June 9, 2021 • 42 mins
Excitement! Danger! Adventure! THESE are the ingredients to the mouthwatering story hoagie we’re making in this week’s action-packed episode. Our first story comes from Lonnie Marts IV who learned the hard way that steep hills and wheels don’t always go well together. Next, our favorite Aussie, Maitland Hanley, shares a tale of adventure in India. And YouTube’s Monet brings us on a modern day Indiana Jones quest to find her Great Uncle’s lost plane. Adrenaline junkies AND people who are more comfortable on the couch…. this episode is for you!
Featured Storytellers:
Lonnie Marts
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@lonnieiiv / @lonnieiiv
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lonnieiiv / @lonnieiiv
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/lonniem3
Maitland Hanley
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@maitlandhanley / @maitlandhanley
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maitlandhanley / @maitlandhanley
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpgoEBYUmkhWm_xy_EUftIw
Merch: https://youngdumbclub.com/
Monet Izabeth
Check out her Kenya expedition on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxuywPsOX1o
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@monet.izabeth / @monet.izabeth
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/monet.izabeth / @monet.izabeth
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/monetizabeth
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Yeah, Hello all my little fable babies, and welcome back
(00:24):
to story Time, the holy grail of great stories from
around the interwebs. I am your host, will I hate
surprise parties, McFadden, and I have got a wild ride
of a show for you today. It's all about adventuring
and and trying new things and danger, and I hate
almost all of those things. But my therapist is recommending
(00:44):
that I open up my horizons to all of the
possibilities that life has to offer and insisted that I
make a bucket list to get me out of my
comfort zone try new things. I honestly didn't even know
what a bucket list was. I thought it was a
list of different types of buckets, like a metal bucket,
a plastic bucket, a wooden bucket, a bucket hat. Boy,
(01:04):
was I wrong. So you all better watch out because
our storytellers aren't the only people going on adventures today. Look, obviously,
there's a few things I won't be able to do,
at least not right away, like visit the birthplace of
Celine Dion or see a horse in person. But there
are a few that I will be able to tackle
from the warm comfort of my home and neighborhood. So
(01:27):
strap yourselves in tight for little Will mc never try
anything new, fat And is about to become big will Mick.
Watch out. I'm brave now, fat In. I'm gonna work
on that, all right. I gotta change my shirt and
pack a few extra pairs of Andy's. So while they
do that, please enjoy a story from one of my
favorite creators, Lonnie Marks. All Right, So this is a
(01:48):
little story about how I killed one of my best friends, Chad,
by convincing him to skate down Monster Bridge on alongboard
that was jankie that I gave to him, maybe with
the intentions of seeing him actually die. So. I was
a sophomore in college in Daytona Beach, going to a
school called embry Riddle and Daytona Beach sounds like a
beautiful place, but it's really not. It's filled with like prostitutes,
(02:09):
god bless sex workers, uh in, heroin addicts. But that's
what kind of makes it magical. I went to embry
Riddle there, which is an aeronautical university, which basically means
I was in class with literal astronauts, rocket scientists, and pilots.
I was none of those things. I was on the
track team, which tells you that we run in circles
for fun. That's our job. That's what we do. We
(02:31):
don't do numbers in math. We run in circles and
we get paid because our legs are good. That's how
we make our money. However, these people were literally sending
dogs and humans into space. I don't know why. Dogs
isn't really important, but they could do it if they
wanted to. That's what's that's what that's what matters about that.
Um So, because I was on the track team, I
eventually got promoted to captain because I had leadership qualities
and as a captain, it's my job to facilitate team bonding.
(02:55):
Was like, hey, alright, Lonnie, it's your job as team
captain to make sure everybody has bonded on the team
and that everybody's getting along well. So, in my lightning
fast mind, I said, there's no better way than to
get these freshmen integrated into the team than to take
them on a tour of the beautiful, magical Daytona Beach.
This is the perfect place to show these freshmen what
Embry Riddle and Daytona Beach is all about. A tour
(03:17):
of the city. I get one of the freshman his
name is Chad. Coaches like, this is your freshman buddy.
Make sure he gets integrated on Like cool, Hi, Chad,
how are you? Chad sits there and grunts at me.
He says, basically, I would describe him as a garden
gnome like. He was about four ft eight. Uh, it
might have been a medical condition. I don't know. Uh,
(03:37):
he was really short. He always worth the same like
black converse and his torso was three times in the
length of the rest of his body. But believe it
or not, the kid was a sprinter and he was
very very fast, So respect him on that. But I
think it was one of those trade off things where
God's like, Okay, you know what, you might be very fast,
but also you're gonna have the brain cells in Neanderthal
So this is a prime target for my scheme that
(03:58):
I figured out. Unleash on him on the line. So
we're walking through Daytona Beach and again we're seeing all
the nightlife. You're seeing like the dead people on the
side of the road and whatnot. Uh. You can see
some of the bikers like their Harley's and all this
fun stuff. It's also midnight, because what better time to
explore Daytona Beach a place I could kill you just
from walking barefoot and you know you step on a
heroin needle or come across an angry biker group than midnight.
