inolongerPod

I am quite certain that I can safely say that when Helen and I left Sam and Tom to return to El Chalten to fly on up to Buenos Aires, they were flirting like Bella Emberg's character did with PC Quilley in Z Cars. That is to say, a lot. At time of press they were travelling around South America together, snogging a bit and getting into scrapes that only a couple with a combined height of less than seven foot can. We miss them dearly and hope to see them back in Blighty soon.

The short flight to Buenos Aires was pretty uneventful but retained a certain level of excitement as we were looking forward to being in a city again. We landed at around nine o'clock at night, and soon discovered that nothing about this neck of the Argentinian woods was going to be easy.

We needed to get a bus to the San Telmo or Centro area of BA to get to the hostel we had reserved two beds in. As we struggled over to the bus stop we encountered a very friendly young bloke who luckily told us that we needed almost the exact change in coins to get the bus. We had nothing but large notes. Sprinting back into the airport I asked everyone that I came across if they could possibly change our note. No dice.

I got pointed in one direction and then the other for about quarter of an hour before I finally reached an old man's little desk who begrudgingly gave me change, after buying six litres of water and three packs of chewing gum. Right, we were in.

The bus journey there was ordinary, and the bus driver was helpful enough to tell us when we needed to get off. When we did, we had about a five minute walk, ten with our bags, to the hostel. On the way there we walked past another hostel called the America del Sur that we had heard about in El Chalten as they have a sister hostel there. It looked fantabulous. But we soldiered on to our hostel; safe in the knowledge that anything that labelled itself the Antico Hostel Boutique probably had to be a bit special itself.

We got there and were buzzed upstairs by the lad on reception. We sat down for five minutes and sorted out the usual rigmarole of passport numbers and fake professions - I believe I was a semi-professional paraglider here - before we were shown to our rooms. Ah... rooms.

The place was pleasant enough, with a fantastic roof bar that had a private function going on upstairs, and it was all rather nice wood and stone floors etc. The toilets did look like something out of Porridge though. The showers were like those in your Sunday football teams club house, six sprinklers in a square room, not exactly the most private affairs.

We didn't want to spend our entire week in BA in separate rooms, so we made the flashquick decision of telling the bloke on reception we were nipping out to get a bite and we'd be back in twenty minutes, and then going back to the America del Sur to see if they had any beds for us.

Ten minutes later we were there booking two beds in a fantastic four-bed dorm for the next five nights, we would just have to sleep at the Boutique place that night. No problemos.

We went back and settled in, I was the only person in my room bar a drunken old man that had all of his valuables scattered throughout the whole room, and took reasonable interest in me. I soon discovered exactly why he was there. He'd been kicked out of his house by his wife - but he was nice enough. Helen was sharing with a less-than-friendly Irish girl.

The next morning, we got up, paid the receptionist and explained that we had made a mistake and thought we had two beds in the same room. He seemed absolutely fine with this and we went on our merry way to the other hostel. Checking in we were supermega excited to be in Buenos Aires and in a seemingly glorious place to stay whilst there.

'Have you got the iPod?' asked Helen.
'No. I thought you did...' I said peering into her massive backpack.
'I can't see it... I had it in... Oh fucking bollocks.'

Helen and I had been listening to the iPod on the flight here, and had thus had it in our little day bag, a bag that had not had a lock on it the previous evening as two of our padlocks had messed up and were as much use as bad metaphor.

The bag had been in my room when we went round to the other hostel the night before. Neither of our rooms had lockers in, but we thought twenty minutes in an empty hostel would be a fair risk assessment rather than carrying it around BA at night. In fact, our rooms did have lockers, but they were all smashed in. Perhaps we should have paid more attention to this fact.

To cut a reasonably long story quite a bit shorter but not quite short, either the fucker who signed us into the hostel or the cunt who he changed shifts with whilst we were out had gone through our stuff and half inched the music player. We went back to the hostel, and as calm as can be expected under the circumstances, explained in pidgin Spanish what we thought had happened to the girl who was on reception, and the same lad we had first met, who seemed to keep tripping up over his words and was physically shaking. It was definitely him.

The girl tried to pin it on the old alcoholic who I had shared my room with, but there is no possible way it would have been him. So we went to the police station to file a report, knowing that we had been fucked over and there was nothing that we could do about it other than get a police number so we can claim on the iPod when we got back. We'd had nothing stolen in seven months and within two weeks we'd been bumped twice; 'Welcome to South America' as our new mate on reception in America del Sur had said when we told him about the iPod.

