Sniper Elite

by Rob Maylor

  We decided to check out the sights in one of the red-light districts close to our hostel. There was no way I was prepared for the bombardment from pimps and bar owners trying to get our business, in some cases pleading with us! The novelty wore thin very quickly so we headed out of the area and found a bar for a few beers.

  A day later we caught what we thought was an overnight train to Andorra, but the trip took two days. There were a few unexpected stops that weren’t on the timetable and one train terminated in the middle of nowhere. We couldn’t get through the language barrier at all at the station, and shortly after we had arrived it closed. We ended up staying the night there on the freezing tiled floor. We must have gained some altitude during the journey because it was really cold and the air was a lot thinner.

  Our connecting train rolled in at 6 a.m. and, feeling like a camel’s armpit and looking like I’d been dragged through a hedge backwards, I double-checked I hadn’t left anything behind and climbed aboard. After another epic journey we came to a stop in the snow-covered mountainous region of Andorra, a small tax-free country on the border between France and Spain, almost totally reliant on international finance and tourism.

  This suited us down to the ground as our finance wasn’t that great. We were after a cheap skiing holiday, and this was definitely the place. We found some inexpensive accommodation, ditched the packs and headed for the high street to check out what was on offer.

  We ran into several backpackers from New Zealand and Australia, who pointed us in the right direction for ski hire, bars and nightclubs–all the essentials. We found the little side street they described and got fitted up for a set of skis and boots each. As soon as they waxed the skis we took them back to where we were staying ready for the following day on the slopes. And after a good feed of paella we went off in search of the bars.

  It wasn’t long before we stumbled upon one and took a look inside. It was pretty quiet but the alcohol was cheap and flowed freely. They also provided bar snacks, which we quickly devoured. After a few beers we started on the spirits as we found they were cheaper. And no measures–they’d just pour it in. ‘Is that enough? Nup! Okay, here’s more.’ We came up with a few cunning plans on how to save money and one was to take full advantage of the free bar snacks. Typical tightarse Kiwis you might be saying, but we were on a shoestring budget and had to make the most of our limited funds. We ate very little throughout the whole trip. In fact we sometimes sacrificed food for alcohol. ‘Eating is cheating!’ became the catchcry.

  We met a few locals along with several backpackers who all pointed us towards the best nightclub on the mountain so, half cut, we decided to make our way up the steep road in the freezing conditions to check it out. As we got closer we could hear the music pumping and the dull roar from what sounded like hundreds of people inside trying to talk to each other over the volume of the music. This place was going off!

  John stopped for a leak and Willie and I went in and parked ourselves at the bar a few metres from the door. The DJ was doing a great job of working his magic and keeping the patrons fired up. As John approached the club the DJ focused everyone’s attention on the glass door he was just about to enter. John didn’t see the smooth patch of wet ice right on the doorstep, and as he stepped on it his feet shot out from underneath him and he became horizontal about a metre in the air. Bang! John landed flat on his arse.

  There was an instant cheer and roar of laughter, us included. John arrived at the bar with a dented ego and a sore arse and looked slightly embarrassed as he hobbled over and ordered a beer. I was falling about all over the place with laughter and unable to talk. The club quickly returned to normal and people began to dance on the tables and even the bar.

  The barmen lined up a load of shot glasses along the bar and topped them all up with vodka; the DJ started a countdown and everyone at the bar helped themselves to a shot or two. We knocked back several each before they all disappeared. This went on several times throughout the evening. We were absolutely baggaged by the end of the night, and same as always, went home empty handed. Trying to chat up women while absolutely blind drunk has never worked for me. Funny that. Even my wife Georgina knocked me back when we first met some years later!

  It was a bit of a struggle to get up next morning to head up to the ski lift, but after a bit of breakfast things started to look a bit clearer. I’d learned to ski in New Zealand and these slopes were fantastic. There were several different routes to select and they varied in difficulty. By the end of the day we were cruising the toughest of them.

  We took it a little easier on the alcohol that night–we were also knackered from a full day on the slopes–but the next night we over-indulged as we were leaving the following day for Barcelona. This journey took us through thousands of acres of cork trees and as we got closer to the coast we started to see olive groves. On reaching Barcelona we slipped into a similar routine as before and found a cheap backpacker hostel, ditched the packs and headed out to see the sights.

  It was now mid-afternoon and everything was closed. We’d forgotten that the Spanish love an early arvo siesta, but we managed to find a bar that was open and ordered a few Bacardis; then did our Andorra trick and got stuck into the bar snacks. The following day we made our way south with a couple of Australian blokes and Anna, a Swedish girl, stopping off at a small coastal village. The backpacker hostel we found was closed, but the woman inside said we could leave our packs there until we came back that evening before we had to get the overnight train to Grenada.

  We caught a taxi into the main part of the town to get something to eat, but ended up in a bar having a liquid lunch. When it was time to leave we were well away. I bought a carton of San Miguel for the trip to Grenada and the world was looking pretty good. Trouble is, when we arrived at the hostel to get our luggage the woman had locked it all up and gone home.