(04:21):
So we're out walking and we come to basically what's
the tallest bridge in Daytona Beach, and it's called the
International Speedway Boulevard Bridge or whatever. It's like a mile long.
It is probably about twelve stories high. I'm like, hey, Chad,
we're gonna skate down this bridge. I got you this
long board. And at this point Chad realizes that I'm
(04:42):
trying to kill him, but he agrees. He's like, sure,
that sounds good, let's do it. He's like, his grunt
is gonna and I'm like, okay, that's gonna be a Yes.
I have my longboard, Chad has his. We're at the
apex of this thing. I'm looking out. You can literally
see all of Daytona Beach from here. It's not that big.
You can see the airport and it's actually really really beautiful.
And I'm like, all right, Chad, listen to me. We're
about to do something very dumb here again. Just kinda.
(05:07):
I'm like, okay, Chad, thank you beautiful, very well, said,
I want you to get on your longboard and we're
gonna skate all the way down there. We're not actually
gonna have to push and mind you, like honestly, literally,
the bridge, the sidewalk is about us. Like imagine going
into a library and having to like kind of slide
between the bookshelves. That's how wide this sidewalk is going
down the freaking bridge because they have the railing on
(05:30):
one side that on the other side of is a dark,
inky blackness of death. And on the left side they
have giant Ford rafters driving by or whatever just being
loud as hell because again it's Daytona Beach. So dad
on either side, and I'm like, there's no better way
to integrate a freshman into the team than to have
him risk his life with me. After that, there's really
you can really only go up from there, you know.
(05:50):
So I'm like, this is gonna be a great idea,
and I get Chad. I said on my board. My
Chad said, on your board, And so he steps on
and we're just standing there and I looked down again
and it looks like it's even further away. This sound
like this to be a terrible idea. Maybe this is
a mistake. And so I'm like I realized, like slowly
but surely, like we're kind of moving. I'm like, Chad,
this is our last chance, and not do this. If
this is a terrible idea, please say anything other than
if you don't want to do this. And Chad is like,
(06:14):
at this point, I realized, all I hear is kt
kt k and we're moving. I look at the bottom
of the bridge and it turns like the sidewalk cuts away,
(06:37):
and I'm like, that's no good. That's no good at all.
That's a that's a big oof. That's a large oof.
And I'm like, okay, all right, Chad, we should stop.
Chat I was kidding. I don't know what I was thinking, Chad,
we should stop. I don't see Chad. Chad's gone. And
then I start to see the cars over to the
left of me. They start going backwards, they start moving backwards.
I'm like, oh my god, I'm passing cars. I'm like,
(06:59):
I'm I said cars. This is no good. This is
no good at all. And I'm like, oh my god,
oh my god. I try to put my foot down
to stop, and the board does this whole like wobble thing,
and I'm like, oh, that's no good. That's no good.
I can't stop. The wind is picking up, but I can't.
I don't know where Chad win. I'm like, oh God,
I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die. The bottom of the
hill is getting closer and closer. It's literally about I obviously,
(07:21):
it's probably about four to the bottom of this bridge
before the turn, and I'm going so fast. As I
try to step off, like every time I lift my
foot up, it wobble. So I'm like, I'm gonna die.
Chad could already be dead or either he was smart
and didn't come down anyways. And so I kind of
crane my head back because I'm going try to keep
my whole body balance. I see Chad. He is behind me.
He also started, but a little bit later than me.
I don't know. I don't know if he thought it's like, yeah,
(07:42):
Fannie can do this, I can do I'm like, that
was a mistake, Chad, I say, And I'm like, I'm
there's no way I'm gonna have to jump off the board,
like because if I keep going, I'm literally going to
hit the bottom because you can't turn at this point.
It's just a matter of keeping it steady. So as
like the wind is flying through my hair and my
eyes are starting to water because we're going so fast,
and I'm like feeling all the bounces in the road
or whatever on the sidewalk, and I'm like, I'm gonna
(08:04):
pop my hamstring and die, but I have to step
off otherwise I'm gonna die. Whatever. So I lift my
foot over the edge and I'm like, okay, here we go.
I'm just gonna put my foot down. I'm gonna run.
And I jump off the board and I feel my
hamstring say, and I try to run, and I'm like
and I run and I tumble onto the ground and like,
I'm okay, but I barely missed the barry. I'm like,
(08:25):
oh my god, I'm okay. I'm alive. And I look
back and Chad is coming down behind me. I'm like,
oh no, he has to jump off. But again, his
body proportions are terrible. His legs are much shorter than mine.
His tors like I said, as three times as long
as the rest of his body. So my Chad, be careful,
and I see his board wobbles as he tries to
step off, and it goes towards the railing and he
(08:46):
hits the railing and I'm like no, and he pinballs.
He's straight pinballs. His body goes ragged all and limp.
He hits the side. He hits the barrier. His board
goes up in the air. It's like about to go
off the railing. He is airborne now in the middle
of the air or whatever, and he hits the railing.
