Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  It also wasn’t uncommon to see horses or mules along the wider sections of the trail. Although we had plenty of water at that point, I was comforted by the sight of the occasional waterfall glistening and splashing over different parts of the path. I readily conceded that the trail’s vistas were breathtaking, but I hurt everywhere, and my forehead was sunburned and itchy beyond belief from the sweat of our exertions. All I wanted was to get this trek behind me, but I also knew that as soon as it was only a memory, I’d be wishing I was sitting on some ledge next to a daring goat, straining to hear the current of the river far below.

  Luckily, it was a flat walk, compared to the one-kilometre stretch of murderously steep switchbacks. I occasionally experienced an intense adrenaline rush when I found myself at the rear end of a wild horse on my left and a sheer, final drop on my right. Their rough tails flipping the flies from their rumps close enough to hit me in the face also set my heart racing. We sometimes inched by them so tightly that I could smell the dusty, grainy odour of their dry hair. Bree didn’t seem bothered in the least, casually patting their bums as we passed. I dared not, preferring to creep past completely unnoticed whenever possible. I could picture one of us getting kicked off like a video game target. “YES! I got the tall lanky one – rack up five-hundred points for me,” I imagined hearing after one of them reared up and kicked someone over the edge. “I count two-hundred over here for that little one. Look at her fly!” Their proximity and their muscular legs and hard hooves taunted me. Barely taking a breath, I crept past them, one after the other.

  Chapter 22: Get Lost!

  Ammon caught our attention as his stork-like legs slowly stepped backwards and he twisted and turned the map he held in his hands.

  “What’s the problem?” Bree asked when we finally caught up. He scowled, investigating the crinkled folds and lines, glancing off to the right in the direction of the gorge and then at the road ahead. He hadn’t needed the map prior. We had simply followed the high road and the solo path that squeezed between 5,000m (16,404ft) high cliffs on either side along with the rest of the tourists.

  The dinky road we’d trekked had somehow and somewhere opened up into an actual street covered with tarmac. A few villages had been built up on plateaus and we passed human life more regularly. We were far from the sight of any backpackers, so in that sense we were alone, and we went back to waving our arms and hands around to be understood. The challenge now was to find our way amidst forks and T-junctions that lacked road signs of any type.

  Our immediate goal was to find a ferry that would bring us to where we’d catch a three-hour bus back to Lijiang. Finishing up our banana pancakes that morning, we listened as our waitress helpfully offered advice. She had leaned over our table when she’d seen the map spread out.

  “No, no. Much fastest old ferry. Better, better,” she explained with her few words, and as she was a friendly local, we believed her. The other advantage was the minimal dent the fare of the Old Ferry would make in Ammon’s wallet compared to the First Ferry.

  But not long after breakfast, Ammon was standing perplexed in the middle of the road, obviously struggling to make a decision.

  “Well?” we prompted him, asking to be brought up to date despite the fact that none of us had had any prior interest in, or responsibility for, the map.

  “I dunno. I’m not sure, but I think we missed our turn,” he told us without looking up from the map. The thought that we might have walked even one step further than we absolutely had to made me groan. All that energy wasted!

  Bree jumped over and started putting her fingers all over the map, bringing it down to her eye level and examining it. “Let me see here, hmmm….”

  “Get off it!” he said, not wanting to be bothered explaining it all to her. She was not by any means a map person, but her curiosity understandably got the best of her. When somebody says something like, “I can’t figure it out,” or “I can’t twist this lid off, it’s stuck,” we are sometimes tempted to respond with, “Give it to me, then.” The instinct to try even when you are pretty sure you won’t be able to help is strong. You want to make sure that you can’t. Curiosity combined with the urge to help seems to be an inherent, instinctual part of human nature.

