Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  The next thing I new were the clangs and squeals of protest from the bunk beds as the Irish girls leapt out. We were late! For the first time I’d managed to get back to sleep post-rooster. Well what do you know, yoga was good for something.

  The next morning dawned dark and frigid.

  Or rather it didn’t dawn, because it wasn’t dawn, and I had the desperate desire to prove the meaning of true darkness to that rooster by choking the daylights out of the fucker. He was bang on time though. 6am. I swear that bird had a digital watch. And the damn thing was set an hour fast.

  It was the do-or-die moment. If I didn’t force myself to get up straight away, I wouldn’t get up at all. Come on! I told myself. So it’s cold and it’s early! Hardly the end of the world is it? I should cultivate a positive mental attitude. Yoga is not something which can be done by halves, I thought, unless of course one is quadriplegic.

  I grudgingly debunked and went into the lounge. Not bad – I was the first to arrive. I sat cross legged on the floor and wished my pyjamas were thicker. It was kind of like sitting naked on an ice rink, but with no one watching.

  Toby was late. Not a problem, I thought. I’m not more perfect than him, just a little more dedicated. I assumed a tranquil, meditative air to prove I wasn’t ruffled by his lack of commitment.

  Fifteen minutes later I realised he wasn’t coming. Bastard! I’d sat here freezing my backside off to keep my end of his bargain while he stayed wrapped up in bed! It was a betrayal of monumental proportions. Okay, so perhaps I was overreacting a little. I tend to do that when my ass gets so numb I can’t stand up. Why the hell hadn’t I tried to look tranquil and meditative in a chair? I hauled myself up onto the coffee table. Whilst I massaged the blood flow back into my buttocks I considered my options.

  I could go and wake Toby. With ice and very, very cold water. I could go back to bed and stave off hypothermia. I could go outside and kill the rooster. Three brilliant plans! Alas, being neither vindictive, or a murderer, I decided I would have to limit my revenge to staying in bed an extra five minutes so the others started work before me. Ha! That’ll teach… absolutely no-one. But it would make me feel better.

  A full three quarters of an hour later I struggled out of bed again and into my disgusting clothes. As I entered the lounge Toby came out of his bedroom. I could tell he’d only just gotten up. He looked like he’d had a nice, long, restful sleep.

  I felt like a complete knob for getting up at all. Luckily he didn’t know that I had. Or that I’d been crouched in here slapping my own ass vigorously, in an attempt to restore sensation. I intended to keep it that way. Some subtle misdirection was called for.

  “Did you get up for yoga, then?” I asked casually.

  “Nah,” Came the reply.

  “Oh, really?” I tried to sound surprised. “How come?”

  This was it, I thought. He better have a bloody good excuse.

  He shrugged. “Well, I dunno, I just… couldn’t be buggered really.”

  Not Suitable for Vegetarians…

  (You have been warned!)

  It was a long time since I’d made the Sunday pilgrimage to Machachi market; between the rigours of dating and the Irish girls dragging me out to party at every available opportunity, I’d spent most Sundays recovering either at the centre or more often than not, in Quito. Whereas previously I’d spent most of each week looking forward to buying junk food (ie. meat) in Machachi, recently I’d been eating my fill of dubious meals from the wide variety of cheap takeaways that dominated the capital’s backpacker district. So far I’d survived the experiences. Mostly. But now the allure of Machachi called to me once more. I was finally confident enough to handle a solo mission, and without the need to shepherd other volunteers around I was also free to pick out my dream machete! For as long as I could remember I’d wanted one of my own, but always felt vaguely ridiculous to be considering buying one. Would they even sell such an instrument of death to a lone scrawny white dude adrift in a sea of tough weathered faces? I now felt sure they would. A blade would be mine! And socks. I needed socks. I’d been hoarding my one clean pair for my next date with Lady, until Machita had found them. Their remains were now amongst her proudest possessions.