Thus our first full day in Buenos Aires was spent in police cars and three different stations. This did offer me the chance to put my wrists together out of the window like I had been cuffed and shout 'I'm a patsy!' out of the window, but I don't think the policemen liked that very much. Still, I was ticking boxes.

The Real Quiz

Helen and Mary had booked the four of us into a small holiday resort type thing in Noosa, and it turned out a million times better than we could ever have imagined. 

The little apartment we were staying in was nice enough to live in, it had a swimming pool that allowed us to sun ourselves around and a tennis court for football tennis. We spent the next few days doing just those things, getting exceedingly sun-scorched and eating beer and drinking lots and lots of food.

And we got The Dark Knight out again. Awesome.

We were going to be spending Christmas there, and were wondering what we were going to do about food on Christmas day. We finally decided on having a barbecue, and set about drawing up the extensive plan of the mechanisation systems of the feast. I was in charge of the meat.

As well as the meat derby that we planned to hold on the 25th, on Christmas Eve, we went to a hostel-cum-pub that was up the road and had a proper Christmas dinner with turkey and everything.

We weren't expecting much but it was actually pretty flipping brilliant. We were so impressed by the food, and also the three members of staff that were feeding and serving a whole pub full of drunken people late on Christmas Eve that we decided to whack on a sizeable tip at the end. 

I was charged with going up after the meal into the kitchen to dish out the money. The only problem was that when I got into the kitchen only the old lady that had been cooking the food was present.

'Can I leave this as a tip, please? That was lovely and it's amazing you were able to make it all in this little kitchen.' I gushed, like a schoolgirl in front of Gary Barlow's legendary genitals.

'Oh no darl', you're backpackers we can't take that much money off you.' She said, out of her good eye.

'No, really, we insist. It was great.'

'I tell you what, if you really want to give me something you can get me a drink.'

Right, now it became obvious that the lady thought I was tipping her. I panicked and ran back to the table and asked what to do. I was met with mixed derision and scoffing, and that I was that useless I 'couldn't even leave a tip'.

I was now emotionally hurt and the quiz was about to start, and so I returned to the kitchen trying to explain that it was for everyone, not just the extras from the riot episode of Prisoner Cell Block H. This was only half successful, and so I grabbed one of the waiter men in with me and asked if he could share the tip round everyone. Success.

After this experience, and the Dagley Trio's consistent haranguing, I was not mentally prepared for the quiz. I didn't have my brain head on. What's more the guy who was reading the questions out was dressed as Father Christmas and his fake beard kept going in his mouth, which inexplicably made me feel incredibly nauseous.

Despite this, I was by far and away the outstanding player on our team (for which we'd reverted back to the classic and called 'Buster Corpse and the Necrophiliacs') - if only they had listened to my answers.

The fact that I could not perform a transaction that only required me to hand over money and not even receive anything back seemingly meant that I also didn't qualify to know the answers to festive-orientated pub quiz quandaries.

We finished third from bottom behind three 'Slavs that held about fifteen words of English and the same amount of fingers between them and a quintet, or a 'tossload' as I liked to group them as, of Australian lads that answered every question with a different word for vagina.

Not letting this under-performance get us down, we got down to some beer swilling with a couple of Australian men and a Kiwi bloke. These lads were good fun, until it was home time and they realised that they weren't going to be able to sleep with any of us, and then they got reasonably aggressive. Nevertheless, we said our goodbyes and walked down to the taxi rank.

(The other day on a trip south in Argentina we were essentially forced to watch Vertical Limit, starring Chris O'Donnell of Batman franchise-ruining fame, which had the quasi-amusing line said by an Australian of an Australian, 'He's like a dog. If he sees something moving he tries to hump it, if he can't hump it, he'll eat it, and if he can't eat it he'll piss on it.' This was the state of play. Apart from the piss.)

Once there, we found two six-packs of bottles of beer that had been abandoned, and we quickly scooped them up and bundled into a taxi. One of the packs of beer just about lasted the trip home, before being dropped three yards out of the taxi. 

The other pack of liquid goodness was dropped as soon as we entered our flat, sending shards of miniscule glass everywhere over the tiled floor.

