Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  This was the excuse I used when phoning my parents for the first time since arriving in Ecuador, by way of explaining why it had taken me over a month to do so. I’d last spoken to my mother as she tearfully put me on the bus to the airport.

  Bless her! She was overcome with joy to find out that I was still alive.

  The Trouble with Reptiles

  Every so often a new creature or two would show up at Santa Martha – it was just the way of things, and we soon became used to it. The morning feed would often be punctuated by cries of “Hey, we’ve got a new monkey,” or occasionally “Hey, we’ve got a new… Whatever the fuck that is!” Everyone would crowd around for a quick look, then disperse back to their feeding and cleaning tasks. Later that morning either Toby or me would ask Johnny about the new addition, and he would reply with customary inscrutability.

  Me: “Um, Johnny, do we have a new *monkey/*ferret/*toucan/*unicorn?” (*Delete as applicable)

  Johnny: “Yes.”

  Me: “Oh. Okay then.”

  And that was that.

  Invariably the animals had been brought by Leonardo, our faithful (and brilliant) vet, under cover of night, either because he worked so hard all day at his practice in Quito, or just because he loved to mess with our heads. Not many people knew how good his English really was, and I’m sure he had a few laughs at our expense as we spent a morning after some heavy drinking trying to decide just how many capuchin monkeys were supposed to be in a particular cage. “Either I’m still really wasted,” someone had famously said, “or these guys are breeding!”

  Some of the new arrivals caused more concern than the others – one time I spotted a small crocodile in the middle of the little open garden between the cages. It wasn’t moving, but had already attracted a few worried stares from the other volunteers. “Toby,” I’d asked, “There’s a small crocodile in the garden. Are we supposed to have a small crocodile here?”

  “Oh,” he replied, “I asked Johnny about that.”

  “And?”

  “He said ‘Yes.’”

  Unfortunately, that poor beast didn’t last long. It turned out that a farmer had caught him, miles from anywhere he should have been, so most likely he was an escaped pet. He wasn’t well, so Leonardo (assisted by an extremely attractive student nurse) had administered some antibiotics. That was a lesson learnt the hard way; our cold climate kept his blood too sluggish to circulate the drugs. The croc was dead within hours. So if you’re ever attacked by a small crocodile, and it’s a bit nippy out, and you happen to have a syringe full of antibiotics in your pocket, you’re laughing.

  The tortoises, on the other hand, we were expecting. Well, perhaps expecting is too strong a word. Basically we were told that some had arrived, which was about as close as we got. They spent their days in the same garden that had witnessed the death of the previous reptile and generally did very little – with one exception.

  Twice each day, during the feeds, one of us would do a quick tortoise head count. I personally considered it more likely they’d have grown another one than lost one. They hardly ate. They hardly moved. As I said, with one exception. On finding only five mottled brown domes amongst the foliage one morning we began to search in earnest. It was a mystery – in the fairly confined space surrounded by cages, where could number six have gone? It was two days later when he was discovered in a scrap pile, slowly burrowing into the rusty junk on top. To get there he’d had to crawl under a variety of fences, down a narrow gap between two monkey cages, under another fence and then jump off a small cliff onto the scrap heap several feet below. Why? We were stumped. ‘How?’ was another unanswerable question. Along with ‘Did he fall – or was he pushed?’

  He did it again two days later.

  By the third time we knew automatically where to look for him. He must have loved that scrap heap. Two possible explanations sprang to mind: either he really was trying to commit suicide, lemming style, or (and this was my favourite) he’d watched too many cartoons. He thought he was a ninja.

  Cross Country

  There are things I’d rather be doing at four thirty in the morning. Well, given the lack of suitable female company, only really one thing. Either way, huddling outside in the freezing darkness whilst tying monkeys to a truck was not on my list.

  The monkeys of course were in a cage, and neither they, nor I, was alone. Toby, Ashley, and Layla were also swarming around the vehicle, hissing orders at each other as though talking normally might wake the neighbours.

