Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  Later that day though he did put in a brief appearance, trotting along the path in front of us as we headed down to feed Meldrew his bucket of fruit. Far too far away for us to chase him, and anyway how the hell would we catch a fox? Isn’t that the very definition of impossible? At any rate, he looked considerably happier, stopping every so often to loll his tongue at us as though daring us to come after him. His sleek fur shone orange in the bright morning sunlight. He looked well fed too – no wonder there’d seemed to be fewer chickens than normal scratching around between the cages. Cheeky little bugger! If only he’d eaten that bloody rooster then I might have gotten an extra hour’s sleep. Perhaps I could arrange something…

  So long as our pet fox limited himself to poaching food from our farm we decided to consider him rehabilitated. If he chose to roam further afield then he’d be taking his chances with the surrounding farmers, all of whom were likely to own a disturbing array of guns. All we could really do was wish the little guy the best of luck. There are far worse places than Santa Martha to be a wild, wily Ecuadorian fox. Up ahead our quarry vanished effortlessly into the cloud forest. I felt sure he agreed with us.

  Trip to Esmereldas

  I couldn’t see much out of the bus windows as we pulled into the southern resort town of Esmereldas. This was for two reasons; one, dawn was still a little way off, so it was dark outside; and two, I was lying on the floor of the bus. Toby and his girlfriend Alice had the last two seats. The gruelling seven hour journey had been punctuated by toilet stops, because the rest of the bus was filled with screaming school kids. Every time the vibrations of the engine started to lull me to sleep there came a squeal of brakes, the hiss of opening doors, and twenty five children stampeded over the top of me to get to the loo. There were footprints on every part of my body.

  So our arrival at the seaside was cause for celebration on the part of all of my parts. It also meant that we were the furthest it was possible to be from beginning the journey home; thirty hours on the clock and counting.

  We’d been invited by Jimmy’s wife Nancy, to accompany her and her two children on a school trip to the beach. It was the real deal; an authentic Ecuadorian holiday resort, where people came from all over the country to let off steam. A week off of work would have been well worth the trip, but nothing so sensible was on the cards. No, a weekend at the beach was the plan – in spite of that fact that it took almost an entire weekend just to get there and back. There was only one golden lining on this horizon. Sitting towards the front of the bus was a goddess. Both Toby and I had noticed her as we fought our way onto the bus back in Tambillo, though he’d sensibly waited for Alice to doze off before discussing it with me. He was understandably gutted that he’d brought his girlfriend on this of all expeditions, and he heartily encouraged me to try my own luck. I’d watched her turning back occasionally to deliver a mild rebuke to one of the kids, allowing me a glimpse of her soft brown eyes, full lips and flawless complexion. She was the youngest of the teachers, hardly more than a teenager herself, but seemed calm and in control despite the chaos crashing all around her. Presumably she was intelligent too; as the list of her potential qualities grew my confidence shrank in direct proportion. She was way too hot for me – what could I possibly offer such a glamorous, gorgeous, sensual young woman?

  I clambered off the bus and stood with Alice and Toby, shivering in the predawn breeze. We seemed to be standing outside a hovel. It didn’t look anything like the glossy brochure we’d been sold on.

  “Here we are!” Nancy enthused, confirming my suspicions.

  “No swimming pool?” I pointed out.

  “Oh, that place is booked up. This is another place.”

  Quite when she had first been informed of that fact I didn’t know, but I had a sneaking suspicion it was a good while earlier than when she decided to pass it on to us. But after a night impersonating a floor board I was too far gone to care.

  “So we’re staying here?”

  Nancy’s voice was soothing. “It’s cheaper here. Only ten dollars. Nice place.” She pointed across the road at the sea, obviously suggesting an alternative venue for swimming.

  Definitely no swimming pool then. And a little more worryingly, as we explored the tiny rooms crammed with bunk beds, no towels, no pretty little packets of soap and shampoo…

  “Shit, man,” said Toby next to me, “maybe we should have bought some soap and shampoo.”

  “Towels,” I added.

