THE MANGO ORCHARD

Non-Fiction (Travel) 288 pages

Arrow - April 2011

 

As a child, Robin Bayley was enchanted by his grandmother's stories of Mexican adventures; of bandits, wild jungle journeys, hidden bags of silver and a narrow escape from the bloody Mexican Revolution. At the end of the 19th century his great grandfather, Arthur - or 'Arturo' - Greenhalgh had left England to travel through the Americas. His fabulous stories had been passed down through the generations, but Robin always sensed in them an absence. So great was his desire to fill that vacuum that he sold his London flat and abandoned a successful media career to retrace his great grandfather's footsteps.

THE MANGO ORCHARD recounts the story of parallel journeys a hundred years apart, into the heart of Latin America. Undaunted by the passage of time and a paucity of information, Robin seeks out the places where Arturo travelled and lived, determined to uncover what he had left behind. Along the road Robin encounters witches, drug dealers, a gun-toting Tasmanian Devil and an ex-Nazi diamond trader. He is threatened with deportation, offered the protection of Colombian guerrilla fighters and is comforted by the blessings of los santos. He falls in love with a Guatemalan psychic with mystical powers and almost gives up his quest, until a sense of destiny drives him on to western Mexico and the discovery of much, much more than he had expected.