It tossed him over and he's coming down, coming down
the walk whatever, sliding on his back like a turtle.
(09:09):
And he's like, jacket is absolutely burned through because of
the concrete and the way he slid down the back
of it. And I'm like, oh my god, he's dead.
Coach is gonna kill me? My Chad, Chad, are you okay?
And he possibly says that was so cool? As again
his back is bleeding. He has he literally has a
hole in the back of his jacket and I'm like, dude,
are you serious. He's like that was so crazy. The
(09:30):
board is like in the ocean now. It popped off
and went over the edge and he fell on his
back and slid He's like that was so great, And
I'm like, all right, dude, okay, man, whatever you say,
if you if you think so, we're not telling anybody
about this. And so he like gets up off the
ground and we have to limp back the campus for
an hour and a half. And I'm like, you know what,
maybe this wasn't such a bad team building experience. Jeez,
(09:54):
I wonder what other team building activities Captain Lonnie put
Chad through. Maybe he trust falls off of a edge.
How about a ropes course? But with no ropes? Why
don't we do an escape room, except it's inside a
burning building. By the way, my hamstrings make that exact
same sound every time I put my socks on. Guys,
I highly recommend following Lonny marts, just not down a
(10:14):
hill on a skateboard links in the description. Okay, so
my first adventure simply takes me on the long journey
from my bedroom to my mother's kitchen. See, my palette
(10:34):
isn't what Gordon Ramsey would call the most refined. I
really only eat ten different foods in different combinations. So
I'm gonna try some new and hopefully tasty foods. Okay,
So first on the list, lettuce. Yeah, I've actually never
eaten lettuce before, but I have come close. One time
at a buffet, a piece of lettuce was stuck in
(10:55):
a deviled egg, and it did make its way into
my mouth, but I caught the little stow away and
spit it out right away. So, in honor of the Titanic,
I decided to go ahead and try iceberg lettuce. As
you get it, iceberg run. Okay, here we go. Yeah, a,
(11:19):
oh god, what is that? What is that? Why do
people eat that? It tastes like bland, crunchy water. Oh
why do you why? Why? Oh? There's like entire restaurants
that are dedicated to this. Gross shit. God, okay, gross
zero for one. Off to a rough start. What do
we have next? Okay? Oh okay, So next I'm going
(11:40):
to try a peach, which realistically I should like because
there's nothing I enjoy more than lounging in the sun
and sipping on a fuzzy naval wine cooler. But this
is hard because fuzzy fruits really weird me out. Why
are they fuzzy? Other fruits aren't? What makes them so
special that they get to have like a little blanket
around them? Are they cold old. It doesn't make any sense. Okay,
(12:02):
all right, I'm just gonna cut it is hard in
the middle. I don't like the fuse. It's really terrible.
It makes me feel like I'm a thirteen year old
boy again. I hate it. Okay, here we go. It's
not that bad. It's not so bad. I don't I
don't need to ever do it again. But it's not
that bad. Um am I supposed to eat the rock
(12:24):
in the middle. Okay, I'll try taking a bite of
this weird rock. Oh all right, No, that's not edible.
I think I think I've chipped a tooth. This is great.
I'm really having fun here alright. Moving on. Next up
on the list is cottage cheese, which I love the
sound of. I feel like, you know, it's just this
(12:44):
cheese that lives a life of relaxation. Like it. It
just it moved away from the city to live in
a little shack and get away from society, and it
takes a lot of afternoon naps and probably owns a
golden retriever that it rescued from a shelter in some
overpopulated big town and spends its free time embroidering cute
little things on pillows. Cottage cheese has really got it
(13:05):
figured out. Let's try it. Nope, nope, nope, What the
is that? Oh, forget cottage cheese. It should be renamed
deception cheese. No, the texture is just all wrong. It
tastes like like cheese took a ship in my mouth.
How is it solid yet also watering? No? God, no,
(13:28):
oh God, you guys. Enjoy the story from Maitland Hanley
while I go wash this cheese arrea out of my mouth.
So this story is about the day of my partner
and I thought we were actually going to die. Um.
It all started when one of my friends asked me
to go to India for his wedding, which obviously I
said yes to. The only issue was my job at
(13:48):
the time wouldn't allow me to have a holiday and
needed with my partners, and obviously my partner Jess, had
to come with me to India if we were gonna
if I was going to be traveling. So we sat
down that night, we had a chat and we had
to come up with some sort of solution for the
problem that we had at hand. And I took about
five seconds to work out this solution. After that we
(14:10):
we sat down, we put on Netflix and went to bed. Obviously,
the next day we both went into work and it
was time to set the plan into motion. The plan
was quite simple. Actually, we quit our job. That was
the plan. That was my genius plan. We quit our job,
very smart. So literally one month later, we're on a
(14:31):
plane to India, jobless, feeling super excited and care free,
uh and just living life. But before we were going
to the wedding, we decided, you know what, there's not
going to be many opportunities for us to actually travel
to India and see everything. So we decided before the wedding,
we're going to go around India a bit and we're
going to have a look at some of the places.