  “Yeah, and toothpaste.”

  Toothpaste? He was supposed to have the toothpaste!

  “I thought you were supposed to have the toothpaste!” I was indignant. How was I going to endear myself to the stunning mystery woman on the bus? Bad enough that after a day at the beach I’d stink of salt and have hair like a toilet brush, but three meals of seafood and not brushing my teeth? I’d be able to knock her out with my breath alone.

  “Alice will have toothpaste,” he consoled me.

  Alice did have toothpaste. Which we could borrow (though a loud “Bollocks!” from Toby in the bathroom announced rather eloquently that he had in fact forgotten his toothbrush), and a towel big enough for us all to sit on, though it seemed a bit of an imposition to ask if we could dry ourselves on it.

  Breakfast didn’t disappoint. A huge plate of rice and salad dominated by a great big tasty fresh fish fillet, or in Toby and Alice’s case dominated by even more rice and salad. So what if the owner demanded that we pay, despite us explaining that the food was included with our accommodation? The sky was… Well, grey, but it was hot, and we were at the beach! Even Toby was happy, having discovered a large pot of chilli sauce.

  And best of all we had a boat tour. For a dollar. You can’t complain at that price, though fifteen minutes into the tour I really wished I could.

  “Here,” explained the guide as the boat chugged past some rocks, “are some rocks. Birds live on these rocks. This rock is shaped like a submarine. We call it The Submarine.”

  Argh.

  Luckily several other holidaymakers on the boat were equally unimpressed, and since for many of them a dollar was actually a decent chunk of cash, they felt fully justified in giving the rock expert a piece of their minds. The only problem was that they seemed to be demanding more for their money, whereas I clearly wanted less. “Just back to shore asap so I can do some sunbathing and swimming, please,” was fine by me. But no. They had paid for a good, long tour and they wanted it.

  As the professor reluctantly turned his boat towards a rather more distant, yet equally unpromising looking formation of rocks, I suggested jokingly to Toby, “Race you to shore?”

  “Absolutely,” Alice replied instead, reminding me a little of Angelina Jolie in Tomb Raider with her cut glass delivery of that most accommodating word. She shrugged out of her life jacket (I hadn’t been deemed worthy of wearing one) and we both stood.

  “Sit down!” called the boat man. No doubt he had some special rocks in store for us.

  “Bugger this for a game of soldiers,” I said, though clearly it wasn’t, and as one we hopped up on the edge of the boat and dived in. Or out, should I say.

  I wish I could have seen the expression on our genius guide’s face. With nothing more he could do or say on the matter, he gunned the engine and the boat swung away. The rest of the group sat and glared at him – presumably in stony silence.

  We had a lovely swim back, once the pretence of a race had been abandoned. It really was quite a long way. Alice told me all about her job, which she loved. She’d left Santa Martha to teach English at the university, which she’d now been doing for half a year. It was one reason why her language skills were so advanced, as instead of spending all her time chatting to other volunteers in English, most of her friends and co-workers were native. I told her about my aspirations towards being an actor and about the primary obstacle to this goal being the fact that I couldn’t act to save my life. It was bonding of a sort and I was pleased to be getting to know Alice so effortle
ssly. It would make hanging out with her and Toby that much more fun, though I had to admit to feeling a pang of jealousy. This was already the closest I’d felt to a girl since leaving home, and she was Toby’s missus. The only female in my life was Machita.

  We beat the tour boat back by about half a minute, them having explored several fascinating geological formations around the bay. They all looked thrilled to have stayed with the tour the whole way. The guide’s face was like a thundercloud. Clearly he’d hit rock bottom.

  The rest of the day was fantastic. I was dragged into a beach football match – “You don’t want me to play,” I warned the others, “I’m crap.” We played for hours; I took crapness to new levels. We tanned and, predictably, burned. We shopped for stringy beady things, ate ice creams, (and in my case hot dogs, more ice cream, a burger, ice cream and a strange frozen jelly thingumy), and then returned to the restaurant for lunch.

