When gap-year travellers email home, they mean to calm the fears of anxious parents, but these glimpses of hair-raising adventures in faraway lands can have the opposite effect - as this selection from Simon Hoggart and Emily Monk's new book shows:
- We arrived at the most fantastic hotel [in Arequipa, Peru] with en-suite bathrooms, high ceilings, balconies, sheets and bedside lights being the star attractions, and slept like logs on Night Nurse, stirring from sweet slumber only once, when the earthquake struck. Panic not, mother. After the initial confusion I fell back to sleep straight away and woke up in the best of health, regardless of gaping cracks in the walls and pavements!
- Well, I got mugged again, trying to get across eight lines of traffic from Cinelandia to the Modern Art Museum in the pouring rain. He did have a knife, but he wasn't particularly threatening, and he let me open my wallet and give him the notes, rather than taking everything, which would have been a pain. It's OK. I'm used to it now.
- In Quito, I went on a crazy party bus which was quite an experience. Everyone dances on the roof with a band, but the bus is too tall and you have to duck for bridges and cables. Me, being too chilled out, forgot to do this. I have since been to a witch doctor, which was scary. She was a complete nutter and made me strip so she could beat me with flowers, and then spat all over my torso. (I was a little freaked out by how much she knew of my fetishes.) Penultimately I visited the equator, which was just a line.
- The accommodation is OK. Well, it's interesting, a bit sticky on the floor and a few cockroaches but it's OK. I'm staying in a little place about 40 minutes from Sydney on the train. It's a small town, loads of crime, drugs etc, etc, a bit like Stoke - only less pottery.
Extracted from Don't Tell Mum by Simon Hoggart and Emily Monk (£9.99).
