As the 16 of us huddled in the back of an open-air truck teetering off the Andes, I closed my eyes and thought of my mother. The joke email I had sent days before, with the subject line: ‘Urgent: your child is in hospital’, didn’t seem so funny now we were taking tight corners along a mountain edge. Even if we did survive our Peruvian trucker’s alarming driving down steep winding roads, there was every chance the police would stop the vehicle and find a bunch of Scottish teens in the cargo container where there should have been animal feed.
It wasn’t supposed to have turned out like this. My school’s three-week expedition to Peru — back in the summer of 2006 — had been pitched to parents as the perfect way to boost their children’s CV by laying the groundwork for a Duke of Edinburgh award. For the alternative kids, it was also the only option available after a lack of sporting ability had ruled out the Australia hockey and rugby tour. While the jocks sweated it out on the field, we would find purpose and meaning in South America.
The itinerary was set; our days would be spent on nature trails in the jungle, trekking the Andes and volunteering with local communities. But once we arrived at our first stop in the Amazon, the six months of preparation proved irrelevant. We misplaced passports, forgot insect repellent and turned beetroot red in the heat. While our jungle hosts actively sought out caimans and anacondas, we screamed and cowered when a rogue tarantula infiltrated the mosquito nets. Yet it was another eight-legged foe that posed the biggest threat. Packing our rucksacks on the last day in the jungle, a friend turned over his mattress to discover he’d been sleeping on top of a deadly spider and its eggs.
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