A Lizard in the Sun: Three Years of Zero Budget Travels

By Patricia Bensky

What would you do if you were desperate to travel around the world, but you had little or no money to finance your trip? You could stay home feeling sorry for yourself, keep putting it off until you could afford it, or just pack a bag and go, hoping to be able to live on your wits and find work along the way. That's what Pat Bensky did in her early twenties, and it led to a three-year adventure as she worked her way around Europe, North Africa, the West Indies, Bahamas, and the USA. At times she was hungry, homeless, sick, miserable, ecstatic; was almost lost at sea, and cured of a serious illness by a West Indian witch doctor. But her resourcefulness, courage, and positive attitude steered her through the hard bits, and when she got to California, she decided that she'd found a place worth staying in.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 10, 2003
• ISBN: 9781469782560

Patricia Bensky

When people asked the little girl what she wanted to be when she grew up, Pat Bensky replied, ?A writer!? But it wasn?t until reaching the age of 40-something, after going to college, traveling the world, doing various jobs from nanny to computer programmer, that she wrote her first book.

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Contents

Recurring Dream

Witch Doctor

Executive Toy

Guardian Angel

Claustrophobia

Every Scar Tells a Story

Recurring Dream, Revisited

San Francisco

Highway Patrol

This book is dedicated to my mother, Linda Joyce Wright.

1

Recurring Dream

Summer 1974–October 1975 Scotland, Morocco, Gibraltar, Cape Verde islands, Antigua

In my dreams

I am lying on a warm yellow beach, soaking up the sunshine and the tranquility. My world is at peace; I feel happy and contented, and life is good.

It’s a beautiful day; the sky a perfect deep sky blue; the sand a luscious golden yellow; the sea a delicious turquoise; the air filled with little wildlife sounds, the fresh salty taste of the ocean, and various interesting scents.

My mother is basking in the sun, her body motionless but for the occasional twitch of her tail or flick of her tongue as she captures some passing winged tidbit.

I start to get restless, and curious about the sea. Mother has warned me not to go into the water; we are land-dwellers, not water-dwellers, and the water is dangerous. But I am curious, and venture closer to the edge of the beach, where the little waves creep teasingly towards me and then dash away again. I am lulled into a feeling of safety and security: what harm could possibly come to me in such a perfect place?

I am close to the water now. I look around to see if Mother is watching. She has been hypnotised by the warm sun and the peaceful surroundings; her body is as still as a twig and her eyes are closed as she soaks up her day’s energy supply.

I slip cautiously into the water. At first just my feet, then I swish my tail around a little to see if anything dreadful will happen. But nothing does, and I venture out a little further. The cool water laps over my hot, dry body, washing the dust and grime away and leaving behind a delicious, cool freshness. Soon I am almost completely submerged. Where is the danger? There is none. I lose my footing and find myself scrabbling in deep water. I am afraid only for a few moments, until I discover that, by flapping my legs about, I can not only keep afloat but, with guidance from my tail, propel myself in whatever direction I want to go.

Now I am curious about the water. What might I find if I looked below the surface? Someone to play with? Something tasty for lunch? Curiosity gets the better of me again, and I take a deep breath and push my head under the water.

Incredible! Such amazing sights! Wonderful whooshy sounds! Colourful things flitter about around me. Strange creatures squirm, wriggle and crawl along the sand at the bottom. I forget about Mother’s warnings and just watch the amazing show that I see under the water.

I need to take a breath. Reluctantly I thrust my head up into the air and gulp some down. I want to see some more of those wonderful colourful creatures that apparently spend their entire lives under the water. How do they breathe? I wonder. I spend some time diving under the water, watching the world below, trying to catch a swimming thing to see how it tastes. I soon learn that it is possible, by turning my body in a certain way and pointing my tail upwards, to dive deep into the water, all the way down to the bottom. I have completely forgotten about Mother and her warnings. I become more and more frustrated at having to keep coming up for air.