(14:51):
We might even visit some other destinations as well. So
we did. We started in Dubai, which had ridiculously fast internet,
amazing for up learning videos. Then we moved on to
Sri Lanka. That's where our first seen a squirrel, which
was super cool. Then after that we went to Goa
where we arrived to a bug infested, blood stained room.
But that's that's a story for another time, I guess.
(15:14):
Before we finally arrived in New Delhi, which is where
the wedding was being held for my friend. Now, a
lot of stuff happened while we were in New Delhi.
In fact, a lot of stuff happened over the whole
time we were overseas. But the only thing you really
need to know for this story is I had a
terrible case of bronchitis and I was not a happy
(15:34):
boy on this day. All right, it's time. It's November
two thousand and seventeen. I have bronchitis. I've got a camera,
a girlfriend, which is cool, and a little French girl
that was traveling with us named Miriam Ah. On this day,
we decided, you know what, let's go see the taj Mahal.
We haven't seen the taj Mahal. Tourists always go and
(15:54):
see the taj Mahal, so we have to do this.
We needed a cab though, we needed a way to
get there. Luckily, the person who was having the wedding
had a friend that drove taxis and he hooked us up.
So at ten am in the morning, this taxi arrives,
as dude arrives and he hops out of his car.
The first thing I noticed is he's got this massive
scar across his face from like the top of his
(16:17):
head on the left hand side all the way to
the bottom of his draw on the right hand side.
It was insane um and all I could think was, Dude,
I need to hear this story. I need to hear
how this happened, because that's ridiculous. The early problem was
he could not speak a word of English, so we
had quite a language barrier, which which did not help
(16:38):
anything throughout this whole day. Regardless of not being able
to communicate though, we decided to just hop in and
go to the Taja my health from which was about
a four hour drive give or take. The start of
the driver was fine. We're just relaxing, We're taking in
the scenery. I'm I'm holding in all my coffing because
obviously I've got bronchitis. I'm not feeling and it gets you.
(17:00):
About one pm, we've been driving for three hours. The
driver pulls over into like a little food stall area
and goes inside and orders food. He sits down and
eats his food For about thirty minutes. We're stuck in
the car. The car is locked. We we obviously we
could unlock it from the inside. Maybe I don't know.
And the windows we couldn't roll down because they're electric windows.
(17:23):
There was no aircorn on. So we're in this car
just like boiling, sweating like crazy while he's inside having
a good little, good little feed. Now, after the driver
finished his chicken and rice, which I hope was delicious,
we continued on our journey and kept driving. It hits
about three thirty pm, right and I'm starting to wonder
(17:44):
why we haven't arrived yet. I'm like, it's only a
four hour drive. We've been driving for approximately four and
a half five hours. Surely we should be at our destination,
Na taj Mahal, but we weren't. So for thirty comes
around and we're starting to get real irritated. Were all
on the back. We're like, I'm like talking to each other.
If you swear words drop out our guess um. But
(18:05):
we just we just chill a little bit because the
taj Mahal closed up five. This is what you understand.
The taj Mahal close at five, which is in half
an hour. But we just relaxed a little bit. We're chilling. Okay,
we're chilling. We're on holiday. It's okay. It comes to
about four p m. We got ten minutes to make
it to the taj Mahal and we arrive. The only
problem is that we arrived on the opposite side of
(18:26):
where we needed to be, so we all had to
get out of the car. We all started running, sprinting
towards the taj Mahal and we finally make it to
the taj Mahal. Life is great at five o two pm,
which means it closed two minutes before we got there.
That's not so great. The security at the front gate.
They've all got rifles and stuff like that. The little
(18:46):
French girl that we are with, she goes up to
the security guards or army men whatever and starts arguing
and like abusing them. I'm like, oh my gosh, this
is amazing content, but also it is terrible for our lives.
Little French girl, please stop, please stop that, have a
cross on and just chill out, okay. Um. So, after
(19:07):
about ten minutes of her arguing and getting literally nowhere,
we decided, you know what, We're just going to go
back to the taxi. He's our man, he's a cool guy.
He's done really good for us so far. Let's go
back to him and get him to drive us just
back to where we're staying, and so begins the second
half of our journey, the part that literally almost killed us.
(19:28):
Fun times ahead. As we were driving, it was getting darker,
it was getting later, we were getting hungrier because we
hadn't eaten anything all day. We left at ten am
in the morning. We didn't have breakfast. He has though,
remember he had a good lunch, so I'm happy for
him right now. Then suddenly we get stopped by a
blockade of army men. They had blocked off the whole highway.
(19:48):
We couldn't get through. They all had guns and stuff
like that, and they turned us around. So we got
turned around and we had to go down these back roads.
