Comfort zone
An unexpected encounter in Mexico - a travel fiction
Hello everyone! A quick note before we start. This is the next in a series I’m tentatively calling ‘travel fictions’ - they are short stories rather than diaries, but all feature someone in a different part of the world, somewhere unfamiliar to them. Those who know me may notice inspiration is taken from places I’ve been or things I’ve done, or, mostly, scrapes I’ve gotten myself into. This isn’t accidental - they’re not quite autobiographical stories, some parts are most definitely made up - but they are at least partly inspired by things that really happened. I’ll let Geoff Dyer sum it up the way he summed up his book Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered to Do It - “everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head.”
Before we set off to Mexican jungle, the organisation sending us there gathered us all into a room and gave us an hour-long presentation about all the things that might kill us while we were. There were dozens of slides on all of the various slithering, creeping, crawling things that we might meet during our time in the jungle and even more slides on what these things might do to us.
It was about halfway through this presentation that the idea that had once seemed such a good one - to be one of a number of journalists sent into the Mexican jungle to observe and give a bit of a helping hand to a load of scientists doing vital conversation work - started to seem a little less good, a little bit terrible, actually. Then the idea really took a nosedive when about ten minutes from the end of this presentation of doom, the organisation detailed all the various cartels, gangs and other miscellaneous dangerous people who lived and operated in the area that we were going, whose presence necessitated the camp where we would be staying having three entrances and exits, “in case something were to happen”.
Had it not been me they were sending off into the jungle I would have enjoyed the way that this was phrased, that something might happen. “In case something were to happen” made the chance of being gunned down or decapitated by an angry cartel member sound like it had the same odds as an earthquake or flash flood. Something that couldn’t be predicted but nonetheless wasn’t too likely. In fact it was likely, given that only a couple of months earlier I had read about four journalists being found dead in the Mexican jungle. That they had been found dead was bad enough, that they had also been found without their heads, and had needed to be identified through scientific, forensic means, was certainly enough to give me pause.
So, when a few weeks later the bus carrying myself, seven other journalists, and an interpreter, stopped at a roadblock, I assumed this was the beginning of my end. The roadblock had been put there by a cartel or gang or some group of miscellaneous angry men, who were unhappy that we were going to be entering the national park where the scientists were working. They found the scientists bad enough, but journalists going to record and write about the scientists were even worse. Fortunately for our heads they seemed less bothered about decapitation and more bothered about cash. Pesos were fished out of pockets and handed to the man acting as their leader, who, it was quite clear, carried quite a large gun.
“I think I’d prefer being shot than decapitated,” came a voice from the back of the bus.
“Is neither an option?” said another.
Money handed over, we made our way around the roadblock and into the jungle, and a few hours later, arrived at the camp. For the next few days we were all wary of the cartels, gangs, and miscellaneous angry men, but in the end the reason we made a swift exit from the camp - the reason we decamped - was nothing to do with men.
We were greeted by the camp manager, an Australian named Jim who looked like he’d been in the jungle for months. This turned out to be the case. When he had entered the jungle a few months previously, it had just been announced that a new royal baby was on the way. When we got out of the bus one of the first questions he asked us was whether it had arrived yet.
“Oh, weeks ago,” said one of the journalists.
“Crikey, weeks?” he asked, “was it premature?”
“No,” I said, “bang on time.”
Jim looked off into the distance. News travelled slowly here.
“So, there’s no internet in the camp?” asked one of the journalists. We had been told this at the horrendous briefing but had not quite believed it, had assumed that although the Wi-Fi would be patchy we would still be able to get in touch with husbands or wives, editors or hospitals.
“Internet?” said Jim, “absolutely not. Or hot water, or electricity. You’re in the sticks now, mate.”
Again we had been told all of this but again we had ignored it, hadn’t thought it possible that any place could have none of the three.
But then Jim gave the tour. He took us to the toilets first, to get the worst bit out of the way. These were a set of wooden cubicles with holes in the bottom. The holes all led to the same place, which was a ditch overflowing with shit.
“The bog’s a bit basic,” said Jim. Upon seeing what was beneath the various holes one of the women in the group, who had said on the plane that she had agreed to the trip after her husband had encouraged her to “get out of her comfort zone,” went pale and promptly threw up into the hole.
“She looks like she’d like to be back in her comfort zone back,” said the journalist who would prefer being shot to decapitated.