  There was only one reason I wasn’t pissed off at the ridiculous hour and swearing like a drunken Scotsman; all four of us had asked, nay begged, Johnny for this opportunity. For the next eight hours we would be tucked into the truck, knees to chins and sandwiched between cages as he drove three hundred miles down the spine of the country. Because at long last we were going to release the animals. We were going to the Amazon.

  Most of the previous day had been spent capturing the lucky customers. None of our bigger critters would be making the trip; ocelots, eagles, puma and tortoise, all had nowhere to go. Realistically none of them would ever be leaving Santa Martha. Osita was another story. Eventually she’d be off to our sister program, a bear tracking project in the northern cloud forests. For now she was an unruly teenager, still awaiting the decision that she was old enough to leave home.

  It took over an hour to secure the cages to the truck. They were stacked two and three high on the roof, with rope running across and around, back through and down, up again and over, and over and over… Toby had been doing the tying and in the sheer quantity of knots I could see his desperation that nothing come loose as we bounced along rural roads. Given the quality of paving in Quito I could only imagine what the road was like in more remote areas. My buttocks clenched involuntarily. I would be riding in the back.

  We lined the floor with an old thin mattress courtesy of Brenda, and lined ourselves with three layers of clothing and a couple of blankets. Toby, Layla and Ashley squeezed together along the back wall of the cab, with arms and legs folded tightly around themselves. I wedged myself in facing Toby, next to the single biggest cage we owned, and braced my back against the low tailgate. Hopefully it wouldn’t open suddenly whilst we were doing a hundred down the freeway. A wooden crate full of small tortoises (including our resident escape artist) was handed in as a last minute addition to our cargo. Every inch of available space was crammed, with volunteers, excess clothing, animals – if Johnny had decided to take a deck of playing cards with him one of us would’ve had to get out. We huddled and shivered as the last minute preparations were completed. It was almost 6 am, and cold enough to freeze the balls off a woolly mammoth.

  Almost as an afterthought Johnny pulled a thick tarp over us. He’d fastened some poles to the sides of the truck without explaining why; now he tied the free corners of the tarp to them, revealing his ingenuity. Our thoughtful boss had given us a roof over our heads, and as though waiting for his permission the rain began in earnest. I hoped the tarp was waterproof. We were essentially sitting in a small steel box which would need very little encouragement to become a swimming pool.

  After an hour of speeding through the darkness I realised I could see out. The sky was lightening almost imperceptibly. Shadowy shops and apartment blocks flew by on either side, grey ghosts of some town on the outskirts of Quito. We made one brief stop in the semi-dark, picking up Leonardo, presumably from his home. He didn’t find the humour to pass comment on us as he took the spare seat in the warm, comfy cab. None of us even considered getting out – it would have required at least ten minutes of co-ordinated contortion and frankly, we couldn’t afford the energy.

  Dawn was a beautiful sight, streaks first of silver and then gold flickering through the gaps between buildings. No-one was speaking, or even moving. Wrapped in multiple jumpers, coats, scarves, gloves… four heads were tucked in tight, facing downwards.

  As the light grew and the sound of the rain on our tarpaulin diminished, i
t started to feel quite cosy in the back of the truck. My body had adapted to the temperature as much as possible, and the area around us began to come into focus. Our world expanded from the square metre and a half of mattress bordered by cage mesh, to shrouded views of the trees and fields around us. We were in the foothills of the Andes mountains, heading steadily upwards.

