went – losing a fair amount of skin in the process.

  Once I’d pulled my top half through I discovered another problem. Well, two problems actually; the first was that once off the chair my legs dangled uselessly with nothing to push on. The second was that everyone else found the sight of my legs dangling uselessly out a hole in the roof so funny that they let go of the ceiling to laugh at me. It sprang shut on my ass with a sensation somewhat akin to being spanked with a cricket bat.

  “Oww! You bastards!” I yelled.

  Unsurprisingly this caused even more hilarity. Stuck half in and half out of the roof, all four limbs flailing frantically on both sides of the wall with a rusty nail slowly embedding itself in the soft flesh of my left buttock, now was not the best time to laugh. It was also exactly the wrong time to have that thought. I felt a chuckle coming on.

  “No!” I called out to the others, “Don’t make me laugh you buggers!”

  But it was far too late for that.

  All I could hear was echoing guffaws from outside, I could picture five people rolling round the floor holding their bellies as my legs protruded from above them, flapping pointlessly.

  I started to laugh, so hard I couldn’t stop. It was the sheer insanity of the situation. I could imagine Toby explaining it to a bewildered fireman who scratched his head as he looked up at the visible half of me. For about ten minutes five people sat around cracking up. I just cracked up where I dangled.

  What a way to go, I thought, stabbed in the arse whilst trying to break into an empty toilet and then bleeding to death because I couldn’t stop laughing about it long enough to get out! Must… Control… Myself…

  Reaching out with both hands I braced myself between the side walls. I wriggled my ass a few more inches through the gap.

  Then my hands slipped and I fell six feet into the toilet.

  A minute later the bathroom door clicked open. I stood inside, one hand on the traitorous handle and looked out at my equally traitorous work mates. The laughter was slowly winding down. A couple of them even managed to stand up.

  “Having fun in there?” Richie asked innocently.

  “Not too bad,” I told him, “except I got nailed.”

  After a crazy two weeks, Carrie and Richie left within days of each other. Richie had originally planned to stay longer, but true love has a way of screwing up long-term plans. A few days previous he’d come up with the idea of using all our waste wood for a bonfire. Much drunkenness had ensued, and by the end of the debacle he and Carrie had discovered feelings for each other that the rest of us spotted the day they arrived. They set out to travel South America together, and that was the last we heard from them.

  Life was often like that at Santa Martha – volunteers came and went, featuring in our lives for a brief time, and just as I was getting
used to them they were gone. It was sad in a way, as each passing marked the last time I would see them again, and living and working so closely together forged strong friendships for the duration of their stay. Yet once they passed beyond the confines of the refuge I found I devoted little thought to them. Their lives were no longer enmeshed as were ours in the daily routine of feeding, cleaning, building and freezing at night. It was hard to think about anything other than the work at hand, or the work waiting for us tomorrow. The centre grew to dominate our thoughts, as will anything which becomes both home and work, and hobbies too, all rolled into one. It was not a bad thing – we just all cared about the centre, loved the animals, cursed the work and shared the same petty frustrations. When not working we talked about working, or what crazy task was likely to be next, or discussed the animals and whether we’d get to see them released or not. Our lives revolved around Santa Martha, and anything which wasn’t directly a part of it tended to get pushed to one side.