I have dived all the way down to the sand and am chasing an oval-shaped creature which has more legs than I do. I’m not sure I want to eat it, but it’s fun to chase. I feel at home here; I don’t want to return to the dry, hot land. But I need to take a breath again. How do all the water-dwellers breathe? Perhaps if I just fight the urge to breathe…I open my mouth a little and let some water in. As it passes over those previously unexplained little slits inside my mouth I discover that I can breathe the water! I feel ecstatic! I have made a great discovery: I am not just a land-dweller—I can stay underwater forever—I am amphibious! I am filled with happiness and a marvelous sense of freedom and well-being.

I have found enlightenment.

I used to have this dream once or twice a year. I always awoke afterwards, feeling happy and contented.

The Isle of Seil, The Inner Hebrides, Scotland, Summer, 1974

I thought about the dream one night while I was spending a summer working at a hotel on the little island of Seil, near Oban, on the west coast of Scotland. That far north, the sun doesn’t really go down completely in the summer—it just sneaks along the horizon for a while and then creeps back up again. It was a warm summer’s evening and my friends and I were enjoying an all-night beach party. We’d consumed a certain amount of food, beer, and other substances (which probably accounted for the contented feeling), and I was nestled in the arms of the most handsome, sexy man I’d ever known, as the party sounds of gentle laughter, some reasonably tuneful guitar strumming, and the ocean sounds mingled together in the background. What more could a person want? I had the feeling of serenity that I’d previously only ever enjoyed during and after the dream. I made a mental video of the occasion so that I could re-run it any time I needed cheering up, closed my eyes and started dreaming about visiting far-away, sunny yellow beaches.

I hadn’t yet decided what I was going to do when the summer ended; I certainly had no desire to go back to the family home in Essex, and wanted to do some travelling before I settled down. The dream had become my nirvana—obviously I wasn’t going to become a lizard, but perhaps there was somewhere on this planet where I would be able to recapture that serene feeling, and for real. I decided that I would have to go and see as much of the planet as possible. But I would need to do a lot of travelling and exploring to find this place, and how was I going to finance my travels? I came from a poor working-class family; I had very little money saved, and working as a waitress in a remote hotel wasn’t going to change that.

I’d met a few people who had travelled around the world, paying their way as they went by working as cooks, waiters, bartenders, boat crew members, and those kinds of things. Elspeth, one of the hotel’s cooks, had done this, and she told some inspiring stories about her travels to exotic places working as a cook on privately-owned boats. And previously, whilst working as a kennelmaid in a training kennel near my home, I’d met a New Zealander who had worked his way to England from the other side of the world in a similar manner. Their tales of adventures on the high seas and on land in fantastic parts of the world provided more fodder to my curiosity, and I knew that I had to go and see these things for myself. I knew I would never be able to settle down anywhere until my wanderlust was satisfied.

I saved as much as I could during that summer, and, not quite confident enough to launch off into the world on my own, I booked a place on an overland camping trip to Morocco. I was to join the group in London, and from there we’d travel by mini-bus through France and Spain, across to Morocco, and tour around there for a while before heading back to London. This would be a good way for me to get some ideas about the world beyond England. As the summer drew to its close, and the tourists began to desert Scotland before it got too cold, the hotel closed for the winter and we all went our separate ways. I headed back to Harlow, spent a few days getting ready for the trip to Morocco, and then I was off.

The fun began at a sleazy little hostel in Kangaroo Valley—that area around Earls Court in London that is populated by Aussies and Kiwis. Arriving the night before the start of the trip, I shared a rather grubby little room with three fellow adventurers. We shared some cheap food, cheap wine, and plenty of laughs together, and the mood was set for the trip.

Next morning we (15 including the driver) convened at the organisation’s HQ, stashed our various bags and other supplies in and on top of the bus, and headed away from the soggy gloomy greyness of London in October towards the sunshine of the south.

