Much quieter on the barricades

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After our night of frenzied activity on the toad crossing, things have been considerably quieter. The next night we found fewer than 20 toads all together, in contrast to the final total of over 700 creatures the night before. The next night was busier again with about 160. The strangest thing though was that on Friday night I helped as many lost people as amphibians! To start with, as soon as I drove out of our cul-de-sac I met another vehicle coming towards me. The road there is only wide enough for one, so I waited for the other driver to pull into the gateway right next to them, but they didn’t, so eventually I had to reverse back around the corner into our road again and they proceeded forward in a very slow and halting way. Definitely looked like someone who didn’t know where they were going, so I got out and went to see if they might be lost. Sure enough the driver stopped and got out too and came to ask the way to an address, so I was able to help him. Then when I arrived at the toad crossing, two volunteers were already patrolling near the junction, so I wound down my window to ask if it was busy (so I would know how quickly I needed to grab my buckets etc. and get into action) and they told me they had met a woman who was lost and looking for a bus into town, did I know where there was a bus stop? I said I would take her to the one further along the road, so she got in the car. She spoke no English and unfortunately I speak no Portuguese so conversation was very limited. She managed to tell me she was from Brazil and wanted to go into town. She was lost and had been crying because she was so worried. But we couldn’t communicate any more than that. I took her to the nearest bus stop, about half a mile along the road, but it was just a post on the roadside in the pitch darkness and the timetable said there would be a wait of about 25 minutes for a bus. I didn’t like to leave her there all alone in the dark for so long, so I took her back in the car and drove her to the main road into town, where it is well lit and busy with more frequent buses. I hope she got to wherever she needed to go. I wish I could have found out more about her but we could barely communicate (I only thought of trying Google Translate after I’d dropped her off! But of course I was driving anyway). No-one knew where she could have come from, the only place nearby is a private school but by that time of night it was closed and quiet – and anyway that was only about 50 yards away so she couldn’t have got lost and upset just walking out of there! She was too old to be a student (unless a mature student of course, but you don’t get many international mature students who don’t speak any English) or an au pair, perhaps she had just managed to take a wrong turn somewhere and just walked the wrong way out into the woods. Now that more people advertise rooms on AirBnB you do tend to get visitors staying in random places here and there, so I guess it’s easier to get lost. I just wonder what she thought when suddenly in the dark she came upon a group of people in high-vis jackets with torches and buckets walking up and down the road! At least she must have had a story to tell of her experience! All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2019.