  I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew brilliant sunshine was baking my box. (By which I mean the box we were all sitting in!). Surrounding me on all sides mountains towered, vast and snow-capped. Beneath the snow line the world glowed green. Every inch of the landscape was heavily forested and glistening from the night’s storm. Steam rose from the foliage and heat-haze distorted the distance. The sheer scale of the panorama was mind blowing. Taming it with a road must have been a bitch of job. On one side of the truck the jungle plunged down so suddenly that we couldn’t even see it from the road. Cliffs soared on the other side, scarring the otherwise flawless emerald vista. For miles and miles at a time the only sign of human habitation was the ribbon of asphalt, stretching forlornly into the distance or vanishing around the next granite outcrop. Spectacular is the only way I could describe it – there aren’t sufficient words to do justice to that landscape.

  About nine in the morning the truck pulled over at a roadside café. There was literally nothing else there – just a café, with a bit of gravel out front for cars to park on. It must have been a lonely kind of existence for the staff, working and presumably living there. Not to mention that, if they ran out of toilet roll while someone was taking a dump it would be a long, long drive into town to get some more.

  By the time the whole group of us had piled out and massaged some feeling back into our lower limbs, the café staff had woken up to the fact that they had customers. None of them seemed particularly thrilled at the prospect. A laminated menu was thrust in our faces by a big woman with a moustache. It was something of a shock after a couple of hundred miles of unbroken natural beauty.

  We sat for a long time, with the waitress walking backwards and forwards across an otherwise empty cafe, glaring daggers at us each time she passed our table. She was truly hideous; forty going on a hundred and forty, haggard and bitter. And quite possibly a man. When breakfast finally arrived it was unidentifiable – certainly to the waitress, as she seemed to have given us completely the wrong order. Times four. Toby drew the short straw for pointing this out. I thought it might be the end of him. He got a short, vicious sounding reply, and she pointedly removed each plate one at a time. Then she brought them all back at once, and merely placed them in front of different people.

  We gave up. The vegetarians ate what food they thought they recognised and I ate the rest. I’d definitely gotten the better end of the bargain, due to my cultural sensitivity and appreciation. Or as Toby put it, by being about as discerning as a wheelie bin. We beat a hasty retreat before the terrifying woman could poison us with dessert.

  The journey continued through stunning scenery for several more hours. The road itself devolved from two empty lanes of bitumen highway to one lane of empty dirt track bordered closely by forest. We were descending now. The lower we got, the more humid the atmosphere became, and the foliage became denser and brighter. We crossed a bizarre steel ‘bridge’ consisting solely of two narrow girders as the proper bridge had been recently washed away. There was no mistaking our surroundings now – it was genuine jungle, straight out of Jurassic Park.

  At some point during this stage of the journey the wooden crate of tortoises ceased to be a crate and became a pile of sticks. Somewhere in the bottom of the truck, between bums, bags, shoes and crumbs, were six medium sized tortoises, probably scared shitless. A yelp from Ashley announced that she’d found one. A further yelp announced that it had decided to be scared shitless all over her. The realisation spread around the truck that at least five more piles of shit were doubtless waiting to be discovered somewhere beneath us, along with their erstwhile owners. And there was not a thing we could do about it. I suddenly regretted persuading them to eat so much banana the previous night.

  Only a few miles out from our destination we ground to a halt in a traffic jam. I honestly wouldn’t have thought more than twenty cars used this dusty yellow track in a year, but there were already that many sitting in front of us with their engines turned off. We took the opportunity to get out and stretch. Over the last three hours my back had begun to conform to the shape of the tailgate. It had two horizontal ridges running across it between my arse and my shoulder blades. My buttocks had compressed into thin pads consisting largely of bruise, and my left arm sported a decorative imprint of parrot cage. But my right arm was getting a nice tan.

  Johnny had walked on ahead to see what the hold up was. We joined him for the sake of something to do. And stood in disbelief looking at the obstacle in our path. It was an enormous plastic tube. Bright blue. Lying right across the entire road. With impenetrable jungle pushed up close on both sides there was no way around this rather unexpected blockage. Several workmen strolled calmly around the area. Could they be responsible for this? It looked like God had been colouring in the sky and had accidentally dropped his crayon.