The rain dripped steadily down all day as we drove to the ferry, sloshed stomach-churningly across the English Channel, and motored on towards Paris. We didn’t let the miserable weather get us down; we were determined to have fun, and it was a jolly but tired busfull that rolled into a dark, wet, cold, boggy campground on the outskirts of Paris that evening.

I had never been camping before, and had no idea what to expect, or how to properly equip myself. I’d bought a sleeping bag especially for the trip, and assumed that was all the equipment I needed, since the other most important of our needs after sleep (food) was, I presumed, going to be taken care of by our fearless leader/driver/tour guide, Chris. I didn’t really mind the discomfort of trying to put up tents in driving rain and howling winds in the middle of a bog, because I knew that all would be OK once I was snuggled up cosily inside my sleeping bag. When I saw other people inflating their air mattresses I began to think that it was possible I wasn’t quite as prepared for this as I should have been, and, after we gave up on trying to light the Primus to cook some dinner and made do with some bread and cheese, I crawled into my inadequate bag and quickly discovered just how little insulation a ground sheet provides between a cold body and a cold, wet floor.

There were three in our tent: myself, a chap called Neil, and somebody else. Neil was as unprepared a camper as me, and also air mattress-less. We decided to zip our sleeping bags together and snuggle up to keep each other warm. This worked quite well, and although it didn’t make the ground any softer or warmer, at least we didn’t wake up with frostbite the next morning.

In fact the next morning was much better. The sun was shining; the mud was quickly drying out; and there was hot coffee and scrambled eggs waiting for us when we emerged from our tent. Things were looking up.

We were soon on our way again, heading south towards Spain. We stopped at a roadside cafe for lunch, and Neil and I discovered a supply of large flat egg car-tons—the kind that hold a few dozen eggs. We thought that they would make good bedding material: they may be a bit lumpy, but they would provide some insulation between our bodies and the ground. We helped ourselves to a few and tied them on top of the bus.

That night we stopped at a big campsite in southern Spain. It was my 21st. birthday, so that provided an excellent excuse for a party. The weather was warm and dry, and we did justice to the local Sangria. I hardly noticed the lumps in my egg-carton bed that night as I dozed off into a contented alcohol-hazed sleep.

Chris, although having probably drunk more than any of us, was up bright and early in the morning, apparently hangover-free, and he cheerfully coerced us out of our sleeping-cocoons and onto the bus. We were a bit subdued that morning as we drove down to Algeciras where the Morocco-bound ferry waited. The ferry took us across the Mediterranean to Tangier, at the northernmost tip of North Africa.

From Tangier we drove south to Fez, stopping overnight at a well-equipped campsite. We spent a day in Fez, which was much nicer than Tangier: cleaner, less crowded, fewer beggars, and some beautiful mosques to admire. Then back on the southerly road towards the Sahara Desert.

The further south we went, the hotter it became and the more boring the scenery. It began to look more and more like a desert, and the gloomy London winter that we’d left behind was quickly forgotten. We were spending long hours on the bus, and signs of civilisation became fewer and fewer. This became a bit of a problem in the bladder department: we’d been on the road for hours, with no conveniences encountered. Chris of course, being well experienced with these kinds of situations, had a solution: he stopped the bus in the middle of nowhere and instructed the boys to go on one side and the girls to go on the other. Not an ideal solution, but a less embarrassing one than all of us simply doing the necessary in the open air. Chris kept the engine running for the benefit of the air conditioning, and when he could see that everybody was in the most compromising position, he slowly drove the bus away. Very funny.

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Taking a break to stretch our legs during the long drive through the desert. November 1974

We continued motoring south, and late in the afternoon arrived at our destination: the Meski oasis.

Meski is a picture-postcard oasis, also known as The Blue Lagoon. A little spring emerges from a hole in the mountain and this keeps the pool supplied with sparkling clean fresh water. Palm trees grow around the edge, and large fish swim in the pool. It’s a little paradise on the edge of the