It all started two weeks into my brother-visit vacation, when we happened to bump into a panicking Danish education officer who’d come over to Venezuela to rescue his students from enforced labour camps. They were supposed to be on a six-month ‘travelling classroom’, learning Spanish while taking in the exotic waterfalls, tropical jungles and eerie tepui mountains of Venezuela, but a feckless operator had them toiling in the fields and labouring on construction sites for his own personal gain.
My brother Chris, an opportunist from the school of hard knocks, expertly set about blagging the contract – I could organise the educational and cultural side of things (I’d been organised enough to drop out of university, after all), while he’d provide the fun and adventure. It was a valuable contract: 80 students a year staying for six-month durations at a time.* I only had a three-month visa, but as my musical career seemed to have stalled, I decided to stay for a year and see out this undertaking.
The fact that I didn’t understand the Latin names of indigenous plants and diseases that lurked in the cruel jungle was neither here nor there to me. What mattered was that I couldn’t even crack open a coconut.** Or erect a tent. In fact, I was a tour guide with no sense of direction.
Luckily, the Danes had a Viking spirit that thrived on being stuck in the middle of nowhere at dangerous times of night. Perhaps they thought I was just testing them. I mean, surely once you’d organised an adventure it ceased to be a real adventure anyway? Leaving things to chance is just one of the many devices you can deploy to camouflage personal shortcomings.
We erected an isolated camp deep in the Amazon jungle – just myself, a native cook and 18 Danish gap-year students alone together for three weeks. It was my job to keep them stimulated, and thinking that a wood sculpture competition would be as good a start as any, I set off canoeing through the waterways of the Delta Orinoco, searching for balsa wood in the Amazon jungle.
There was a dull thud as the blade of my machete sliced into something unexpectedly round and soft, with the consistency of an overripe orange. Then came a sharp pain and needles were piercing into my temples, accompanied by an angry buzzing sound. It took me a few seconds to realise I was being attacked by an army of jungle bees, before I plunged into the Orinoco River.
I paddled for my life, but each time I came up for air an angry black cloud of vengeance was waiting, tracking me 150m up river as I swam back to the camp, buzzing and jabbing all the way. When I finally clambered on to land I’d suffered over 40 stings.
Even though I’d just had a near-death experience, I didn’t shout for help – I was even quite reticent about it. The students were all in tropical lounging mode, reading books and idly chatting. When I told one of them what happened, she presumed I was just complaining about an annoying rash or a trifling insect bite. Then I collapsed and passed out.
I awoke to discover not bees, but bikini-clad Florence Nightingales busily tending to my grotesquely red and swollen body. None of the Danish girls could agree on the correct nursing procedure, so I found myself being simultaneously massaged with ointments, plant leaves and onions – yes, onions; why does there always seem to be a witch present at moments like these? It was probably the closest I’ll ever get to being molested by a homeopathic octopus. The delirium was broken when Helle, the hypochondriac of the group, produced a bottle of anti-histamine tablets. I swallowed a handful and disappeared for the next 11 hours.
I awoke with cloudy vision, a fuzzy head and furry tongue. Our cook, Victor, approached through a haze, barefooted and grinning, with what looked like two halves of a coconut in his hand. The nest had been surgically sliced through the middle like a Damien Hirst exhibit, revealing the tragic remnants of a wasp kingdom. And yet remarkably, apart from the tragic remnants of lost pride, things appeared to be OK in my own kingdom.
Two days later, things got even better when Katrine, the 18-year-old, green-eyed blonde bombshell of the group, bequeathed to my person a sympathy shag – did she really just feel sorry for me and my silly moustache? I preferred to believe it was a sign that God existed after all: following a massive disaster there always seems to be a massive reward on its way – especially for gentlemen – since most women are big-hearted. If things are going badly wrong, you just need to break a leg or fracture a skull. It’s your best chance of getting a girlfriend.
Kind-hearted Katrine became mine, and what I presumed to be an act of charity turned out to be the first of many as she became a more-than-generous benefactor to my hopeless cause for the next three and three-quarter years.
With a spring in my step, I dragged the unfortunate group of students through the remaining eight weeks of the programme, before spending a week or so enjoying the occasional set of tongue tennis and then simply staring out to sea, wondering: what next?
Finally, in a Venezuelan beachfront internet café with the world’s slowest connection, I got an email from Justin Hawkins stating his intention to be the front man of our band. For once, he sounded deadly serious. Three weeks later, I headed back to England with Katrine, alive and in love. I had finally discovered that sense of direction.
When you’re desperate to rent a room and the estate agent asks what you do for a living, you don’t say, ‘I’m a bon viveur,’ do you?