Amazon Journey - seven thousand miles through Peru and Brazil

Barrie St. Clair Mc Bride

Published by The Travel Book Club, hardcover

Peru with its Riches
THE idea grew in New Zealand. It seemed too conventional, ordinary, and too expensive to catch a ship to Fiji, Hawaii and on to the west coast of the United States. The nearest lump of land was South America, so I decided to go there.

I was working in Wellington in the wool stores. It was the height of the shearing season and bales of wool flooded into the stores keeping us there twelve hours a day every day of the week except for Sundays when we had a rest and only worked eight hours.
Robin was a drinks waiter at the Grand Hotel. I had met him on the poop deck of the W anganella a few weeks before as we crossed from Australia and in Wellington we met occasion¬ally to compare jobs. I tried a drinks waiter job at Robin's suggestion, in the Midland Hotel, but left under a cloud after I dropped a cake, which supported an enormous amount of cream, on the red carpeted floor amid a party of forty-four members of the local Operatic Society. I thought the manager was unnecessarily unkind in saying I would be far better suited in a wool store.

Robin stopped me in the street one evening. He was in a white shirt and black tie and I was in lanolin covered anorak and trousers, returning from the wool store. We only spoke for a couple of minutes, it was one of those days which gave "windy" Wellington its name, when voices are caught and blown off down the street; he wanted to come to South America with me.

During the next week we met and discussed plans. No one could tell us much about the place we were going to. The ex ......................................