  “I’m serious! I don’t know where we are in reference to the road that she told us we needed to take.” The lines on the map were faded, the towns unnamed. “Geez. It’s gotta be just over there.” He pointed down at a dirt track winding off in the direction of the gorge. The paved main road we were standing on headed further inland, away from the water. “This map makes no sense. I think we missed it.” He muttered to himself for a while before giving his opinion. “That’s got to be where it is. It probably connects back to the road we missed.”

  “So it’s not the road we missed?” Bree asked, thinking she’d missed something.

  “Yah, yah, it is. It’s that one,” he said, finally making a decision. After all, somebody had to do it, or we’d be standing there until our year was up, given our family’s mutual tendency to procrastinate. I was just glad to hear that we didn’t have to backtrack and could access the right road just below us instead.

  Bree then mischievously tugged the earphone out of my ear, and I skidded and scrambled down the steep gravel hill screaming behind her, “Hey!! Where do you think you’re going with that!” We stirred up clouds of dust as the four of us slid down towards what we hoped was the right road.

  Catching up to a skipping, jumping Bree, I grabbed the second earpiece dangling from her right ear and promptly stuck it back in mine. She was in charge of the MP3 controls. The MP3 player which was actually mine to begin with had conveniently wound up in her pocket after hers had mysteriously broken.

  “This has got to be it. It’s got to be the right one,” Ammon assured himself.

  Bree and I continued on our way, linked arm in arm and loudly screeching along to a Whitney Houston tune.

  “Okay, next song is yours,” Bree generously offered, continuing with another of the games we often played. Listening to randomly chosen songs, we had to consider every word and relate them to our lives. It was easy to do this now, lots easier than it had been at home. Many more songs seemed to resonate with me now. I related strongly to tales of missing loved ones and broken hearts, pain and weakness, sweat and tears. In fact, I realized as we walked that I had rarely before been all that moved by song lyrics. Music had just been the source of a pleasant beat to me, and I had somehow managed to largely miss the point of every song I ever listened to. But now, the lyrics took me through layer after layer of emotion, some of which I didn’t always want to feel.

  Quickly switching off the song, Bree said, “No, no! You can’t have this one. We aren’t allowed to listen to this one.”

  “What? Bree, you were listening to it just the other day,” I protested.

  “Yah, but I decided we can’t until we’ve been gone for a hundred days.” It was 3 Doors Down’s, “Here Without You.” Despite only hearing the first few beats before she snapped it off, the lyrics played in my mind, “A hundred days have made me older, since the last time that I saw your pretty face.”

  I thought of Terri. I had been counting the days in my journal. We were at day twenty. The hike I was facing seemed at least that long, but it was only three days, a thought that made me shudder. As we continued to sing away, the trail grew fainter and fainter until it eventually faded to nothing.

  “Uumm, Ammon?” Mom quietly began.

  “What!” he barked, displaying a bit of the tension he was feeling.

  “This is taking kind of long. Wasn’t it supposed to be a short cut?” She said, not daring to mention the more obvious reality that the path had virtually vanished. Our neat quartet had spread out slightly, like confused hounds that had lost the scent. Ammon slowly stopped and turned around. Bree and I slowly peeled our earphones out and stopped singing.

  “This stupid map is impossible to read! I don’t know where we are anymore,” Ammon was fu
rious with it and with himself.

  “Well, we know the river is down that way,” Mom said, pointing to the right down the hill. The landscape we were walking through was initially dry and relatively flat, but it had become increasingly steep. Before we knew it, we were on a rough mountain side.

  “Bree, run down there and check. See if you can see a boat or a ferry port or something,” Ammon said, waving her off in the same direction Mom had pointed.

  “Are you serious?” she asked.

  “Well, we’ve gotta know if we’re on the right track or not. Maybe we just think we’re going the wrong way. You never know with these things. I mean, this is the less popular trail. That’s why it’s called the OLD Ferry. Just see if there’s a ferry,” he told her.

  “What would you guys do without me?” she asked, placing her daypack on the ground and taking the second earpiece from me. She plugged herself into some “pumped” music, as she called it, and ventured off to complete her assignment. Her athletic figure disappeared slowly behind some dry, lifeless bushes down the hill.