I knelt down to brush up the larger pieces and must have put my knee onto a patch of vaporised glass dust, as suddenly there was a pool of blood on the floor around my knee.

I rushed upstairs to wash my knee under the tap in the bath, only to pull the whole tap out of the wall. At this point, all hell broke loose.

It was like the 'crazy' scene in a Steve Martin film where things were flying around and people were going mental and Steve Martin stands in the middle of it with his hands over his ears and shouts something hilarious like 'STOP!'. 

Except that nobody was laughing.

No wait, that is the same.

Mary and Helen started to shout at each other about something - possibly the tap, which was pouring out about 200 litres a minute, my knee was pissing blood like a confused mosquito and Emma was trying to Skype her mate back in England.

Things then quickly escalated to all out lunacy when Helen attempted to call the police, yes, you read correctly, THE POLICE, and then ran outside into the residential cul-de-sac and shouted ´IS THERE NOBODY THERE?!!´ as loud as a 757 taking off on a runway of kittens before shortly blowing up and smashing into a piano factory.

A shame to end a very fun evening like this, I thought.

Then I remembered it was Christmas Eve. Standard.

Christmas Day was a much more fun affair, with more meat than we could eat, and even Helen had great food too. Our differences were forgotten, even Helen let the Police off for not coming round to fix our tap. 

'Really though, we really got no beef with the PoPo.' She might have said.

Three days later, it was time to say goodbye to Mary and Emma. This was a pretty emotional affair as Emma and Mary were on separate planes and so there were two 'saying goodbye' sessions. I didn't cry so much as get pissed. Won two beach balls and a sweat band on three out of four scratch cards! Bonus.

And then it was just Helen and I again. So we quickly went back to Lisa's in Sydney so we didn't have to spend any time alone.

A Little Help from Our Friends

I'd left Helen alone in an empty police station for at least half an hour. When I let myself consider what could have happened, considering the obvious state of corruption in the town, I shudder.

Me and the nicest Vietnamese man in the world sped back to the station. We picked her up, and discovered that she had been taking photos of her battered face using the timer. (Some of which, with the grace of hindsight, are actually really quite funny.)

Getting my Vietnamese guardian angel to stop round the corner from our hotel, so he couldn't tell where we lived – this was the level of trust we would have in people until we left Vietnam two weeks later – I gave him 100,000 dong and he pop-popped away on his bike.

The reality of the situation donkey punched us, hanging over us like a badly fitting suit. With that suit in mind, we immediately thought of Ed.

Somehow we got into Ed and Nicky's hotel and went door-knocking to find them. Luckily, we only got it wrong once. After waking up some poor Irish couple, we found the correct room and Nicky very kindly tidied up Helen's face and examined me.

They, like many other people – as I will show you later – could hardly believe it when we promised that we hadn’t done anything more than leave the bar to provoke such a reaction.

It was then that we really started to think about what had happened. They had set up an ambush for us – but why? They didn't demand any money from us, they didn't steal any of the dozen cameras that we had on us. In fact money wasn't even mentioned once.

What their motives were will never be known, but they've been discussed a lot since. Plus, the irony is if they'd had any foresight they would have realised that we would have been back later that night anyway as the only other bar shut at two o'clock. But, as far as we were concerned, money didn't seem to be the motivator.

With a sudden dropping feeling in my stomach, I clocked that I still hadn't found Jon.

Going out on to the street, this time with Ed, I realised that I hadn't really got a clue what I was going to do. I was worried sick. I walked around the streets trying to remember the name of the hotel that Jon had said he was staying in, when I saw a taxi pull in further up the road.

I ran down as I saw a big group of people get out of it – I was overjoyed – it was Jon, his mates and the two Swedish girls.

I gave Jon a very big bear hug and told him he was a cunt for going the other way. He looked at me, incredulous as to what I was going on about – and told me that they'd just had a nice drink in the Sleepy Gecko. Not really getting his sarcasm and suddenly feeling very tired, I told him I would meet him the following day.

Good as my word, I went round the next day and retold what had happened. It turned out that the gang had followed them up to the other bar and had started to throw rocks at them and the bar itself. Jon, however, was quite content with having a nice beer or nine and decided to just weather the storm. Plus he was necking one of the Swedish girls. Priorities.

