Books that remind me of stuff

One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Reminds me of being in Laos, in a town called Vang Vieng, one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever been. I hired a bike for the day and rode out into the fields by myself and found this abandoned bamboo hut up on stilts. I climbed into it and sat down and read the last few chapters of One Hundred Years Of Solitude while listening to a cricket on the roof and the sounds of nature. It was lovely.

Lord Of The Rings
The first one. I don’t remember what it’s called. I started reading it right before I flew back to Namibia. I’d lived there for a year on my gap year and was going back 10 months later to work for some friends. I was reading it on the flight and did quite a few changes so I read that book in Scotland, England, Holland, South Africa and Namibia. I loved that it had taken such a journey with me.

Paulo Coelho, I’ve forgotten what it was called
I read this in an airport somewhere. I think on the way to Morocco. My friend and I did a lot of travelling together over the space of two years and on this flight we had a stopover in Spain, I think. I had bought this book in the airport in London. In the airport in Spain, my friend slept and I was knackered but trying to stay awake and I just tore through this book. I had finished reading it in a few hours.

Kafka On The Shore by Haruki Murakami
I read this while travelling through the Philippines with the same friend. We stayed in this little B&B on an island called Bohol. We’d found it because a lady on the boat there had started chatting to us when we were singing Whitney to pass the time. She told us to stay there and it was such a good find. No-one else was staying there so we pretended it was our own house! We stayed up late playing card games and reading. I loved this book! I finished it and left it there for the next guests.

Hamlet
I had been reading Shakespeare in school and not really liking or disliking it. I just didn’t understand it mostly. Something clicked at some point and I wanted to read more of it. I went to the English cupboard at school and borrowed a copy of Hamlet and loved it. I just got it. I remember feeling really excited because I knew there was a whole stack of Shakespeare out there for me to discover.

Leon: Ingredients and Recipes
I was a few months post-op last year and had finally got over my fear of eating (I was terrified in case eating caused the same problem and I had to go back to hospital and by this point I was pretty scared of hospital). I was eating more and was strong enough to stand up for the time it took to cook dinner. I found this book and loved the first section, about ingredients. If any of you are into food, this book is amazingly fascinating. I went on holiday to Portugal and was still quite delicate, so instead of jumping in and out of the water and running about, I sat reading this book in the sun. It was lovely.

Famous Five
Reminds me of my childhood in general and how much I wanted to be George.

The Janice Project
This was the first romance novel I read that formulated my idea of what my potential life partner should be like!

Ahab’s Wife by Sena Jeta Naslund
I read this book in Namibia while I was training for a trek across the Great Wall of China. I used to go on the stair machine for an hour every morning to prepare. My body was fine with it but my mind was bored. A friend lent me this book to keep me entertained and it worked. A few years later I kept thinking about it but couldn’t remember the name. I was in an out of the way town in Texas, waiting for a bus, when I saw a little book shop in the distance. I thought I’d kill some time there and found a few books I wanted. I went to the till to pay and right there, next to the till was this same book! Same cover. I recognised it immediately and got it. It was just as good, if not better, the second time around. I’ve been daydreaming about visiting Nantucket since I read it.

The Ginger Tree by Oswald Wynd
I might have got his name wrong. Found this in Laos, in Luang Prabang. Opposite our hotel there was a little cafe/bookshop. It was the first I’d seen in Asia so I was pretty excited. We sat drinking exotic teas and absorbing the book joy. I found this tucked away on a shelf and loved the cover. It’s a woman’s diary of moving to Japan just after the war. I can’t emphasise how good this book is. If I could only read a few more books ever again, this would be one I’d choose. Read it.

Bungee jumping in Africa

When I was younger I was, as most people are, a lot more hyperactive. I was constantly excited by something, looking for an adventure. My first big adventure was my gap year. I had been saying for ages before that, in a nonchalent ‘yeh-I’m-crazy-and-wacky-what-of-it’ type of way that I wanted to do all these extreme sports. White water rafting, sky diving, bungee jumping, anything, you name it, I’d rave with enthusiasm about how ‘cool’ that sounded and I’d definitely do it given half a chance.

So I’m on my gap year. It’s the last month or so and we decide to do a bit of travelling before heading home. We were in Namibia and had already been to South Africa for our previous break so decided to head north this time, up to Zambia. I couldn’t wait, Victoria Falls, it was going to be amazing. Amazing! I was so excited! Always excited! Yeh! Woo! (I must have actually been quite insufferable.)

We got there and we had about six days, I think, to spend in Livingstone. We started looking around for exciting things to do. We went to music performances, ate Zambian food and marvelled at their money, which consisted entirely of notes, and tons of them! Getting a fiver out of the cash machine gave you a handful! There was even a note which was equivalent to 0.2 of a penny! I think I still have one somewhere.

Then we noticed a few leaflets for extreme sports type of things on the Zambezi River and around the Victoria Falls bridge. And then it was time for me to do some of the things I’d been going on about, when they didn’t seem like a possibility. We white water rafted the Zambezi one day, which wasn’t too scary as it’s not really turbulent the whole way, a lot of the time you spend just paddling along the still waters singing aloud and looking at the crocodiles lounging around on the rocks, eyeing you up.

Then came the big one. We went to the Victoria Falls bridge to sight-see… and there were people jumping off it! That’s right, there was a bungee jump off the bridge. It claimed to be the highest from a bridge in the world! And Lucy reminded me that I’d always said I wanted to do one… hadn’t I? Yes indeed, I had, yes, that’s right. Well let’s go and do it then, I can’t wait.

Before I knew it I’d paid my £40ish and been stood in a queue on the bridge. And then there I was, toddling onto this little platform and getting my ankles tied together. And I thought, damn me and my big mouth. So now they’re tied together and I’m shuffling to the edge of the platform and I’m looking down and I can see the Zambezi underneath me with teeny tiny little people white water rafting, in boats that I knew were quite big, so their smallness from up here just confirmed how high up I was.

I got ready for the pep talk, you know, you think they’re gonna give you the low down, let you psyche yourself up then say, jump when you’re ready. But no! As I got to the edge and looked out, I heard a voice behind me say “Hold your arms out straight when you jump. Ok! THREE! TWO! ONE!” And I just had to go….

I remember thinking, “I’ve just paid £40 to die.” If I could have stopped time and gently stepped back onto the platform, I would have.

But I couldn’t! And I was just hurtling down and down, turning upside down, arms out, screaming in terror. About half way down, the scream caught in my throat and my mouth stayed open, silently, in horror. I got to the bottom and bounced up and down wildly, my heart beating frantically when suddenly someone appeared on a rope thingy, grabbed me and we were both hauled back up.

I remember later in the day, reliving the experience and having the fear all over again! Every so often, though, I think, well that was over eight years ago, I’d probably be fine to do one again. The fear has been forgotten now, surely? I’ve not tested my theory but I certainly think carefully before saying I really want to do something! Although I have also skydived a few times so I didn’t learn my lesson that well!