  This detour had already cost us four hours and the rest of our water. Well, that wasn’t entirely true. The only thing worse than having no water was having only two sips left at the bottom. I considered taking it for myself and claiming it was already empty, but I didn’t dare. I didn’t think I could live with the guilt, so I just told myself the bottle was already empty.

  “I have no idea anymore.” Ammon continued spinning in circles with his map held out in front of him. “This is obviously just an old goat trail!!” he finally admitted.

  “Well, where the heck are the goats that made the darned trail in the first place??” I demanded. “They would have the nerve to disappear! Cowards! Getting us into this mess with their trompy old hooves!” The trail clearly led nowhere. Even the goats probably never made it, I thought, subconsciously scouting for any tell-tale remains of goat skulls and bones as my impulsive condemnation haunted me.

  “It’s not me, it’s the map,” Ammon kept insisting.

  “You know, that’s really comforting. I feel lots better now,” I said.

  “You’re not helping, so shut up,” he retaliated, and I did. About ten minutes passed.

  “Where is she? Why is she taking so long? Can you see her, Ammon?” Mom nagged, as if his single foot of extra height somehow gave him super vision.

  “She’ll be fine,” Ammon said.

  “Well, what if she slipped and fell off or something,” she continued to fret.

  “If she’s stupid enough to walk off the bloody---” he began.

  “Oh Ammon, stop it!”

  “I’m just saying, don’t worry about her.”

  Bree and I had learned how to make a strange but very loud and accurate screech using our bottom lips from a Venezuelan guy we’d once hosted. Only we two could do this, so I whistled for her using our secret signal. Nothing. Again, and no response. Again, again, again. Popping out from behind a nearby bush, she whistled back piercingly loud right next to me and said “WHAT?” as in, “Ow, my ears! What the heck is all the racket about?” Her face was beet red, but she was hardly puffing at all.

  “See? Stop fretting,” Ammon said as if he had been in control the whole time. “Well?” he continued.

  “And?” I added with a squeak that was a little less cool than intended. I inched over beside her and squeezed her by the arm, clenching my teeth so as not to show her I had been worried.

  “There is nothing down there. It’s just this humungous cliff that drops into the river. That’s not the way to go,” she said again confidently. “What time is it at home anyway? I’m sensing Full House might be on right now!”

  This was horrible news. Knowing what was ahead of us, I lifted the water bottle to eye level and shook it, acknowledging for the second time that it was virtually empty.

  “Is that all there is?” Mom looked round at us, trying to remember who’d had it last.

  “Yah, only a tiny bit,” I confessed, holding it up again for her to see. We shared the last drips of warm water to wet our lips. It was a lot less pleasurable than I had imagined. I found myself unable to feel it slip down my throat.

  There was absolutely nothing around us. There weren’t any little huts, let alone a village or a place to buy water. Even the goats didn’t show their faces, and the gorge was a million and a half miles down a sheer cliff, so that was a dead end if I ever saw one. There was nothing for it but to start out again. We were headed inland, which meant upland, which meant straight back to the road we’d originally abandoned, if we could find it. We might not even recognize it, since we had left that road over four hours ago, and it probably would not look the same wherever we intersected with it. But then, it didn’t matter so much if it was the road. Any road would do, for that matter, as long as it led to water.

  We were in this together, and we had our music game to keep our minds off the heat burning our flesh. I never liked hiking or pushing myself to those kinds of limits, and luckily, I’d never had to. I was more like Mom, who hated exercise, and very unlike Bree, who got high from the exertion of spending hours on end doing gymnastics and working out. She removed one of her earpieces and held it out to me so we could again share tunes. I was still looking up at the obstacle ahead.