It turns out that this bar, and its owners in particular, did not have a great reputation in the town. Nicky and Ed, without mentioning what had happened to us, asked their hotel staff what they thought of the King Kong Bar and they said that it was 'A bad place, run by bad people.'

According to the staff at Jon's hotel they were the local drug dealers, and were essentially the local mafia (sic). This somewhat, perhaps, explained why the pigs hadn’t done a lot to help me out.

Whoever these people were, there was no possible way to hold them accountable for anything. The police didn't care, the tourist police (who we walked the town searching for for two hours that day) seemingly didn't exist, and Helen was too scared to leave the hotel once it started to get dark, let alone take it back up with them.

This incident had well and truly taken the wind out of our sails. Vietnam had turned from our favourite country on our travels so far to a place where we were suspicious of everything and everyone. It was a crying shame.

Perhaps we were naive to leave the bar so soon after coming into it, but I don't think any of what followed was in any way justifiable. For me, the most horrifying part was what had happened after the scuffle had occurred. The police, incredibly, were more intimidating than the people with sticks. But then again, I'm sure Helen would tell you that the girl with the sovereign rings was pretty terrifying herself...


If you want to read about really horrible human beings, then copy and paste the link below into your interweb slab, it goes to the Lonely Planet Thorn Tree forum. Helen attempted to post a bit of a 'heads up' to other backpackers going to Hoi An. It met with mixed responses, to say the least…

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/thorntree/thread.jspa;jsessionid=DD770ABC0B4EB33E052B0AE0DE3B812E.app02?messageID=14876433

Helen's riposte is one of the funniest thing's I have ever read though, so it's worth a butchers.

Since we posted on the Lonely Planet site, and also set up a random one-off blog as a warning to people thinking of going to Hoi An, we've received three emails from people saying that they had similar experiences, or they knew someone who had.

The most harrowing of their accounts included a boy who had become separated from his friends, beaten up outside the bar so badly that he feared for his life – and hid in a paddy field until dawn.

[NOTE FROM THE FUTURE: Hello, it's the 2012 version of Chris here, how are you? The King Kong Bar has apparently changed it's name to 'Old & New Bar' [THANK YOU FOR TIP OFF, ANONYMOUS POSTER BELOW HERE] – and who can blame them. If there were dozens of accounts of violence and thievery about my bar on the internet I'd change its name as well. (Seriously, search 'King Kong Bar Hoi An' and you get a mixture of people telling stories about how they were robbed or how they barely escaped with their teeth.)]

Our message here is, if you're going to go after King Kong, make sure you're not a blonde lass. Have you not seen the fucking film?

Anyway, next time we'll have much more funner stories to tell. Sort of. It'll make the Plagues of Egypt look like the Cold of Egham.

The Battle for Hoi An

As we were paying the lovely lady that ran the café, the heavens opened. It was cats and dogs and rats and frogs. Undeterred, but minus the emotionally and physically drained Ed and Nicky, we paced it up the street and hailed two taxis to carry us the diminutive distance over the bridge to the Happy King Kong Bar.

Making the short sharp sprint from the taxi into the bar, we were slightly disappointed that it was so empty, especially considering that the place was only about 20 square metres in size anyway. Strolling up to the bar, past the half dozen other customers that were there at the time, I asked if we were in time for our promised free drink. I did this only out of faux politeness, as I was safe in the knowledge that we were; it was 10.25, and the offer ran from ten until eleven.


'You got five minutes' snarled the squat, tattooed and Mohican-haired man behind the bar, who looked as though he was being run off a twelve-volt battery.

'Really?' I thought, glancing at my imaginary watch. Either way, we were here now and we weren't going to head out anywhere else just yet. Especially as the only other place on the isle was a good half-mile away and it was still wetter than an otter's slot outside.

I asked for one of their famous(ly free) rum and cokes, and received a small tumbler glass with an ice cube the size of my forearm in, a hamster's spit of rum and an eighth of a small bottle of warm coke.

‘Ah. Right.’ I thought.

Never mind. Helen had the same, as did the rest of the boys, and the two Swedish girls bought some toxic-looking and exceptionally overpriced cocktails. I believe they were called Mother Fuckers.

Standing around the pool table that took up 60% of the floor space in the establishment, and was seemingly only available to members of staff rather than customers as we got snarled at if we looked interested in playing, we met a further seven or eight people from all over the place. We began chatting about our various, and invariably identical, trips around south-east Asia.