Now it hits about ten pm. There's no street lights,
there's no signs of other cars, and soon we realized
the driver is actually lost. He has no idea where
we are. After driving around for another hour, he turns
down this dirt road that is only meant to be
(20:11):
accessed by like big trucks and stuff like that, because
there's massive potholes all right, so little cars don't actually
go down there very well. As we're going down this
random dirt road with with no lights, The girls are
getting more and more worried. Time is getting later, and
the driver's car is getting more and more dented and
messed up. He also lost his front bump buck, poor dude. Finally,
(20:33):
after roughly two hours of going down this dirt road,
we make it out onto actual concrete roads. Yeah, is
what we're thinking. We're safe. It's awesome. Yeah, or so
we thought. It's it's not true. We weren't safe and
we should not have let out that little yee heart
that I did earlier while driving down this now well
(20:53):
lit populated road. Something happened that we we never thought
would happen, and I guess no, whenever things would happen,
we get smashed by a bus. A bus rear ends
this dude's taxi and wobbles us like crazy. I checked
on I checked on my partner, obviously, then I checked
on the little French girl before pulling out my camera
(21:16):
and being like, wow, this is really good log content.
So I start recording. The bus turns around and starts
driving off. Now usually that's fine. The bus drives off whatever,
It's okay, it's not my car insurance that I have
to deal with the problem. I have right now, is
that our taxi driver decided it's a good idea for
him to turn around and start this high speed freaking
(21:38):
pursuit after this bus with us in the back. He's
yelling like at top at the top of his lungs.
I don't know what he's yelling, but he's yelling, I
assume at the bus, and we're yelling at him, like, dude,
turn the hell around. Like after about like ten minutes
of this high speed pursuit, the bus turns into this
dingy alleyway and drives off into the dark night and
(21:59):
we can't see it anymore. Our driver stops, he hops
out of his car and he starts sprinting down this
alleyway into the darkness, and we're like, what the hell
is going on? Like, you can't just that's weird. You
can't just do that. We closed his door, locked all
the doors, um, and then I went to actually get
out of the car, but Jess asked me to stay
in the car, reason being there was a bunch of
(22:19):
people surrounding us all around like fire barrels of like
like fire like barrel bins I suppose full of fire,
and they were all just staring at us, so Jess
was like, look, you have to stand here, like please,
like look after us, blah blah blah. So I do obviously.
Fifteen minutes later, the cops arrive and tell us to
hop out of the car. But at this point I
am trusting nobody. There is no one that I trust,
(22:41):
so I'm not hopping out of the car. I tell
the police that, and finally our driver comes back from
the darkness and the cops tells us that we're all
going to the police station. So we follow the cop
to the police station, and when we get there, he
asks us to come into the police station and give
a statement. I refused again, as I said, I'm trusting
(23:03):
no one, so I refused to get out of the car.
We stay in the car, but I plead with the
police officer to to just get this guy to take
us back to where we're staying and then they can
continue whatever they want to do. I don't care what
they do. Just take us back to where we're staying,
where our friends are waiting for us. It works somehow,
which is good. We get back in the car, we
start driving. Literally five minutes later, at roughly one thirty am,
(23:25):
we arrived at the place we were staying, so we
were so close and yet so far um. When we
got back, we told our friends the story and they
talked to the cab driver for us, which was great.
The only bad thing is is my friend came back
to me and said, the cab driver said this, he
is asking for double of what you agreed on because
his car is damaged. Honestly, I laughed. I was like,
(23:47):
you have to be joking me, and like double the
zero chance I'm giving him double. In fact, I'm giving
him half. He didn't speak a word of English. He
left us in the car while he ate. He made
us miss out on seeing the taj Mahal, got us
lost hip a bus and in a high speed pursued
over like a seventeen hour time frame. I gave my
friend half the money and went up to the room
(24:07):
with the girls. Left to that didn't say a word
to the cab driver. Luckily for me, after all of this,
like after this big day, I had no injuries. I
was just more sick, more piste off, bronchitis, unhappy, but
had a very good vlog, which was that was the
main thing. My partner, she was just piste off. She
had no injuries as well, but the little French girl
(24:28):
that was with us did end up getting some neck
injuries and the next The funny thing is, the next
day we all decided to just get flights and we
all decided to leave India. Um So when she got
back to France, she did inform us that she had
to wear a neck brace and stuff like six weeks
or something. I guess the moral of this story is
don't hop in the car with the total stranger that
(24:50):
you can't communicate with it all. That's that's the moral
I believe out of that whole story. That's what I
get out of this. Do not hop in a taxi
with someone that cannot speak your language. And that is
why I only travel to places where they speak fluent English,
which explains why I've only ever been to Fresno and Paris, Texas, Paris, Texas.
(25:15):
You know what I was thinking the whole time, What
if that whole story they were on an Indian hidden
camera prank show and they just never told him. That
would be amazing. Go give my mate Maitland to follow
links in the description. I tell you, there is not
(25:40):
enough toothpaste in the world. Pure evil, pure evil cheese.
Oh my god, gross. You know what, I think, I'm
good with my diet. I I don't think I need
anything new, but one thing I do need is to
learn how to swim. So I mosey it on down
to the community pool to take some swim lessons. I
know it's weird that I never learned, but I never
(26:02):
really needed to because I'm terrified of water. You see,
my mother told me at a very early age about
the Laya rona ghost that apparently drowns little children, so
that i'd stay away from rivers and pools and not die,
which I guess for her felt like a better option
than just teaching me to swim in the first place.