  The meal was exactly the same as breakfast, except the fish was traded in for a chicken breast fillet. And it was equally delicious. The vegetarians started to wake up to the fact that they’d be eating a lot of rice on this holiday.

  The afternoon we spent at a different beach further round the coast, one full of holidaying Ecuadorians having the time of their lives. As the only three gringos in the whole resort we got quite a lot of attention, especially Toby and myself. Everywhere slender beauties with copper skin and long brown hair were smiling shyly and giggling to friends, or staring openly at our glowing red bodies. Cool, I thought, don’t have to be a stupendously muscular surfing dude to do well here…

  And then, almost before I knew it, I was alone. Toby had gone back to the hotel with Alice to get some ‘rest’ and I didn’t actually know anyone else in the group well enough to recognise them. I stood on the beach, obtrusively white (and red) in a sea of brown.

  I was debating my next move when, from a short way out in the sea, a big group of girls started waving. Pushing each other, and giggling, and waving. At me. Panic washed over me. Surely it was someone behind me they were waving at? I checked – no-one there. Who were these girls? Why were they interested in me? Feeling more than a bit foolish, I risked a slight wave of my own.

  And they responded! I could hear laughter and some of them were definitely calling to me. For want of anything better to do, I waved again. The calls increased in volume. Waving hands became beckoning hands, signalling me into their midst.

  What to do? Indecision paralysed my leg muscles. These chicks were way out of my league, even individually. Together they could quite possibly eat me alive. Except that I couldn’t communicate with them. They’d be asking me things, suggesting other things, and I wouldn’t understand a word of it. I’d just be stood there, grinning like an idiot, until they got bored of looking at me and waved me away again. Damn this language that everyone said was ‘so easy to learn if you went and lived there!’ I started to wave again, then thought better of it. Who was I, to wave at a whole bunch of babes when I couldn’t say a thing to back it up? I was no mouth and all trousers. I put my ridiculously flapping hand in my pocket, flashed what I hoped would be interpreted as a knowing smile, and walked off up the beach. I’d done the right thing.

  “You did the wrong thing there mate,” said Toby helpfully.

  We were sitting in our room making up a plastic coke bottle full of vodka and coke in the hopes that we could sit outside a bar and catch some tunes while the sun went down. And drink all night for the $3 the vodka and coke had cost me.

  “Yeah?” I asked. “What could I have said? Hi, I’m Tony from England, me love you long-time?’

  “Ha, well, would have been a start! No mate, just try to speak Spanish to them. If they like you, they aren’t gonna care if you sound like a dick head.”

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I told him. By way of punishment I offered him the vodka and coke to try. I’d been doing the mixing, and the buying come to think of it – and if the $2.25 price tag wasn’t warning enough of what was in store, the smell certainly was.

  Toby still had a cold. And in a few seconds his mouth was on fire too.

  “Fuckin’ hell! God that’s awful!” He coughed violently. “Tastes like fucking meths!”

  “Well, you know me and reading labels, I hope I didn’t buy meths…”

  “How much did you pay for it?” he asked.

  “Erm… like, five dollars, maybe,” I lied.

  “It’s fuckin’ awful! I can’t drink that!”

  Oh well. More for me.

  The sun was down. The beach bar was wicked – a little serving shack with a thatched roof, surrounded by stools. It was all ours; we had the only actual table, and joining Alice, Toby and myself were several parents of the various hordes of kids we’d dragged along, and – wait for it – yes, the stunning teacher from the bus. Against all the odds she was amongst the five other people from our party who’d dared to venture outside the hotel in search of some night life.

  Sipping her bubble gum pink cocktail through a straw, she looked so wildly exotic. It was hard to believe she’d come from a place as unrefined as Tambillo. I couldn’t talk to her, of course, that having already been established as Not a Good Idea. So I sat, and looked, and listened… A peaceful balmy evening in a paradise location at a grass-roofed bar with a beautiful girl, and I was doing the Green Cross Code.

