Sandra

The train to Bordeaux left the following morning. We spent the night in a bar in Rochefort, and were adopted by a young French couple who bought us drinks and practised their English on us.

Bordeaux was like any other city would be if it was soaked in oil overnight. Grimy, dirty looking and kind of s***ty. The guide book went down in my estimation by pointing us to a camp site that no longer existed. Then we waited for a bus for about two hours. Anyway, after a ridiculously annoying experience with a French Taxi driver (the lowest form of life on the planet) we found a camp site.

And that's when we met Sandra Jackson. She was English, 18 years old, and on a motorcycling holiday with her parents. We were camped next to them. We kept them all entertained with our hitchhiking anecdote, and then pretty much sat around drinking into the evening. Sandra seemed more than impressed with our tales of backpacking, and confessed a yearning to do likewise.

Now, what happened next is rather odd. We can't decide who's fault it was - I'm sure it was Karim, and he's convinced it was me. Either way, I blame the one Euro a bottle wine. What happened was, one of us said "Why don't you tag along with us?"

"Yeah", we went on, digging the hole deeper, "we've got a four man tent, and we could do with someone who actually knows how to read a map - or someone who actually owns a map would be a good start".

It was just one of those things you say - like "I'll call you", or "Come round anytime", or "Of course I wasn't faking it".

But it caused trouble. Sandra woke up her father to inform him that she wasn't going with him tomorrow, she was going to be travelling around with these two English boys for a while. Now, her father had liked us - he was a teacher and we'd bantered about the education system with him so he obviously thought we were pretty stand up guys. Not quite good enough to abduct his daughter and mess up his entire holiday plans of course.

We made our excuses and went to bed. The next morning, the atmosphere could best be described as 'tense'. We tried to stay hidden in our tent for as long as possible. But, eventually, we had to face the music. Sandra was talking about how she was going to carry on her holiday with her parents, but she was going to e-mail us and arrange to meet us in Sydney.

Her father wasn't talking to us. Her mother just gave us odd looks. We waved apologetically as they rode off. Then we started the argument that is still raging, about who's fault it all was.

The e-mails started a few days later....