I've only just recently been able to take a bath,
and the pool it's just like a really big bathtub
(26:23):
with other people in it. Okay, so um. It says
here that I need to take a shower before getting
into the water, for some reason, seems redundant. But what else,
I guess I'll just head into the locker room and
rinse off real Oh hello, goodbye, Nope, nope, fuck this.
Oh my god. There were literally six elderly men in
(26:44):
there with their wieners out. Oh my god, I cannot
unsee that. I cannot unsee what I just saw. It's
burned into my retinas. The wrinkles on their balls had wrinkles.
I mean, if that's part of swimming, I want no
part of it. I'm out, I'm good on swimming. I'm
I'm just I want to go home. Oh my god,
why don't you listen to the story from Monetizabeth while
I washed my eyes out with purell. So in the
(27:07):
summer often I got a Facebook message from a stranger
telling me that my great uncle's plane had been found
on the side of a mountain in Kenya. So, of
course I thought it was a scam, but the story
was true, and that message would mark the beginning of
what I call my real life Indiana Jones Adventure. So
(27:30):
my father was born and raised in South Africa, and
I grew up knowing that my great uncle had gone
missing in Kenya. During military training in nineteen forty two,
he was part of a crew flying British Royal Air
Force planes out of Nanyuki, which is a small town
at the base of Mount Kenya. And on July two,
(27:51):
the day after my great uncle Simon had turned twenty
one years old. He and his crew set off on
a routine practice mission and were never heard from again.
The woman who was contacting me was trying to get
in touch with my father. After several emails back and forth,
my father and I learned that Simon's plane had actually
been found in two thousand two, when a poacher stumbled
(28:14):
upon the wreck at ten thousand feet on the side
of Mount Kenya. The poacher notified the British Army, who
are still stationed in nan Yuki for training purposes, and
the army led four expeditions up to the site in
two thousand two. On the fourth and last expedition of
that year, they brought someone from the UK who was
an expert in Blenheim bombers, which is the specific type
(28:37):
of plane they were flying, and he was able to
confirm that the plane was Z seven seven six three
and that the crew members on board had been Charles Allen,
Hendrik Lemmer, Lloyd Murray and my great uncle Simon Eliasam
On this same expedition, the last of two thousand two,
and where they identified the plane, The Army had also
(28:58):
found some human remains, not many. The biggest was about
the size of a forearm, but without permission from next
of kin, they weren't able to take them off the mountain,
so instead they put the remains in a black plastic
bag and they buried them at the crash site. The
British Army came off the mountain and since the crew
had all been South African, they notified the South African
(29:20):
government saying, hey, we found this plane that crashed in
two and here are the names of the soldiers who died.
Can you let their next of kin know? But you know,
in two thousand two, ten years after the end of apartheid,
the South African government was understandably busy doing other things
and dealing with four white guys who died on a
mountain seventy years ago was not high on their list
(29:41):
of priorities. And that's where the story stalled for about
fourteen years until the Ebo Trust gets involved. The Ebo
Trust is a privately funded organization that helps to bring
back the remains of South African soldiers who have died overseas.
So in when this woman was contacting my family, she
was working on behalf of the About Trust, trying to
(30:02):
get in touch with us to let us know that
one the plane had been found fourteen years earlier too,
that the British Army had agreed to lead another expedition
up to the crash site, and three to get permission
from my father for any remains found to be brought
off the mountain. So my father was like, well, of
course we are going to give them permission, but also
(30:24):
you need to ask them if you can go up
the mountain with them, and I was I was like, Dad,
there is no way that the British Army is going
to let some twenty six year old nobody joined them
up on an expedition up the mountain. And he was adamant,
saying if you do not ask, you are going to
(30:46):
regret it for the rest of your life. So I did.
I emailed asking if I could go up the mountain
and they said yes. So three months later I was
on a flight to Kenya. I arrived in Nanyuki. We
had a couple of days of debriefing at Batok and Nanyuki,
which is the British Army training unit Kenya. There would
(31:07):
be twelve of us going up the mountain, myself who
was the only woman. A South African journalist Chert Obermann,
who is a retired major general from South Africa who's
the head of the EBO Trust, some rangers, porters, mountain guides,
and three members of the Army, including a medic helicopter
(31:29):
specialist and our Captain Tomo. While we were being debriefed,
it actually became pretty apparent that the British Army did
not have high hopes for us finding the plane. Even
though the British Army had been up to the site
in two thousand two, no one from that time would
be going up with us again. And there had been
like a box with all this information about the crash
(31:52):
site and where it was, and that box had been
lost in the intervening fourteen years since they had gone up,
so they were going off of for the location of
the plane was a literal pinhole in a map that
had been hanging in someone's office, And a week before
we went up, a much smaller group from the Army
(32:13):
had tried to go up on their own to find
the plane and they hadn't been able to find it.