When she had finished throwing up we checked out the shower blocks (“also a bit basic”), which were more cubicles only this time with the bottom half of a Coca Cola bottle on a string serving as a shower head. Then there was the kitchen, a wooden hut with a sink and a gas-powered hob. The local villagers supplied the gas.
“Are the local villagers who supply the gas the same ones who extorted us on our way in?” I asked.
“The very same,” said Jim with a smile, “they do pretty well out of us, all in all.”
Then we came to the accommodation. This consisted of a few hammocks strung up between trees, or for those of us who preferred a flat surface, tents. Some were clustered around the firepit, but there was a long line of them up against the edge of a small pond. We walked along the line, Jim assigning tents to pairs of us as we went along. I was given the end tent with the journalist who had asked if he really had to be shot or decapitated at all (“is neither an option?”), and was dumping my bag at its entrance when something moved in the pond. I stopped and looked and then it moved again, silently across the water.
“Jim,” I said, “is that a crocodile?” I pointed out onto the water.
“Oh, yep, that’s Buster.” Jim said with a smile.
“There’s crocodiles in the pond?”
“Just the one croc, really. We’ve only ever seen Buster.”
“There’s a crocodile in the pond that’s right next to my tent,” I said rather than asked.
“Yeah,” Jim said, “but you should be alright. Buster tends to stick to the water.”
“Tends to?”
“Well, we’ve never seen him on land.”
Accommodation sorted, we got on with watching the scientists. Mostly, this involved getting in the scientists’ way. First there was Eduardo, the bird scientist, who took us a long walk around some jungle which, every hundred yards or so, had very fine nets strung across it. These very fine nets caught some birds and Eduardo would fish them out, record them, sometimes put a tag on their legs if they were particularly rare, and then release them again. Comfort Zone, as she had been christened since her incident in the toilets, was given the task of recording on a clipboard the names of all the birds we saw. I asked Eduardo who would normally be doing the recording if he wasn’t accompanied by eight journalists.
“Well, I’d do it myself,” he said, “but since you’re all here, I might as well use the help.”
We saw various birds, some blue, some green, some red and green, but I don’t remember any of their names and, since I wasn’t Comfort Zone, didn’t write any of them down. I amused myself when walking between the nets by striding across the jungle like an explorer, taking big steps and frequently jumping over small branches that, in my mind at least, served as huge obstacles to be surmounted. After I had jumped over a particularly large branch I steadied myself by grabbing a tree trunk. The organisation had tied ribbons around trees on the paths through the jungle so that if, say, a journalist wandered off alone, he could find his way back to the camp.
“You shouldn’t just touch random trees,” Comfort Zone said from behind her clipboard.
“What do you mean?”
“You don’t know if the bark is dangerous or not.”
“I’m sure the ones with ribbons tied around them are safe,” I replied, thinking about just how far Comfort Zone was out of her comfort zone. Even the trees seemed dangerous to her. I carried on fording rivers (small streams), leaping over whole forests (a few twigs), and generally larking about, and a couple of hours later, as we made our way back into the camp, we passed another tree with a ribbon around it. Its trunk was completely covered in small but extremely sharp spikes. If I were to lean against that tree I would be stuck there, impaled, would be leaning against it for quite some time. I hoped Comfort Zone hadn’t spotted it, but of course she had.
“Do you think that one’s safe?” she asked.
Next up was a trip out with, as I christened him, the snake guy. Technically Gareth was a herpetologist, someone who specialised as he said, “in all reptiles and amphibians, actually.” But I was only interested in snakes, preferably big and poisonous ones.
“Snakes are typically venomous, not poisonous,” said Snake Guy.
“Right,” I said, pretending that I knew the difference.
Being a snake guy seemed one of the more boring jobs in the camp, despite the fact that the animals that needed studying were the most interesting. This was mainly because we couldn’t find any snakes.
“This is actually a very good area in terms of snake concentration,” Gareth said as we walked, but over an hour passed and we hadn’t even spotted a tail slithering off into the undergrowth. Gareth’s version of Eduardo’s very fine nets were little traps hidden in the ground that were, essentially, boxes that the snakes could fall into and get stuck there. He checked trap after trap, box after box, and still no snakes. By the eighth or ninth trap it was obvious to me, Comfort Zone, and all the other journalists that there would be no snakes in the traps. Still Gareth proceeded with caution, opened each box with care, acted as if, as we knew for certain there wouldn’t, a snake was waiting inside.