  Socks were everywhere in Machachi. Every time I looked at a pair I imagined Lady exclaiming in delight as I took them off. What would she find funnier? Pink socks? Odd socks? Suddenly I was nervous. This ridiculous indecision typified the chaos that whirled through my mind whenever a meeting with Lady was imminent. She was so beautiful and so… intimidating! Without a stern bone in her body she still managed to scare me more than every animal in the refuge. Because I cared, so very much what she thought of me – and I was painfully aware that I didn’t have a lot to offer her. She had this whole exotic beauty thing going, a real job in the city and… did I mention she was beautiful? I was… well, just me. I’d never had a ‘real’ job. I’d trained as an actor specifically to avoid it! The only reason I wasn’t broke is because I was living in a country where you could buy a steak dinner for two for the price of a loaf of bread back home. I was always just a little bit grubby due to the general crappiness of the shower, and constantly covered in cuts and bruises due to… well, I don’t know! For some reason everything that lived and breathed at Santa Martha (and quite a few things that didn’t) seemed to want a piece of me. And most of them had gotten one.

  Before I knew it I’d spent half a day looking at socks and machetes. The colourful blur of the market was largely ignored around me. Even the mouth-watering smells of strange things a-frying couldn’t shake my focus. I’d narrowed my options down to a gargantuan blade almost as long as my arm and cotton socks with Popeye on. It would have made for an interesting package to explain if stopped on the bus. “Why yes officer, they’re both gifts for my ten year old son…”

  I decided to buy the machete. I could already imagine the look Jimmy would give me when I brought it to the galpón for him to sharpen – I would doubtless spend the next week listening to him comment on the size of my tool. But at least it was better than the alternative – the only other blades on offer were mini-machetes about ten inches long, probably for use by children in arts and crafts classes. That was not something I would easily live down. So my grand haul for the day was a farmyard tool which looked suitable for shaving a wooly mammoth, and one pair of comedy socks.

  It wasn’t until that afternoon, with a date arranged for the same evening, that I started to get dressed and so realised my error. I’d been so caught up with the question of style that I’d neglected to check the size. The damn socks didn’t stretch – they went on over my toes, halfway up my foot and stopped just shy of the heel. Of course they were children’s socks. Why else would they have Popeye on them?

  Other than that I was looking pretty good. My clothes had been washed, and… that was it. Being clean was such a rare occurrence for me that I was actually counting it as a benefit. I was wearing my best shirt. I was wearing my only shirt! I really had to think about getting another shirt. Though if I changed clothes Lady probably wouldn’t recognise me. My hair had finally grown back to a sensible length, so I no longer looked like I had my finger trapped in an electrical socket. I would have checked myself out in the mirror if we’d had one. We didn’t, so I didn’t. This made shaving a little difficult but I struggled on manfully. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen my own blood in the sink and the chances were better than average that it wouldn’t be the last. There was still an hour or so before I had to start out down the mountain, so I wandered outside to watch the sunset. It was a beautiful evening.

  Then I noticed Johnny walking purposefully towards our house. I smiled and waved. Whatever bombshell he’d come to drop, I was on my way out. Toby could deal with it, and tell me in the morning. But instead of waving back, Johnny called me. “Tony, there’s a job for you to do,” he said.

  Weird. We didn’t work on Sundays, much less in the evening. Was some cool new beastie arriving?


  “Erm… do you want me to get Toby?” I asked hopefully.

  “No, no,” came the reply, “we only need you. Don’t tell Toby.”

  What? Interesting! A job that they’d rather I do than Toby! Well, maybe this was something worth doing. A job only I could do eh? My ego was already kicking in. Toby was king around here, and deservedly so. He worked hard, and did so much more than feed the animals and dig holes. But then so did I. Damn, I worked hard! Maybe it was time for some recognition…

  “Come with me,” Johnny said, a note of conspiracy in his voice. “You will like this!”

  I followed him down the path, filled with excitement. Everyone liked me, after all. Perhaps they’d decided to make me their king! We stopped at the milking shed and Johnny led me inside.

  There, in the middle of the concrete floor, lay my prize. On its back with its legs in the air. It was a dead cow.

  “Wow,” I said to Johnny. “It’s… great.”

  He looked at me and grinned. “Here.” He handed me a machete. “You can skin her.”