They had even flown a helicopter above where they thought
the crash site was, but the bamboo forest of Mount
Kenya is just too thick to see anything in and
there's no space for a helicopter to land near the
crash site, so their chances of us actually finding the
plane we're pretty slim. And so early in the morning
(32:36):
on October we set off on our expedition at Mount Kenya.
It takes about three hours to get to the starting
point um and then when we started hiking, we got
a pretty good introduction to what the terrain was going
to be like. So there are hiking trails up the
north side of Mount Kenya, but on the south side
(32:57):
where we were hiking, the terrain is much steeper and
covered in meandering elephant and buffalo tracks. So for the
first couple of hours we followed a sort of you
can call it a suggestion through the mountain up until
we would need to start chopping our way through the
(33:17):
bamboo forest. And then there are these open areas that
are just filled with man high bramble bushes that have
huge thorns on them, and the brambles stick on everything,
your face, your arms. We were bleeding. The person in
front of you is holding back a branch that comes
back and wax you in the face. My shoe came
(33:39):
off at one point and so we ran into a
couple of complications that first day, which is that we
were going slower than anticipated. We hiked for seven hours
until we started losing light, and on top of that,
we hadn't found any water. It's hard to carry enough
water um for a couple of days of hiking, and
so we had planned that because we were entering the
(34:02):
rainy season in Kenya, we would find water on the mountain,
but we hadn't. So the next morning we hiked um
through the mountain and then we finally reached the spot
where they thought the plane might be. And at that
point it was ten am and we could all feel
that time was just slipping through our hands at that point.
(34:24):
So in order to maximize the efficiency, the captain had
anyone who wasn't from the army sit in a clearing
and he said, Okay, the army army guys are gonna
go in concentric circles or or a clover pattern around
this area. We're going to see if we can if
we can find the plane, or if we can find water.
(34:44):
At eleven am, everyone came back to the clearing and
you could just see right away that they had not
found the plane or water. We started back down the mountain,
our mission essentially having failed, and at this point Captain
made a very interesting decision. So he could either choose
(35:05):
to have us go right, which means we would retrace
our steps and have to go back up the mountain
a bit before following our path back down, which was
obviously the safest route, or we could go left, which
means that we would be trying to forge a new
path through the bamboo so that we could save some
(35:28):
time and hit up with our path just a little
bit lower down. And he, in that moment, chose to
go left. So we were single file. The air was heavy.
You could feel the sadness and disappointment all around. I
(35:48):
was at the back of the line, and then all
of a sudden, up ahead, I can see a commotion,
and then people are tearing off their backpacks, throwing them
on the ground, and they're ripping off the forest growth
from these rocks that are around us. Except they aren't rocks,
they are pieces of metal, more specifically, pieces of plane.
(36:11):
And all of a sudden it is dawning on us
that we have just stumbled onto the plane crash. So
I ripped my camera back out I start filming again.
The captain is raid going down to the station and
nan Yuki saying, you won't believe it, mate, but we
found it. We found the plane. One of the soldiers
called my name from farther down. I run down to him.
(36:34):
I like turn a bamboo corner, and then there it
is the plane. The whole plane is laid out. It
has a tail wing stick sticking up with these spikes
coming out of it. There's a whole wing in front
of me with the turrets going down. It's stripped of metal,
but you can see that it is a plane. It
is there, and the soldier turns to me and says,
(36:55):
your great uncle is here, Monet, and I just start
bawling at the crash site where my great uncle had
died over seventy years before. I just was so overcome
with emotion. It was one of the most incredible moments
of my life. And so now we were we were, all,
(37:17):
you know, on a high that we had found the
plane when we had literally stumbled right into it after
thinking that we had failed. But of course we still
had a very large problem of not having water and
not being able to find it. So luckily this is
where it becomes very convenient to have the British Army
on your side. They were able to helicopter up water
(37:37):
for us, and then it was time to start digging
for the remains, the real real reason that we had
gone up there. So we dug and dug for six
hours until it got dark. Um we found bits of metal,
cereal plates from the plane, an entire machine gun, but
(37:59):
we didn't find any remains, and so we put up
across at the site. Even though my great uncle Simon
and my family is Jewish, but the cross just symbolized
remembrance and respect. We spent the night at the crash site,
and in the morning we collected soil from the site
to bring back down for a memorial for the soldiers.
(38:23):
And going back down was its own form of adventure,
because by that point we continued going left and forging
our own path through the bamboo, and which should have
taken us under five hours, ended up taking us over
twelve hours. We had run out of food because we
didn't expect to be staying out. We were all very hungry,
(38:45):
and there were a couple of times where I was
pretty sure that we were going to not make it
out of this forest. We would have found the plane
and then no one would have even known and maybe
we would never be heard from again. But even though
we hiked through the dark with our head lamps on,
we did make it back down eventually where we tore
into the Army rations that were in the trucks and
(39:07):
we made it back to the army base. And six
months later we had a ceremony um at the Commonwealth
War Graves in Nanyuki where there are currently four headstones
for the four soldiers who lost their lives, and we
were able to put soil at the headstones at that ceremony.
