The Further Adventures of an Idiot Abroad (22 page)

Have you ever been given an item of clothing that has stressed you out? I was given a big coat to wear for my trip to Alaska that made me worry. There was a label inside where
I was to write my name, an emergency contact number and . . . my blood type. I’m all for writing my name and phone number, comes in useful if I leave my coat somewhere, but why blood type?! I
didn’t even know my blood type. I couldn’t believe I’d been asked a question I couldn’t answer by a coat! I called up the doctor’s and made an appointment to get a
blood test. When I got to the clinic the doctor asked why I needed a blood test. ‘Because my coat needs to know,’ I said.

I had to pack more for this experience than for any of the other trips. I had big boots, thick socks, gloves, scarfs, hats, extra thick trousers and heat packs. I ended up wearing the massive
coat to the airport as it was too big to pack in my case with everything else. It was like a continental quilt with a hood. It had eleven pockets. I made use of all of these by putting chocolate
bars in each of them.

Our flight from London arrived late at Anchorage so we stayed at a hotel for the night. Nice place, but there were stuffed animals everywhere you looked. Grizzly bears, brown bears, black bears,
polar bears and moose. Bloody big things, they were. I’ve never understood the point of stuffed animals. Years ago I suppose this was the only chance people had to see most animals as they
didn’t have zoos or TV to watch nature programmes, but now, unless you’re planning on using a moose head as a clothes’ horse, I really don’t see the point in taking up room
in your house with a dead animal. Years ago, I had a mate called Ryan who had one of those rugs that still had the animal’s head attached. It was a bear. He said his dad had won it in a card
game. To think of all the trouble Noah apparently went to saving all the different species and yet here was one of the strongest animals on the planet with Ryan’s mam hoovering its back with
a Dyson. I went round to his house again to find that they had cut off the head as his dad got sick of tripping over it and almost falling into the coal fire. His dad said it was probably less
dangerous when it was alive.

The next morning we set off to meet a local man called Marty. The plan was for him to show me how beautiful the area was, while also teaching me how to survive in these cold conditions. We got
to the meeting place early. No one was around. All this snow and not one snowman in sight. I could already feel a headache coming on, not from the cold but from the white of the snow. My eyes
aren’t good at dealing with brightness. If heaven does exist and I make it up there I hope it’s not as bright as people always paint it. If it is, I hope there’s a Boot’s up
there where I can get an aspirin. I put it down as a side-effect of growing up in Manchester and having a dad who didn’t like wasting electricity on bulbs. As soon as a light was turned on he
would be there to hit the off switch. It was like he was playing that 1980s computer game
Simon
before it had been invented. We didn’t even have bright white walls when I was a kid,
it was always magnolia, so my eyes are in no way trained for this. I took two Nurofens to try and ease the pain. My headache certainly wasn’t caused by any noise. It was strange how quiet it
was. It was as if the deep snow soaked up every sound. Mind you, why would there be any sound? If we hadn’t been filming, I wouldn’t be out in these conditions either. I’d be
staying in watching a
Columbo
box set, drinking tea and making me way through a pack of biscuits. Maybe that’s why taxidermy is big here; apart from Sir Edmund Hillary, who would
wanna take a dog a walk in this weather. As I waited for Marty I had one of my chocolate bars from one of my eleven pockets. It was a Twix. I’d basically turned this coat into an Advent
calendar.

Marty turned up. He was a big man wearing a cowboy hat. Imagine Burt Reynolds in a fleece. He was dragging two sleds full of gear. I wasn’t sure if we were going for a trek into the
mountains or I was just about to help him move house. I’ve seen bag ladies carry less than what Marty was lugging with him. He had axes, shovels, skis, ropes and a gun.

I told Marty I’m not really into dangerous fun. I love having a nice stroll, but if having a stroll involves carrying guns and shovels I’d rather stay in. He said we
were going to have ‘an awesome time’. Awesome seemed to be one of his favourite words. He used it a lot. I asked him if it’s so ‘awesome’ why was he carrying a gun. He
told me he brought it for my safety. ‘We’re in bear country,’ he said. I asked him where my weapon was, as all I had to stop a bear attacking me was ten bars of chocolate. He
handed me some pepper spray. A lot of people who live in these parts don’t like carrying guns but need protection from bears, so they carry bear spray. He said it could spray pepper up to 30
feet. I remember thinking that that wasn’t a great claim. A 30-feet spray is nothing. I may as well throw it from a pepper pot. I would have been happy to carry a gun. I was carrying so much
stuff already I looked like a contestant on
Crackerjack
so what harm would one more item do, but he said if I wasn’t used to shooting a gun the chances are I would miss my target and
end up hitting one of the film crew, so I would be best just using the pepper spray as a form of defence. The idea of the spray is that bears have an amazing sense of smell and they don’t
like the pepper. I took the lid off, and Marty kept telling me to be careful. The problem was, Marty was hard to read as he was an excitable person and spoke like one of those voiceovers you get on
kids’ nature programmes who say things like ‘Woooowwwww’ and ‘Looooook outttttt, duuudddeee’, so I never knew if he was kidding or not. It was like one long game of
Call My Bluff
with Marty. I sprayed it. Marty started screaming while squeezing his eyes. I thought he was messing about. Richard the director told me to put the cap back on the spray as
if he was some sort of hostage negotiator. I then noticed Freddie the sound man’s eyes were streaming, and a gust of wind sent some of the spray into everybody else’s eyes. It
wasn’t long before we were all stood there crying, like we’d just been eliminated off
X Factor
. My eyes may not be good at dealing with the brightness, but they handled the
pepper spray quite well. I put this down to the fact that I grew up with my mam using loads of Silvikrin hairspray. If I had to go in the bathroom after she had been in there spraying her head I
had to learn to keep my eyes open. If I closed them the amount of lacquer in the air would stick them shut. Marty told me I needed to keep the spray in a location I could get to quickly if a bear
appeared, so I moved a Kit Kat I had in my right-hand front pocket and put it where the Twix I’d eaten earlier had been. Another tip that Marty gave me, if I was to get chased by a polar
bear, was to strip while running, as the bear would stop to sniff each garment. If I had to do this, with the amount of layers I was wearing, there would be more clothes on the floor than at
Primark when a sale’s on. And the chocolate would probably help too.

Marty asked if I had any back problems or health issues. I told him I’d just taken some Nurofen to stop a headache. He seemed concerned and was worried about me doing a trek if I
wasn’t fully fit. Again, I wasn’t sure if he was being serious. Here he was being worried about my safety after having a couple of tablets for a headache, and yet a few minutes ago
he’d given me some pepper to protect myself from a bloody big bear. I told him I would be fine, and we started our trek. It wasn’t long before we were wading in five feet of snow. Never
mind pepper spray, salt spray would’ve been more handy to melt ourselves a path. I thought these sorts of conditions were meant to have died out with the woolly mammoth. I was knackered. I
didn’t know how deep the snow needed to get before Marty would think about using the shovels we were both dragging with us. He kept saying how beautiful everything looked, but everywhere
looks nice when covered in this much snow. It’s a good place to fly-tip ’cos after a few hours in these conditions anything you tip will be covered.

I asked Marty if he had any water as I was thirsty. He didn’t, but he said the snow that surrounded me was the cleanest snow in the world, so it would be safe to eat that.

As we walked we talked.