  Bucket. I needed a bucket. And not to help in the skinning process.

  “Jimmy will show you how.” Jimmy was stood off to one side, grinning too. I got the feeling there was some kind of joke here, with a very strong possibility that I was it. There was only one thing to do.

  “Yeah, no problem,” I said, taking the machete off Johnny.

  “Good,” he said, and left.

  Jimmy came over and clapped me on the shoulder. He was clearly enjoying this way too much. “Let’s do it,” he said.

  What followed was one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever done in my life. Between us, with me pushing and Jimmy pulling, we broke the cow’s legs. Ugh. There is a very definite sound to it that is guaranteed to churn the stomach. The worst thing was that it happened in stages – not one almighty ‘CRACK’ and it was all over, but with a series of sharp jerks, each one accompanied by just enough of a crack to make me wish I really had asked for that bucket. It went kind of like this:

  “Ready?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Pull!”

  “Yeah.”

  “Now! Harder!”

  “I’m trying!”

  “Tight! Hold tight!”

  “I know!”

  “Now!”

  CRACK!

  “Ewwww!!!”

  “Again!”

  CRACK!

  “Ugh. Ugh!”

  CRACK!

  Crack, Crack, Crack.

  CRUNCH!

  “Good. Done.”

  (in English) “I feel sick.”

  “Okay, next leg…”

  Breaking the legs backwards at the knee apparently allows the tendons holding the leg together to be cut. Jimmy attended to this with a few mighty whacks from his machete. The result: four severed lower legs, hooves and all, which he put in a pile for the dogs.

  Then it got tricky. After producing a wickedly sharp kitchen knife (Jimmy had an unhealthy obsession with his grinding wheel. I had a sneaking suspicion even the spoons in his house were wickedly sharp), he proceeded to make a long straight slice up the inside of what was left of the first leg, bottom to top. Then he dug his fingers in and peeled back the thick hairy skin.

  Now, I was under the impression that the worst was over. Surely once we’d ‘opened’ the cow, the skin would come off like a Mars bar wrapper, and we could fold it up and go home. No. Not the case. As he peeled back the hide, a thick squelchy layer stayed attached to the cow. This I now know to be the subcutaneous fat. Lovely. With a few words and gestures Jimmy let me know what I had to do. Then he handed me the knife.

  It was about this time that I realised I was still wearing my best clothes, and was on my way out for a date. Things may be a little different in Ecuador, but I was fairly sure that Lady would not be impressed by me turning up looking like the victim in a slasher movie. I couldn’t do much, but at least I could take off my shirt before I ended up knee deep in cow guts. So I did. I hung my shirt on a rusty nail well out of splatter-range and went to work. Jimmy made no comment on my decision to do my butchery half naked, for which I was very grateful.

  So with knife in hand I carefully trimmed the fat layer away from the skin as Jimmy pulled it tight. Slowly, slowly, we removed more and more until we had half a body off. Each leg was dealt with the same way as we came to it, with a vertical slit allowing us to peel the skin off in one piece with the rest of the hide.

  Jimmy expertly slit the skin down the belly, and we switched over to work on the other side. Eventually we had a naked inside of cow, sitting on an inside-out cow-skin rug. And everywhere there was ichor.

  It was about to get worse. On the upside, Jimmy produced a bucket from somewhere back in the shed. On the downside he was planning on using it to store all the bits we were about to cut off the cow. He clashed the kitchen knife and machete together by way of sharpening them, in the way I imagine a homicidal axe murderer does before carving his Christmas turkey. Then he squatted next to the body of the cow and started to slice. Mostly my job at this point involved picking up the massive chunks of meat and carrying them to the bucket. I congratulated myself repeatedly on the decision to take my shirt off.