After about 45 minutes or so, a couple more free drinks and a couple of expensive ones, we decided that, once everyone had finished up, we would all set off up to the only other bar, about 600 yards up the road.

The bar had not filled up. It was so deserted in fact, that when Jon and his mate Dan (who, ironically, wasn't drinking that evening as he was on antibiotics for a horrific septic blister that he had on his heel) rounded everyone up to go down the road to 'The Sleepy Gecko’, we at least halved the population of the bar.

Perhaps it was this that infuriated them. Perhaps it was that, as seemed to be the case, they thought Jon and Dan worked for the other bar and had poached us, perhaps it was because we'd had a free drink or two and only half of us had actually bought one and then left, but something had, to say the very least, got the staff of the Happy King Kong Bar's goat up that evening.

So, into the valley of death walked the fourteen of us. A narrow mud path that had been turned into sludge by the now utterly torrential storm. The tempest had taken out the electricity on the island and so we were trudging along in almost pitch noir-ness.

About 300 yards down the track, a motorbike had caught us up and we moved across to either side of the path to let it through. It slowly drove through the middle of us, and we realised, rather than just being loud, the man and girl on the bike were hurling volleys of abuse at us. It was the man with the Mohican and the girl that had been driving the English lad around on the moped.

They seemed to be picking solely on Jon and Dan, which was what led us to believe that they thought they had pilfered us from their bar to take us up to the Sleepy Gecko, the only other watering hole on this shithole island. After a lot of confused smiling and ‘OK, OK’-ing at them, asking what the problem was and trying to sort it out, we got fed up and started to carry on walking past them and up to the other bar.

The man drove the bike up, through and past us, and stopped about 20 metres up the road in front of our gaggle, turning his bike to block the narrow pathway. The girl crooked down and selected a large rock.

'Ah. Right.' I thought.

We were intimidated enough not to make any silly aggressive moves to get past them, but not so much as to turn on our heels and run. (Which, as you will see dear reader, would have been a very bad idea anyway.)

So, walking slowly down the mire path in an attempt to get past, the Vietnamese girl turns her attention to Helen, who, in good Coventry style (and luckily not parlance), held her ground. The girl took offence to this and, quick as a flash, hit Helen just above her left eye.

Well, the whole scene erupted, with the girl jumping off the bike and pushing Helen away onto a wire fence. I was trying to get to her from the other side of the path but almost couldn't see her through the other load of boys that were trying to do the same.

We just about managed to pull the girl off and separate them. Helen had blood streaming down her face and the little Vietnamese lady had blood on her fists and rings, and huge clumps of Helen’s hair in her hands. Whilst this was happening, we only just noticed that another four motorbikes were speeding their way towards us from both directions, each carrying two men clutching either a bamboo staff or a snooker cue.

'Ah. Right.' I thought.

This was when snap decisions started to be made by members of our assemblage. After an assortment of threats from the mob that now surrounded us - all in English, which was nice of them - ranging from the timid: 'You're barred!' (weren't really planning on going back there now) to the more significant: 'I'll kill you!’, it all kicked off again.

The girl evidently thought she had unfinished business with Helen and rushed at her again whilst I was trying to calm down the situation with Jimmy White, Hurricane Higgins and the Bamboo Boys. I was closer this time though, and grabbed hold of the girl by the shoulder but received about three or four blows to the side and back of my head for my troubles, as I twisted to try and get them off me, I got a stick across my hip bone. Ouchy.

Helen was getting the beating of her life, as this girl could fight. This was palpably not the first time that she'd had a scrap. Knees and elbows were flying, and Helen was incredibly lucky not to get her nose smashed, with blows raining on either side of it.

One of the other boys managed to pull the girl off her, and the men on bikes took a few pot shots at us with their sticks. It was at this point that I realised that everybody else had made the bright resolution to fucking peg it. The quandary was, however, that Jon and four or five other bodies had disappeared one way, and everyone else had vanished in the other, including Helen.

I was now in the middle of an alley, my bleeding girlfriend heading one way - back in the direction of the fucking bar we'd come from - and my bloody mate going the other way - into the black void of the night. The gang had dispersed that way too, and I was worried for Jon's safety - but I obviously couldn't leave Helen, either.

