Free Extreme Frontiers: Racing Across Canada from Newfoundland to the Rockies by Charley Boorman

right at the end beside the fire doors, beyond which there was a staircase, so that was one escape route at least.
     Paul gave a little knock just to make sure the widow was aware we were coming in and then he unlocked the door.
    I was chewing my nails, trying to look cool and calm but not doing a very good job. The room was not the best in the hotel,
     but it was nicely decorated. I tried to tell myself it was just a room. A room where a woman had committed suicide.
    ‘Anyway,’ Paul said. ‘I’ll wish you good night. Hopefully there will be no disturbances. Oh,’ he added, ‘and don’t be like
     the last person who stayed here, will you.’
    ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘What happened to them?’
    ‘He ran out of the hotel at two thirty in the morning.’
    ‘You’re joking?’
    He shook his head. ‘No, I’m not. He ran out with his shirt tail hanging out, kicking his suitcase ahead of him in an absolute
     panic.’
    I was incredulous now. ‘What happened?’
    ‘He woke up in bed and the room was freezing cold; for about forty-five seconds he couldn’t move, he couldn’t even blink.
     When I spoke to him he was white as a sheet, and he told me that lying there like that, he knew there was somebody else in
     the room. He hadn’t been drinking, he was just a regular guy, but he hated the feeling he got in this room so he upped and
     left in the middle of the night.’ He smiled now, encouragingly. ‘Anyway, good night, Charley. Sleep well, won’t you.’
    I didn’t unpack. I sat in the chair by the window and rocked. I had Mungo with me, filming just in case the widow appeared.
     We sat around, taking the piss, messing about – Mungo pointed out that me being there was definitely going to stir the widow
     up, rile her, stuff like that. On top of it all we had to be up at five thirty for the three-hour drive to meet up with the
     guides for the Bloodvein River trip. Bloodvein. God, that was appropriate, wasn’t it?

6
River Wild
    S he didn’t bother me. She must’ve liked me, because I did sleep and I didn’t wake up at two thirty, screaming and shouting
     and rushing down to 207 and Russ’s double bed. I was so knackered after the two-day ride and the ice hockey that I crashed
     out and didn’t stir until the alarm went off. I jumped out of bed, ready to board a floatplane for our trip into the wilderness.
    When we arrived in Bissett, our guide Cameron White and his team were busy overseeing exactly what we were taking on the floatplane.
     We’d each been allocated a watertight barrel for our belongings and these were loaded into the fuselage.
    ‘Make sure you’ve packed everything you’re going to need,’ Cam told us, ‘because if you haven’t, this is going to be a bad
     trip.’
    ‘Like toilet paper, you mean?’ I asked.
    ‘Right … or food maybe. It would be an idea to take food. Having said that, we could always survive on fish – it’s good where
     we’re going because people don’t go there to fish.Now I come to think about it, people don’t really go there at all.’
    There were four guides in all: Cam, Rob, Dave and Matt. Four boats, two men to a boat, and we each needed to be with someone
     who had some experience. We also had to make sure we were not exceeding the floatplane’s payload. It could only carry so much,
     and only two canoes at a time, which meant we’d be making two trips. Russ and Nat were going ahead, then the pilot would turn
     around and come back for Mungo and me. We’d driven three hours north of Winnipeg already this morning and now the plane was
     going to fly us fifty miles further. Last night when Russ and I had plotted the route on the map, we’d realised that we really
     would be in the middle of nowhere.
    With the gear loaded, the pilot began the very delicate process of strapping the canoes on to the struts above the plane’s
     floats. It had to be done very carefully because we didn’t want them coming loose and falling off. He told us that if a