  From behind the huge tube came the rumbling roar of a big digger starting work. Clouds of dust obscured its operation, but I saw enough to make out the plan. The tube was a pipe. And the pipe was going into the ground. A trench of epic proportions was being dug behind it, and until it was finished no-one was going anywhere. If someone listing the potential hazards of travelling by car in Ecuador had suggested the possibility of being severely delayed by a massive blue tube, I’d never have taken them seriously. But here it was, proof again, had I needed it, that this was a very, very strange country. Their priorities were not my priorities, and to them midday on a Monday must have been the perfect time to bury a two-metre high plastic pipe beneath the only road for hundreds of miles. The whole day’s worth of traffic was queued up behind this bizarre obstacle, yet no-one seemed in the least bit surprised. I tried to imagine the reaction of rush hour commuters on any road in England if faced with such a situation. Some of them would drop dead of apoplexy just considering the concept. This car owning community was far more relaxed. They stood around and chatted with other drivers, smoked, drank or just sat on the side of the road. Quite a few had noticed the strange cacophony of sounds emanating from the roof of our truck. Before long Johnny was pointedly ignoring a veritable crowd of onlookers, all reaching out hands to stroke monkeys and poking whatever came within poking distance. I got poked myself a few times.

  An hour or so later the situation finally resolved itself. Working amazingly fast, and with typical lack of regard for anyone’s safety, the workmen had managed to scrape a trench almost deep enough for their pipe, dump the bloody great thing in, then throw a few shovelfuls of earth back on top. They stood back from their labours, clearly proud of what they had achieved, as the first vehicle moved up to negotiate the bulge. It was some time before we got our go, and I was glad I wasn’t driving when we did. Johnny skilfully traversed what remained of the ramp and ignored the frightening way the top of the pipe seemed to sag and groan under our weight. Then we were across, and home free. As we followed the procession of beat-up trucks and 4x4s deeper into the jungle I swear I could smell the anticipation in the animals. Or wait – no, it was just more tortoise poo.

  Removing the cages from the car was a whole lot easier than putting them on. In minutes we had close to twenty separate cages of every possible size and style arrayed around us like Christmas presents. And about a mile and a half of rope. Johnny had driven us down a succession of progressively smaller dirt tracks until the car wouldn’t fit any more. From where we’d parked a footpath was scuffed into the grass, leading off downhill. I really hoped we weren’t walking the rest of the way. See, you can put eleven large parrots into one enormous steel cage for travelling purposes – assuming you survive the process of catching them – but such a burden doesn’t lend itself well to
being dragged for five miles through virgin rainforest. It would give even Jimmy pause except that he’d stayed at home to feed the cows – a choice which suddenly made much more sense.

  Instead we caught a canoe. The footpath led to the edge of a wide river and by the time we’d hauled every cat carrier, bird cage, box, basket and crap-filled crate down a short dirt slope to the waters edge a boat had already appeared as a dot on the horizon. It still wasn’t substantially larger than a dot when it arrived. If primitive canoes could be described as hollowed out logs, this just about qualified as a hollowed out stick. It had an engine though, which sounded considerably older than the boat.

  The pilot threw a long mooring rope at me, which I caught instinctively before realising that there was nothing remotely close enough for me to tie it to. I stood there dumbly for several long moments with the end of the rope clutched pointlessly to my chest, wondering if he was expecting me to tie it to my head. Then Johnny, with a grunt of disgust and a shake of his head for the foolishness of Englishmen, snatched the rope out of my hands and hauled on it with all his might. Sluggishly the canoe responded to his efforts, and by the time it had dawned on me just what had been expected of me Toby was already helping to pull the narrow boat in to shore. The front of the canoe ran a little way up the slope and the pilot, a silver haired, wrinkled old man wearing tattered jeans of indeterminate colour and nothing else, jumped out onto solid ground. He exchanged a few words with Johnny, punctuated with a sharp bark of laughter, that honestly didn’t require translation.