  Next he took a few practice swings with the machete (for dramatic emphasis, I was sure) and started smashing his way through the ribs. Halfway through I took over, and the feeling of the blade biting home into bone was just subtly different from chopping into wood. The cow’s chest was strong enough to withstand a series of heavy blows, but something about the way it absorbed the impact felt more… organic? Squishy. Sickeningly so – not that I was going to tell that to Jimmy. And then my machete lodged in the dense bone and I had to put my foot on the beast to lever the blade free…

  I’ve always been a proud carnivore, even when working as a volunteer in an animal refuge staffed almost exclusively by vegetarians. I’m of the opinion that man is supposed to eat meat – it’s part of our natural diet. Keeping animals chained up in a tiny box for people to poke, that I’m opposed to, but I see no contradiction in caring for animals, and also wanting to fill my belly with some of them. It’s nature. But I do believe that if I’m prepared to eat meat, I should be prepared to kill it for this purpose. Hiding from the brutality of killing something for food, yet still being quite happy to eat it when someone else does the dirty work, does strike me as a bit hypocritical. It’s only my opinion, and not necessarily the right one, it just makes sense to me. So whilst I don’t go around knocking pigs on the head and stealing a quick bite, I figured I should be man enough to cope with this at least once in my life.

  This argument was going through my head as I planted my recently cleaned training shoe on the cow’s mangled rib cage and wrenched the machete free for the third time.

  Once was definitely enough.

  Finally that bit was over. We shifted operations to the squibbly bits inside the cow, and soon had a separate pile of slimy internal organs next to the bucket. Jimmy was careful to point out the stomachs, and warn me against nicking them with the knife. Apparently this would not only ruin the rest of the meat below, but would also make a horrible smell. Horrible smell? Where the hell did he think he was now, the perfume counter at Selfridges? The whole place stank like someone was chopping up a dead cow. We trimmed out some more meat until the cow looked like a bony canoe. There couldn’t be much left now that we could remove. Jimmy seemed to agree. He stood up and wiped the kitchen knife on a rag from his back pocket. He stopped for a breather and eyed the huge pile of meat and sliminess we’d amassed. I looked down at my jeans for any signs of sliminess there. Somehow it seemed I’d escaped the worst of it, though I’d be leaving bloody footprints for a while.

  Finished? I thought. Not even close. We’d mercifully left the skin on the head, and after accidentally making eye contact in the first few minutes of the job I’d been trying really hard to avoid looking at it. Not a problem for much longer – a few minute’s rest was all Jimmy needed. He walked ar
ound what was left of the cow, took careful aim with his machete and hacked the head off in three excessively brutal strokes. More for the dogs.

  Well over an hour later I emerged from the milking shed and headed back to the house.

  “Still here?” Toby asked as I walked straight past him to the bathroom. “Where’ve you been then?”

  “Trust me,” I said, like they do in the movies, “you don’t want to know.”

  But this was the real world, and like anyone else who hears that phrase for real, Toby instantly did want to know. So after scrubbing my hands for a good few minutes, I told him. Poor bugger! It was fairly obvious from the start why they wanted me to do the job as opposed to him, but given his reaction to my report he would have made more mess down there than the cow did. Still, it gave me something to wind him up with. For the next few days all I had to do to make him go green was to make a few innocuous sounds… “Crack… Crack…. CRACK…!”

  I really wanted a shower. So I had one. I really wanted to shower in my clothes, but I had nothing else to wear and I couldn’t be soggy on a date. There are rules about that sort of thing.

  It was getting quite late as I walked quickly down the hill. I was sweating from the exercise, but in my imagination I was still discovering bits of slime I hadn’t managed to wash off. That would be a sure hit with Lady. I could just imagine the conversation…

  Lady: “Mm, you’re sweating. I like a man sweating…”

  Me: “No, sorry, that’s cow mucus.”

  My dictionary doesn’t even have a Spanish word for mucus. Which is probably a good thing.

  Lady was late. I was standing alone in the middle of a shopping centre on the outskirts of Quito, and the temperature inside and out was dropping rapidly. I’d agreed to meet her here after work and was a little late myself due to the surprise butchering party. Every time I smoothed my hands down my jeans I discovered another microscopic fleck of blood. What would I do when she turned up looking stunning, leant in to kiss me and pulled up short to ask why I smelled like something had died of dysentery in my pocket? And as if it couldn’t get any worse – I wasn’t wearing any socks.