I was pretty shaken up and my stomach was tender from an expert teep kick that I'd received from the only man that I had managed to thump back. (I was just about to write 'I hope I got the right one' but I think that I could probably have justified twatting any bit-part actor in their gang of ten pool-master maniacs.)

This didn’t do much other than shatter the illusion that I held that if I punched someone as hard as I could in the face their head would explode in a mess of brains, gum and bone.

So, sprinting - as much as you can sprint in flip flops in a flood - after Helen and her motley crew of folk we didn't really know, I was also shouting in a Hollywood style: 'I've got to go back for Jon'. Daggers, understandably, wasn't having any of it.

We turned away from the direction of the bar and, still in the electrical blackout and hammering downpour, made our way up to what appeared to be a hotel and started banging on the door. 

After about two minutes a man answered and we implored him to call the police. He didn't want to. So we begged him to let us use his phone. He didn't want us to do that either. After five minutes, and me gnashing my teeth like a demented Andrex dog, he rang someone. But it wasn't the police. For all we know it was probably the King Kong Bar.

By this time, I was losing my mind with a cocktail of worry about Jon and anger about Helen. Her face was in a mess and I felt revolted with myself that I couldn't have stopped it from happening and now couldn't help her again. Almost in tears I waved down a man on a moped (which, on reflection, probably wasn't a good idea considering what had just occurred).

This Vietnamese Good Samaritan volunteered to take Helen and I to the police station, which, we hadn't realised, was only about 400 yards over the bridge. We hopped onto the back of his bike and sped off after telling the rest of the group to stay at the hotel and that we'd be back very shortly.

We arrived at the station and had to wake up the three policemen that were there. The friendly man on the moped translated - perhaps very badly, who knows? - what had happened to us. The police seemed pretty nonplussed about the whole affair, but I was determined to take them out to help find Jon at least, as I was convinced that there would be a gang of ten people on bikes versus four boys with suspect nipple rings.

Leaving Helen at the police station (what was I thinking?) I went on the back of the nice man's moped again, and we went back to hotel and picked up two other boys who, I think, were both German, who rode on the back of the policemen's bikes. As we approached the alleyway, I signalled to the policemen to go down it as that was where my friends were. They ignored me and, lo and behold, drove on to the King Kong Bar.

'Ah. Right.' I thought.

This was one place that I didn't want to be. But, in a moment of madness and/or curiosity I went into the bar, which was empty apart from four random people, whilst the others waited outside talking to an old man. I asked a couple of Scandinavian sounding people if the staff that were on now had been there the whole time that they had. These lads were pretty drunk and even more foreign and didn't really understand, or care about, what I was asking them.

Thus, walking out of the bar again, I was stopped by the head policeman, who pointed at the old man standing by the large table outside the bar. Turns out he was the owner of the bar.

'I see you I kill you.' He said.

'We've been atta- What?!' I blurted.

'I see you agai' I fucki' ki' you!' The older man said.

I almost laughed! I turned my head with a semi-smile of disbelief to the policemen in a 'has he just said that in front of you?!’ way. One of them was looking away, one was looking at the floor and the other was looking at me in a ‘What…?’ way.

'I see you again I fucki' KILL-YOU! I KILL YOU!' He continued to shout, drawing a neat line across his own throat.

I looked again at the policemen; one of whom was unbuttoning his baton holder, the other tapping his hitting stick against his thigh. I was surrounded by the old man, three policemen and a table and the only way I could go was back into the bar.

I looked down at the two German guys who were stood by the bikes in the rain.

'I want to go now.' I said in my calmest possible voice to the head policeman. He looked away and ignored me. 

'I want to go - NOW.' I repeated as sternly as possible. He pulled up his trousers by his belt and sat down. The other two looked at me and one of them smiled. I looked at the old man who was still bowling beamers of abuse at me.

'Ah. Right.' I thought. 'I'm going to get killed by the fucking police.'

I barged through the two standing policemen and shouted to the two Germans to get on the back of the bike - the Samaritan knew what was going on as he had already started his bike and turned around.

Thank glorious fuck he hadn't just driven off. Luckily - as the water was about four inches deep on the floor now - one of the German lads was wearing trainers, so he ran alongside the moped as we sped off into the rain, leaving the policemen with the smiling old man.

Getting back to the hotel where everyone was waiting, I thanked everyone for their help and told them I had to go and get Helen - FUCK! HELEN!