  “C’mon, Savannah. C’mon! We can do this! Imagine you’re part of a secret CIA mission.” For the first time, I felt I could relate to her and Rocky Balboa’s obsession with sweating to the “Eye of the Tiger” song that she listened to as she did sit ups and push ups in her room. My singular contribution to her fitness regime was to sit on her bed and shake my head in general disapproval.

  “Rising up to the challenge of our rivals.” The lyrics inspired me, and the beat pounded in my chest as I became one with the music. Cresting the summit, I envisioned myself triumphing at the top, raising my hands above my head to celebrate my victory. I was almost there! Two more steps, one more, and then, and then---

  My arms dropped before I got a chance to do my “Rocky on the steps of the courthouse” impression when I saw yet another hill. I felt like crying. Now I remember why I never cared for work-out music. It makes you feel like crap! I became a good deal less enthusiastic from that point on.

  Not knowing how or when our blind route would end was torturous. My mind began to drift and imagine the worst, because over analyzing is what the developed mind does (at least mine does). The sun would get hotter and hotter before it inevitably, and too soon, started sinking. We would be left in total darkness, with no shelter and no light. We’d get turned around and lose our way completely. Who knew what animals would come out at night to nip at us as we lay terrified though the cold night, in a fetal position in the prickly dirt.

  I had never hiked, nor had I experienced 35°C (95°F) degree weather, and now I was being challenged by both. There was no escape from the harsh sun. Nothing was tall enough to provide us with shade or shelter, and despite my 30SPF sun block, my skin was burning. The rasping wind worked together with the sun to suck all the moisture from my body and gave me chills, despite my sweaty skin. I felt so defenceless. The swooping breeze felt like a bodiless vulture circling overhead and slowly sucking the life out of me. I could not touch its ghoulish presence and was unable to bat it away. We were exposed to whatever harsh conditions this strange land cared to mete out.

  After what seemed an eternity, a big fat pipe gushing water miraculously appeared in the middle of the plateau at the top of the next hill. Oh, no. That is mean! Now I’m hallucinating? What next?! But as we drew closer, I began to hear splashing from the cement platform it stood on, and that wasn’t all! A shallow valley with a few cottages was tucked away below the water source. It was a fair bit down the hill, still quite some distance away, but it lifted our spirits immeasurably.

  Not knowing the source of the water and unsure whether it was safe, we all kept our distance – well, almost all of us. Bree dashed into it before anyone could stop her. There was no holding her back, a
nd she was soon sopping wet from head to toe. Filling up the water bottle she still carried, she offered it to us. “Anybody want some? Yum, yum!! This water is amazing!” It certainly looked like nothing less.

  “No, Bree, you go ahead,” Ammon told her, knowing she’d already had half a stomach full anyway, but not wanting the rest of us to risk contracting Giardia. “You can be our official guinea pig,” he added. Newly refreshed, she was now joyously doing cartwheels and other gymnastic tricks.

  “So now we’ll know, if you die, we shouldn’t have drunk it,” Ammon smirked. She better die, I thought, ’cause not drinking it is going to kill me anyway. I was jealously grumbling under my breath. I wasn’t brave enough to drink it, but I sure was going to get my hands wet. When I felt its icy chill, it was even harder to hold back. It was like caressing temptation itself. I was furiously envious of Bree and her lack of fear. Maybe dying would be worth it just to take a few sips. Instead, I stepped in and felt the ice cascade over me, thoroughly soaking the minimal clothing I wore.

  “It’s a good thing we got an early start,” Mom said, aware that there was still a long road ahead. And somehow, the rest of the day became a steady, draining series of “just a bit furthers.” First it was the water spout, but we didn’t indulge because we saw the village, but before we could get to the village, we saw a tiny sign to the ferry and trudged on, and somehow we STILL had no dang water!

  Winding down in the direction the sign indicated, we finally reached the river. “Whoa, where the heck is it,” Bree said, leaning a hand on a rocky wall as we approached the dusty trail beside the river bank. We couldn’t see any dock, shelter, or ticket booth.