  We could see our packs through the glass of the front doors and we were running out of time to get to the station to catch our ride, so Willie climbed up on the roof and broke in through a flimsy door. After jogging down the stairs he opened the front door and let us in. Then it was flat out to the station before someone saw us.

  Safely on the train we cracked a relaxing San Miguel and looked around for the sleeping space. They told us when we bought the Eurail tickets that everything was included, even sleeper cabins, but apparently not in Spain! I decided to have a few more beers with John before I got my head down, but a few became most of the carton. So when I did decide to get some sleep the only room available was on the parcel shelf above the seats. Somehow I managed to get up there all right, but it wasn’t long before the rocking motion made me feel sick. I had to get out of that cabin quick, but missed my footing getting down and ended up in heap on the cabin floor. I did manage to get to the toilet in time, but had to stick my head out of a window to suck in some fresh air.

  Grenada was truly a magnificent place. It is at the base of the Sierra Nevada mountains and I wish we had spent more time there. The Aussie boys went their separate ways in Grenada, but Anna the Swedish girl was heading to Morocco too and decided to travel with us.

  When we arrived in Algeciras early in the afternoon it was too late for the ferry across to Tangier, Morocco, so we ended up staying the night. This gave us time to look around and conduct a recce on where we were to get the ferry in the morning. It wasn’t long before we attracted a few drug peddlers trying to sell their goods–hash, cocaine and marijuana–once again dramatically dropping their prices every time we knocked them back. I know these blokes were trying to make a living, but their persistence quickly became a pain in the arse.

  The ferry crossing took a few hours and all went quite smoothly until we reached Tangier customs at the other end. Finally through the organised chaos, we discovered that our rail passes were no good in Africa so we had to get around by bus. So early the following morning we headed for Marrakesh, past the Atlas Mountains and through some very steep and nerve-racking terrain. The bus l
ooked and felt like it was built about 70 years ago using the cheapest materials available. It was painted dark red with a thick yellow racing stripe along the side. I reckoned it had probably never had a roadworthy inspection in its hard life, and as a mechanic this did worry me slightly. It was an accident waiting to happen.

  The seats were wood covered with red vinyl on a steel frame and seemed to have been built for pygmies. We were packed in like sardines but the locals must have been used to it; all we heard from them was a frustrated tut and a sigh. On the roof were hessian coal sacks full of chickens. There were also push bikes, and even 100 cc motorbikes tied down with an assortment of twine and rope. This was going to be a long and painful trip.

  We did stop a couple of times on the way, mostly so the driver could get out to a have a piss and a smoke, and we all took advantage of that. There were no public toilets, so a private space along a wall or several metres away from the bus was good enough, females included! I was shattered by the time we arrived in Marrakesh, mostly mentally knackered as I had subconsciously driven the whole route for the driver hoping we would get there in one piece.

  It was just before dusk, which meant the food stalls were starting to fire up for the evening’s activities. We accepted the fact that we would probably come down with some gastro complaint, but I was starving. I went for the barbecued chicken and cous cous, probably not a wise choice in meat but it was cooked over a flame and cooked well, so I took the challenge. I did end up with the shits–we all did–but it could’ve been anything: in those conditions an unwashed glass would’ve done the job.

  The souks, or markets, were absolutely amazing–probably unchanged for hundreds of years. It did get a little frustrating at times with nearly all the stallholders trying to get us into their shop to part with our money, especially since we didn’t have any. But if you could push past all the hassle, it was a great experience.

  We left three days later for a coastal city called Agadir, and another lengthy and arse-numbing bus ride. Agadir looked like it relied on tourism, as there were plenty of huge hotel complexes, most of which had bars and nightclubs built into them and nearly all were whitewashed. We did gain entry into a couple of the hotel clubs, but though the music was loud they were nearly all empty. The alcohol was too expensive for us so we opted for a smaller local bar.

  The following day we decided to head up the coast to Anchor Point, a favourite spot for surfers. Once there we quickly made friends with other backpackers and some of the surfers and we were invited to a house that some of them were renting. They had cooked up a huge feed in the tagine using a large freshly caught tuna.

  We hooked in. If it hadn’t been rude we would’ve licked the tagine bowls clean we were so hungry. Then they passed around the hash. They handed the joint to me first and I thought it would’ve been very unfriendly of me to decline the offer, so I pinched the joint between my forefinger and thumb and took a couple of good tokes. We left our newfound friends’ house a little worse for wear that evening and I reckon I had the best night’s sleep of the whole trip.

  By this stage Anna was starting to look pretty good, and when she went topless with us on the beach one afternoon Willie decided to put the hard word on her. He put in some very hard yards that night and left her room very frustrated and disappointed. She even told him to tell John and me that we weren’t getting anything either, which kind of pissed on our fire somewhat.

  It was a bit of a shame to leave that small fishing village to start the tedious journey back to England and Banbury. The journey was almost identical to our trip south; we did a few more overnight train stops in slightly different towns. A Canadian bloke who was travelling by himself joined us in Tangier and stayed with us until we got to Madrid.

