Free Llama for Lunch by Lydia Laube

smack in the middle of the entrance, where you almost had to touch him to go past on the tiny footpath, was a fellow with a huge submachine gun. That put me right off and I kept on walking.
    While I was preparing for the overnight bus ride out of Mexico, a marathon for a non-bus-lover, I started to feel squirmy in the tummy. This progressed to squirty. I was in trouble – just when I had to spend thirty hours on a bus. Nice. I cemented my internal workings with Lomotil – I hoped – and bought a bottle of tequila for sedation. It cost seven pesos, just one dollar forty cents. The nice shopkeeper put my Coke and other snacks in a plastic bag, but the tequila he wrapped in brown paper.

4 Tequila sunrise
    On a lovely morning I ate my farewell Mexican breakfast of omelette, coffee, juice and toast under the vine-clad pergola of a nearby restaurant. Then I checked out of my room and took what I meant to be a short cut to a craft shop I had heard about – but you guessed it, it turned out to be another of my long cuts. I ended up on the edge of town, where I found a street market and an old bloke selling gem stones. They were most probably almost all cut glass but the opal was genuine. After some solid bargaining, I bought a pretty opal egg for fifteen dollars in order to rid myself of my remaining pesos.
    Never having managed even a whiff of the craft shop, I returned to the hotel and stationed myself in the portico on a long polished wooden seat to read and watch the comings and goings until it was time to take a taxi to the bus station. As I disengaged from the taxi, three diminutive and exceedingly grimy urchins rushed up wanting to carry my bags. They were in no way big enough for this task but, as I still had some Mexican coins to unburden myself of, I let them ‘help’ me inside.
    After a while I asked someone to watch my luggage while I patronised the wonderful green and pink loo, inside which I was accosted by a maiden in distress: a large-ish Mexican girl wearing a trendy outfit of black skin-tight pants topped by a vest. It didn’t take long to work out her problem. The zipper of her pants had seized up at the top and she had an urgent need to get it down. After struggling with the recalcitrant zipper for some time I told her, in pantomime, that it was hopeless. ‘Shall I cut it?’ I asked. ‘Yes yes yes!’ I cut as neatly as I could, then went back to my bag and returned with a large safety pin. The girl at the turnstile, a witness to the drama unfolding, refrained from charging me more coins to re-enter and, after some tugging and pulling, I secured my new friend back in her pants. She covered the damage with her jacket and went on her way relieved. Giving away a precious safety pin was my good deed for the day. They say a good nurse always has a safety pin and a pair of scissors and I never go anywhere without mine.
    The next entertainment in the bus station was the entry of a pair of Americans. One was a very large, blind man sporting a big black leather hat and a black cape that made him look like an overweight Zorro. Attached to a female helper, he tapped along with a white cane. The helper was also very large, as well as far advanced in age. The blind man was about fifty; she could have been a hundred. If she was the helper then Lord help him.
    I wondered what they might be doing on a bus in the middle of Mexico. The helper seemed to have no idea what was going on. She tried to get into the disabled persons’ toilet but it was locked. This threw her completely. So she went back to the desk and they showed her where to go. The regular toilet was next to the disabled one but she had failed to see it – and he was the blind one. She then made an attempt to get into the regular toilet but couldn’t work out what to do with the coin machine or the turnstile. The desk staff rescued her again. This pair of innocents abroad were obviously leaving Mexico, so I pondered what she had been doing all the time she