One thing that I did excel at was spotting toads. Toads fell under Gareth’s too-wide purview and so he had asked us to keep an eye out for them too. Like most things that are much less exciting than something related to them, they were extremely common. They were everywhere. Whereas this area with such a supposedly high concentration of snakes didn’t seem to contain any snakes, toads were ten a penny.
“There’s one,” I said, and then, only minutes later, “another one.”
“You have a real knack for this,” Gareth said.
“There’s two over there,” said Comfort Zone. For a little Comfort Zone and I got into a toad spotting competition. I spotted three or four and she spotted four or five too. But after a brief period of intense competition I rapidly pulled away. Comfort Zone stayed on four or five, I quickly hit double figures. Toad spotting, it turned out, was my comfort zone, or at least the one time in my days in the jungle where I felt vaguely useful.
Then, at the end of the walk, we finally saw one. Gareth was leading the way and suddenly stopped with one foot still in the air.
“Woah!” he exclaimed, “what do we have here?” I was beside myself. “Woah!” was exactly what I’d been waiting for. An animal really worth the exclamation. Not those useless fucking toads, but something really cool, really deadly.
“Gather around me, slowly,” Gareth whispered. We did so. We peered at the ground beneath his boot. Then we squinted, and looked again.
“What is it?” asked Comfort Zone finally.
“Look at this little guy,” Gareth said, picking up the tiniest snake imaginable. It was so small it was practically a worm. “Isn’t he cute?”
Cute was not what I had in mind when I pictured seeing snakes in the Mexican jungle. Deadly, huge, poisonous (or venomous), but not cute. Then, Comfort Zone piped up.
“There’s another toad by your foot, Gareth.”
The days passed. We walked through the jungle in search of animals we often did not find, and when we found animals they often weren’t those we were looking for in the first place. There was an irritating abundance of toads. But one evening about a week into our stay we were told of a change to our routine. Instead of having dinner and a warm beer by the campfire we would be going out into the jungle again. It wouldn’t be birds or snakes or toads we would be looking for but bats.
The method of catching a bat was basically the same as that for birds but at night rather than in the daytime. Because it was at nighttime the party of journalists willing to go along was even smaller than usual. After a couple of weeks in the jungle it wasn’t just Comfort Zone that wasn’t enjoying herself. Richard, a tabloid journalist in the tent next door to mine, had woken one morning to an enormous spider hanging above his face. He screamed and along everyone ran to his tent, eager to see which of the jungle dangers had done for him. But when we zipped open the tent he was very much still alive, as was the spider. It was still hanging in front of him.
“Oh, you’re fine,” said Jim dismissively, “that beauty isn’t venomous. Only the spiders that have little red bits on their backs are venomous.”
I didn’t think this last bit was true, since after this I took quite a close look at basically any spider I came across, and saw that almost all of them had little red bits on their backs.
Then Hugh, a journalist with a respected science magazine, caught a bug or a virus or a flu of some kind, and spent most of two days in the toilets. Since spending even more than thirty seconds in that terrible hellhole, as I had begun calling it, was absolutely unbearable, it was clear he was really quite unwell. He lost weight with a rapidity and effectiveness that would make a boxer wrapped in a dressing gown next to a hot radiator jealous. So he was carted off in a truck to the nearest clinic, and given the state of all of the other facilities in the local area we assumed we would never see him again. But he turned up again later that day with some eye-wateringly strong antibiotics and a haunted look that meant we all tended to steer clear of him from then on.
And so despite Comfort Zone’s unlikely attendance, we were a depleted bunch. And we did not make up for this with visible enthusiasm. After the disappointment of the snakes, the boring birds, and the terrible toads, I discovered that catching bats could also bring an equal, if not larger, sense of disappointment. We didn’t actually catch the bats, the nets slung across the paths did. But, whether it was my presence or Comfort Zone’s or just a good night, we couldn’t move for them. Each net we came to had a few struggling critters all caught up in it. Their wings had arms that looked creepily human-like and we picked them off, tagged them and set them free again. That was until we came to the second-to-last net. Then Lee, one of the bat guys - he had told us in no uncertain times never to refer to him as a batman - let out a yell of excitement. Trapped in the net was a huge winged creature, a massive bat, a bat the size of a kitchen table, or so it seemed in the dark.
“Bloody hell,” he shouted, “get the bloody net.”