  We were sitting in a square in the middle of the city and he produced a block of Moroccan hash the size of a tobacco tin from his backpack. I couldn’t believe he got it through customs in Spain as I had my bags pretty thoroughly searched. ‘Better make sure I haven’t been ripped off,’ he said as he prepped a small block for his cigarette. He put it to his lips and sparked it up, after a big drag he passed it around and we all spent the rest of the afternoon in a state of splendid relaxation.

  We stopped off in Paris for a couple of nights and I remembered a book I’d read a few years previously about an Englishman who joined the French Foreign Legion in the 50s. Even though this bloke had a bit of a rough time, it intrigued me. I began to talk to John about it and finally said to him, ‘Let’s not go back to England; let’s join the legion.’ Boy, am I glad now he told me to pull my head in. If he had said yes I’d definitely have gone through with it.

  When we reached Calais we caught the hovercraft across the Channel to Dover, taking 45 minutes instead of the usual two hours. By this stage we had run out of cash; we couldn’t even afford the duty-free alcohol. That’s what you call ‘broke’ in any language.

  Once back in old Blighty we needed to find work so we called into a temp agency, which turned out to be owned by a Kiwi woman. She organised an interview for John and me at a chocolate factory and we got the job there and then. It entailed packing endless bars of chocolate into cardboard boxes–mind numbing stuff, 12 hours of 24 golden foil-wrapped bars per box. We took the money at the end of the shift and never went back. I did slip a bar into my pocket at the end of the day just to see what this choccy I’d been packing tasted like. It was bloody disgusting! It must have been some cheap and nasty cooking chocolate but we were so hungry on the walk home, we both held our breath and ate half each.

  As we still needed some sort of cash flow John and I joined the other two lads on a nearby American Air Force base. This place resembled a small city. I’d never seen anything like it. I met the supervisor, who quickly directed us to the kitchens. ‘Great,’ I thought, ‘there’ll be bugger all to do as I’m on the night shift.’ How wrong I was. Not only was this place huge, it was alive 24/7. Servicemen and women seemed to come and go at the dining hall all night.

  Some of the major timings were the midnight feed and the 5 a.m. chow down. I whisked 2,000 eggs for the morning meal, two eggs per bowl, 1,000 serves of bloody scrambled eggs, which vanished within minutes of the dining hall opening its doors.

  We didn’t return to that job either, but we needed decent full-time work, something interesting and enjoyable. Two days later John and I borrowed a friend’s car and made a rather desperate and uninvited trip to Silverstone raceway, a famous race track where there were permanent workshops owned by former race car drivers and enthusiasts who built, repaired and designed race cars.

  After several knock-backs we got lucky and both secured mechanical jobs in a small but very professional workshop. John was put to work to rebuild a V6 Ford Sierra engine previously owned by a famous Swedish rally driver, and I began to help one of the other mechanics repair the front suspension of a Ford Escort rally car, which I was more than comfortable with as I’d had a lot of experience on them as an apprentice.

  It wasn’t long before I became bored with this and decided to make my way north back to Cheshire. There was also an ulterior motive behind my decision. I had met a girl–Carla–just before Christmas and wanted to see her again. She was working behind the bar at the Coach and Horses in a little place called Neston. During the day she was a hairdresser and she used to do some dancing in clubs as well. A romance blossomed. She was a good sort, very fiery, like her mother.

  We became very close over the next few months and I found a job at a mechanical workshop. But I soon realised being a mechanic didn’t really suit me and I lost interest in it quite quickly. In a way I was marking time–I really wanted to join the forces but timing was always against me and I kept getting sidetracked.

  I’d had enough of the UK and Carla was more than happy when I asked her to move to New Zealand with me. That was a mistake. Once back in New Zealand things really didn’t go according to plan. We found out Carla was pregnant and so decided to get married, which I thought was the right t
hing to do. Our son Lee was born in Middlemore Hospital, South Auckland and I was at the birth.

  Carla became very homesick during that time and four months after Lee was born we made the long return journey back to England. Back in the small Cheshire village we lived with her mother and her sister in a council house. Not much fun there. We started to fight and argue and things just got worse and worse, even when we moved into our own rented council house.

  I was working with my uncle fitting double-glazed windows, doors and conservatories, which wasn’t what I was put on this planet to do either. It was okay in the summer but once the winter came it was more like a punishment than a job. More often than not my hands were numb with cold and difficult to use–not good when you’re working with glass. It wasn’t long before I sliced through the end of one of my fingers and had to have it stitched back into place. The company we were working for did a lot of telemarketing and posting of leaflets to drum up business. So it had its peaks and troughs–sometimes there would be just a couple of days work a week and then my uncle would do the odd job on the side. That was where we fell out. One of his relatives wanted the windows replaced in his house and my uncle said, ‘Come and do it with me and we’ll share the profits.’ I had an idea of what he stood to make on the job and said, ‘Oh yeah, no worries, sounds good.’ So I did a full day’s work for him and at the end of the day he only gave me 20 quid, I wasn’t happy! At first I thought he was joking around. I took the money expecting him to call me back and tell me he was only messing around, but his van slowly disappeared down the road. That was it for me, everything went downhill from there.