Travel Book for July 2010
Section 1 - ANDES
‘Everything that has happened since the marvellous discovery of the Americas…has been so extraordinary that the whole story remains quite incredible to anyone who has not experienced it at first hand.’
A Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Bartolomé de las Casas (1552)
Chapter 1- ECUADOR: MAMA NEGRA
In-flight Entertainment
Mark took his last seventy mushrooms on the plane from London to Quito.
How they let him into Ecuador remains a mystery. He strode across the tarmac – for Mark always marched everywhere – towards the big shed that passed for an arrivals hall, dressed in a purple shell suit, head and shoulders above all the Ecuadoreans and most of the tourists. His hair was a tangled mess. His pupils were wildly dilated. The veins on his arms and neck bulged. Melissa and I waited outside and watched him (it’s a small airport) grinning maniacally at the customs officials and then grinning maniacally at the immigration officials. He couldn’t have looked more conspicuous if he’d painted himself fluorescent pink and stuck a sign on his forehead saying ‘Stoned’.
They let Mark through. I guess Ecuadorean customs aren’t really on the lookout for people bringing hallucinogenic drugs into South America. Anyway, Mark’s were safely inside him by the time he got off the plane. His wild eyes and stupid grin could have been simply due to lack of oxygen, stepping off a plane from England into the second highest capital city in the world.
It was a bad sign.
Charles de Gaulle Airport
Before leaving England, I’d made both Mark and Melissa promise that on no account would we take any drugs across international borders. That lasted an hour into the trip, when Melissa and I changed planes at Charles de Gaulle airport and Melissa pulled out a couple of ready rolled joints. She pointed out that the fastest way to get rid of them was to smoke them.
‘We could throw them away,’ I ventured.
Melissa tossed her long brown hair out of her eyes and looked at me sadly. No. You can never just throw a joint away. As we smoked the dope, hiding behind a line of trolleys, the realisation dawned: no one was going to take any notice of anything I said.
Not that I was in charge, as such. It was just that I’d done all the work to get the trip together.
‘If you’ve organised the tickets and the insurance and where we’re going and what we’re taking and so on…what’s my role?’ Mark had asked.
‘You can buy the drugs,’ I’d suggested.
Mark had missed the plane altogether, postponing his flight by three weeks while he worked through the two thousand magic mushrooms drying in his front room. That’s how Melissa and I came to be in Quito already, waiting for him. I knew that if Mark came to South America, life wouldn’t be dull. I also knew that he would be a pain in the arse.
I was right, as it turned out, on both counts.
The Gringo Trail by Mark Mann is published by Summersdale (paperback; £7.99). It is also available through amazon.com and all good booksellers.
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