The other bat guy, actually a bat lady named Heidi, came running up from the back of the group and shared Lee’s excitement.
“Bloody hell!”
It was, according to the bat guys, a false vampire bat. This meant nothing to us and so were greatly amused by the silly little vampire walk that Jeff, an unusually funny science journalist, did, a sort of Dracula-cum-Frankenstein act. But it got little from Heidi.
“They’re called false vampire bats because they don’t feed on blood.”
But we weren’t listening, we just watched Jeff until it wasn’t that funny anymore. Heidi brought Lee the bag and he manhandled - bat-handled - the bat into it, but not before it made a break for it with one of its huge winged arms. It reached out of the bag and made a grab for anything within reach, which on this occasion included Heidi’s finger. It drew blood and she gasped and reached for the first aid kit.
“Looks like it wanted some blood to me,” said Jeff.
This little bit of excitement heightened the expectations for the rest of the bat walk, but that was the peak of it, the biggest bat we would find. Once we’d tagged and released them all we had to take down all of the nets, a much more tedious and boring job, and Jeff, Comfort Zone and I made slow work of it. It was past midnight as we trudged back towards the camp, fed up with the jungle, with bats, with each other, with Mexico. I couldn’t wait to get back into my tent and sleep through eight hours, and wake up in the morning, eight hours closer to going home. But we wouldn’t be sleeping very much.
We didn’t realise it was a scream at first, the noise that came to us through the trees. We thought it was a bird or the bat in the bag or a monkey, or something, until the person, wherever they were, screamed again. It was a real, frightened scream, no joking about it.
“I think that’s coming from the camp,” Lee said, slinging the bat bag over his shoulder and taking off into a jog. This meant that of course, we had to jog after him. I didn’t want to jog towards the scream. I thought of the presentation we had watched about a month before we shipped out to the jungle, about the multiple exits to the camp in case something should happen. I felt we might have a better chance of surviving whatever was making somebody scream should we hide amongst the trees, the toads, the non-venomous spiders. But now even Comfort Zone was running towards the screams, she was running from one place that wasn’t her comfort zone into a place that was, if the screams were anything to go by, even more not her comfort zone.
We reached the camp after a few minutes and saw a group of bodies standing around one of the tents. The tent next to mine. We reached the group just in time to hear a sloshing of water and to see something dark and long swimming off into the pond.
“It’s just not like Buster to do something like that,” Jim said as he boiled a pot for coffee a couple of hours later. It was three in the morning but nobody in the camp was asleep. Just as we were taking down the last nets and heading back towards camp, Una, the journalist from the very serious broadsheet newspaper who had deemed the bat walk too late at night to take part in, had got up to go to the toilet. She had left the tent open, as if it was her bedroom door, as if there weren’t numerous creatures who would all like to explore its inside. A rookie mistake which Jim lightly chided her for.
When she got back she found, as she recounted over a cup of crap coffee, “a crocodile the size of a small car” having a poke around. She screamed and out came everybody else, some of whom had seen a crocodile but not in the tent. They had however seen the alligator near the tent, which was good enough for Comfort Zone, who promptly went white upon hearing this. She had to be helped to a bench. Jim offered her something stronger than coffee. The more people chimed in the more uncertain it was that a crocodile, Buster or otherwise, had been anywhere near the tents, perhaps Una had just mistaken her pillow for one, or her backpack.
But Gareth the snake guy - herpetologist - said no, he had seen Buster all right. It was a shock, he said, to see him that close to people. He normally kept to the pond. But this evening he hadn’t kept to the pond. He’d come into the camp and had a sniff around, and he’d nearly sniffed out Una. The scientists realised they had a near-mutiny on their hands. Journalists were a bad group of people to annoy, and it was decided that in the morning, the real morning, not the small hours like it was now, we would all get into a truck and begin the long journey home.
Comfort Zone perked up at this, and she and Una helped each other to a tent quite away from the pond which had stood empty for most of the stay. They would rest there until the truck left, they said. We watched them go.
“I think we’re all just quite out of our comfort zones,” I said to Jim.
Thank you so much for reading! A quick request - if you liked this please don’t forget to press like. It helps other readers find Tom Fish Is Away.
Fantastic. I very much enjoyed this. I’m so used to your normal style, and this is so much written in your normal style, that I can’t quite bring myself to believe it isn’t an entirely true story! Lovely stuff - looking forward to the next one.
Delightful!
Oh Buster.
Love this series, Tom.