  I could hardly believe it when she asked me to dance. So enraptured was I by the beauty of the scene, and by the fact that the vodka and coke bottle was half empty and only I was drinking it, that I hadn’t noticed the Salsa music kick in. Now it was time to dance, the sensual swish of Salsa for all those with Latin blood in their veins, and that curious shuffle from foot to foot vaguely in time with the music if you come from somewhere near Manchester.

  I accepted the invitation, but only because all eyes around the table seemed suddenly to be on me, and it was just about possible for me to look more awkward in refusing than it was actually dancing. But not by much. She avoided stepping on my toes despite some alarmingly fast footwork which seemed to flow around me. I avoided neither stepping on her toes, nor stepping on my own, which was actually quite a feat of contortion, and certainly made me wish I hadn’t worn flip flops.

  Fairly quickly I realised I had to sit down again. Hell, I was drunk.

  Over the salsa, a new music had started to intrude, fast, rappy hip hop sort of stuff that would intrude pretty much anywhere. Its source was the shack next door, and its culprits, well… It was hard to tell, because the first one I saw was upside down. He landed on his feet in the middle of the path, and stepped back to give his mate room to try some moves. It was a small group of locals, practising their breakdancing, and damn they were good. As the next guy span on his head so fast that watching made me feel motion sick, I started to plan out what to say.

  Because my mystery girl was sitting next to me! Instead of grabbing the outstretched hand of another partner and spinning away into the (admittedly rather small) crowd, which is what I had expected would happen, she had followed me back to the table for a chat. And now we were alone.

  I watched an impressive back flip from one of the guys opposite and wondered if his head was sweating inside his woolly hat. I was sweating. Buckets, and not just from the heat. Right. I turned to face her, and delivered my opening line —

  “Estás bien?” (You okay?)

  She was. “Oh yeah, she’s fine alright!” said the voice inside my head. I was at a conversational impasse. Jeez, and I thought it was hard to talk to English girls!

  She said something utterly unintelligible, and smiled. I did that kind of half laugh, a fairly safe response to most things said with a smile, then smiled myself so she’d didn’t think I was laughing at her. “Sí,” I added, to be sure.

  She smiled again – and was it my imagination, or did she lean closer?

  Bollocks to it. I was five thousand miles away from anyone who could ever bring this up in the pub and remind friends and strangers alike of just how
badly a man can make an arse of himself. Well, except for Toby, and he did that anyway.

  I leaned over and kissed her.

  At least I’d brushed my teeth.

  She looked a little shocked, though not in an altogether bad way. She glanced around, as though vaguely embarrassed, but no-one seemed to have noticed. Then she beckoned me with a finger in a way which completely transcends language. I followed her as she stood and walked to the other side of the bar. There, in the shadows, she turned and let me walk into her, grabbed me tightly and kissed me again. Things were looking up.

  She must have noticed that things were looking up, as she glanced at them then smiled mischievously at me.

  “I’m a lady” I heard her say.

  Quite so, I thought, kissing random strangers in random bars not withstanding. She held me close, kissing me with an unexpected urgency. I pressed my body into hers and was rewarded with a whispered enticement. It had the word ‘playa’ (beach) in it. I felt that up until now my responses had been doing very well. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

  “Sí,” I replied with feeling.

  So she took my hand and led me off down the beach.

  Now, I could leave it at that, were I, for example, a lady. But in case you’re in any doubt about the matter, I’m not. Suffice to say that fun was imminent – she finally came up with a phrase I understood. “Sólo sexo.” Now, that could really only mean one of two things, and I was fairly sure she wasn’t walking half a mile down a totally empty beach just so she could watch.

  She found a piece of beach which seemed to be more to her liking than the rest, and there I’ll have to leave it for decency’s sake – other than to bemoan the lack of a condom in my back pocket, a habit I’ve gotten out of due to the total futility of carrying one. In my experience up to that point, it seemed to act as a magical female-repelling charm, almost as if to take one out with me was to tempt Sods Law into proving just how unrealistic my chances of needing it were. Not so this night. So whilst fun was had, and sand worked its way into crevices not often occupied by a granular substance, there was even more fun that was not had. Damn it.