Previous Challenge Entry (Level 3 - Advanced)
Topic: Australia or New Zealand (01/15/09)
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TITLE: A Travelling Australian (fiction) | Previous Challenge Entry
By Amanda Gray
01/21/09 -
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From the start this tour was different. My first sight of the bus flipped my stomach over like a partially cooked pancake. It wasn’t just the rust spots or the similarities between it and my old school bus that kept the abdominal disturbance going. It was also due to the realisation that the man I had assumed was our tour guide - a man who had been squinting unseeingly at his clipboard through glasses that, when he looked up, made him appear like a petrified deer staring into oncoming headlights - was actually our driver as well.
Being a laid back Aussie, I was quite willing to simply note the circumstances and await developments. And if someone else wished to make a stand and refuse to travel until better transport was provided, I was happy to support them.
Unfortunately a fellow passenger, whose name turned out to be Sonny and whose accent and risk-taking nature proclaimed that he was a kiwi, shrugged and declared, “Weel, you onleh leve once.” (New Zealand for “Well, you only live once.”)
We all followed him onto the bus like a pack of bleating sheep.
The trip began and it lived up to its petrifying promise. Inevitably, as we swerved and shook our way onwards, one of the passengers became sick. Sonny, with no consideration for life and limb, heroically decided to alert the driver.
I could have wished he had had more consideration for our lives and limbs before he had done this by yelling, “Hey, bud!” from his seat near the back of the bus.
Now there were two strong reasons why I felt this was not a good idea. First, even with every faculty concentrated on the task, the driver was clearly finding it hard to stay on the road. Secondly, just ahead it seemed we had run out of tarred road.
Accordingly, I prodded Sonny. “Hey, mate” (mate, NOT buddy) “Why don’t you go up to him. Or may-aybe wa-ait until we-e’ve slow-owed dow-own and the ro-oad is le-ess bu-umpy.”
He grinned. “Sure theng, bu-uddy.”
But as Sonny’s idea of following through on this was to yell “ Hey, bud!” in the driver’s ear, none of us felt that this was an improvement. The driver, shocked out of his desperate focus on the road, swerved to within an inch of the perilous looking roadside ditch. We received momentary relief from our quivering fear by getting malicious enjoyment from the sight of Sonny flung across the aisle.
But Sonny’s flailing, airborne legs and the sound of spraying gravel brought us back to reality with twangs of guilt intermixed with alternate stabs of fear and soaring relief as the bus zig-zagged first towards, then away from the ditch.
But at least he had got the driver’s attention. Not that we could see immediate benefits from this as the driver was now using the hands that should have been on the wheel to gesticulate and yell, “Sit down. Sit down. You must sit. Sit. Sit.”
“Look, buddy.” Sonny had extricated himself from under the seat and was a little upset. “Ef you don’t do sometheng now, thus purson es goeng to be seck all over your bus.”
“Seck? Seck? What do you say? What do you mean?”
I intervened hurriedly in a scene that was becoming life-threatening - and not just because of the dirt road and the ditch. “Sick.” I yelled. “You know. Blaaaahhh! Sick! Vomit! This man’s going to be sick!”
“Aaah! Sick!”
“Thet’s what I sed. Seck. Seck He’s goeng to be seck!”
The driver slammed on the brakes and we became a ball of flailing limbs, arriving at the driver’s feet as the bus skidded to a halt one millimetre from the edge of the ditch. If he had opened the doors we would have rolled out. Fortunately he waited until we had untangled ourselves. Unfortunately, the passenger needing to be sick didn’t.
That evening, huddled together over dinner and still vaguely smelling of vomit, we felt bonded as only those who have jointly survived a catastrophe can be. We began sharing our stories. Sonny spoke of his home town in New Zealand. I followed with a description of my home town.
A fellow passenger asked, “So you’re from New Zealand, too, are you?”
Hmmmmph.
Are we not so different after all?
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