The Gringo Trail
Mark Mann
THE GRINGO TRAIL
This edition published 2010
First published in 1999 Reprinted 2001/ Second edition published in 2004
Copyright Mark Mann 1999
The right of Mark Mann to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, nor transmitted, nor translated into a machine language, without the written permission of the publishers.
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'Breathe (in air)' Waters/Gilmour/Wright
Copyright Pink Floyd Music Publishers Limited 1973
Extract reproduced by kind permission of the band and SLC Registrars Limited
'Siempe Alegre' Extract taken from Salsa: Havana Heat! Bronx Beat.
Copyright Raphy Leavit 1992 Extract reproduced by kind permission of EPO Publishers, Belgium
Disclaimer
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material; should there be any omissions in this respect we apologise and shall be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
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To my parents, for endless support and love, and to D
For 'Westie' (shine on you crazy diamond)
CONTENTS
SECTION 1 ANDES
Chapter 1 Ecuador: Mama Negra
Chapter 2 Peru: Buses, Bimbos and Banditos
Chapter 3 Bolivia: Things Get Worse with Coke
SECTION 2 AMAZON
Chapter 4 Ecuador: Rumbles in the Jungle
SECTION 3 COLOMBIA
Chapter 5 Highlands: Cowboys and Indians
Chapter 6 Caribbean: Carnival
SECTION 4 ARRECIFES
Chapter 7 Arrecifes
Chapter 8 A Full Moon Trip
Chapter 9 The Fishboy
Chapter 10 Afterlife
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOTES
Section 1
ANDES
'Everything that has happened since the marvellous discovery of the Americas has been so extraordinary that thewhole story remains quite incredible to anyone who has not experienced it at first hand.'
A Very Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies,
Bartolom 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.
***
Slacker
Mark was probably the most intelligent person I knew. He certainly thought so.
I remember an entire night, a few years earlier, wandering around the Glastonbury Festival while Mark explained why sines and cosines were fundamental to the working of the universe. It all made sense. As he spoke, sines and cosines leaped into life, danced across the fields and sang through the air. I cared about them. I instantly forgot every word. (Well, I was tripping.) Most people who talk about maths and chemistry and stuff like that for more than, say, three seconds are immediately consigned to a social status slightly below that of a fungal infection. But Mark could carry it off, even with guys I regarded as seriously dangerous. Guys who stole cars to get home from the pub. Of course, this had much to do with the fact that he was always the last one standing in any drug-taking contest. That earned you the right to talk about cosines.
I'd originally met Mark at university, where he'd studied anthropology and I'd studied politics. For the last two years, though, he'd been happily unemployed. In between, he'd been 'Northern European sales manager' of an American computer company. What he liked about the job apart from the huge salary and trips to southern California where 'girls go crazy when they hear an English accent' was that the 'Northern European office' comprised one person and was located in his front room. The very room in which he kept his dope.
The company was taken over. Mark was made redundant. He adjusted to the massive drop in income by cranking up his speed intake so he didn't need to buy food, and not paying any bills. He stopped paying the mortgage, phone, electricity, gas, water and TV licence. Nothing happened. A stream of red letters threatened legal action, but his house wasn't repossessed. His phone wasn't cut off. Electricity, water and gas continued to flow from their appropriate taps and sockets. He even got to keep his most treasured possession: his three-litre, fuel-injected Toyota Supra sports car.