But the story isn't over yet because we are still
(39:28):
hopeful that we can find the remains that were buried there.
So we went back up once up the mountain um
In and we are going back up in September of
this year to go one last time to see if
we can find the remains. And if we don't find
the remains that time, then we are we are going
(39:49):
to say that they don't want to be found. But
this will forever have been the most incredible modern day
Indiana Jones adventure of my life. Amazing. She's pretty much
a real life tune writer I mean, my great uncle
got kicked in the head by a goat and died
(40:09):
in a ditch, so not a great mystery to unravel there.
Monet has made an incredible documentary about her adventure, which
you can find on her YouTube channel, which is always
is linked in the description. Okay, Fable Babies today will
not be a bust. I will have new experiences. Look,
the food wasn't for me, the pool wasn't for me,
But you know what new music might be for me?
(40:31):
So I'm going to go on an oral adventure to
expand my horizons. I heard about this new fellow named
Baruna Mars. Apparently he's very popular, so let's give it
a try. Nope, don't like it. You know what, Fable Babies,
you are perfect the way you are. And technically I
did try a new thing successfully because trying new things
in itself was a new thing for me. The comfort
(40:52):
zone has the word comfort in it for a reason.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. This middle aged
dog doesn't need to be learning any new tricks, although
I still would like to see a horse in person
one day. Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to
enjoy the rest of my afternoon doing things I know
that I will love. I will be watching Golden Girls
while I eat and listen to Meet Loaf. Good day, Hey,
(41:17):
thanks for listening to today's episode. As always, I want
to give a big ass shout out and thank you
to our fearless storytellers. Head on down to the description
and click the links to subscribe to their channels. Would
you like to be a featured storyteller on an upcoming
episode of story Time? If you have a great story
to share, record it and send it on down to
story Time at collab dot Inc. Or you can call
(41:39):
the story Time hotline and leave us a message. Give
us a call at three two three seven four one
eight sevent three, and we'll share our favorites on our
next listener episode. Oh you're you're still listening? Cool? Cool, cool, Well,
if you've gotten this deep into the episode, you might
as well rate it, review it, and share it with
a friend or an enemy. It makes no difference to
(41:59):
me as long as I get those sweet, sweet streams.
Story Time is produced by I Heart Radio and Collapse
executive producers Eric Jack's Song King and Will McFadden. Hosted
by Will McFadden, Produced by Jessica Eckles, Jason Shapiro, DANIELLEA Mora,
and Jenny Olmer. Written by Jenny Olmer, sound designed by
Tony Maddock's original score by Scott Simons. Cover art by
John Kuzakaya, Animation by Bellabusha,
Yeah, Hello all my little fable babies, and welcome back
(00:24):
to story Time, the holy grail of great stories from
around the interwebs. I am your host, will I hate
surprise parties, McFadden, and I have got a wild ride
of a show for you today. It's all about adventuring
and and trying new things and danger, and I hate
almost all of those things. But my therapist is recommending
(00:44):
that I open up my horizons to all of the
possibilities that life has to offer and insisted that I
make a bucket list to get me out of my
comfort zone try new things. I honestly didn't even know
what a bucket list was. I thought it was a
list of different types of buckets, like a metal bucket,
a plastic bucket, a wooden bucket, a bucket hat. Boy,
(01:04):
was I wrong. So you all better watch out because
our storytellers aren't the only people going on adventures today. Look, obviously,
there's a few things I won't be able to do,
at least not right away, like visit the birthplace of
Celine Dion or see a horse in person. But there
are a few that I will be able to tackle
from the warm comfort of my home and neighborhood. So
(01:27):
strap yourselves in tight for little Will mc never try
anything new, fat And is about to become big will Mick.
Watch out. I'm brave now, fat In. I'm gonna work
on that, all right. I gotta change my shirt and
pack a few extra pairs of Andy's. So while they
do that, please enjoy a story from one of my
favorite creators, Lonnie Marks. All Right, So this is a
(01:48):
little story about how I killed one of my best friends, Chad,
by convincing him to skate down Monster Bridge on alongboard
that was jankie that I gave to him, maybe with
the intentions of seeing him actually die. So. I was
a sophomore in college in Daytona Beach, going to a
school called embry Riddle and Daytona Beach sounds like a
beautiful place, but it's really not. It's filled with like prostitutes,
(02:09):
god bless sex workers, uh in, heroin addicts. But that's
what kind of makes it magical. I went to embry
Riddle there, which is an aeronautical university, which basically means
I was in class with literal astronauts, rocket scientists, and pilots.
I was none of those things. I was on the
track team, which tells you that we run in circles
for fun. That's our job. That's what we do. We
(02:31):
don't do numbers in math. We run in circles and
we get paid because our legs are good. That's how
we make our money. However, these people were literally sending
dogs and humans into space. I don't know why. Dogs
isn't really important, but they could do it if they
wanted to. That's what's that's what that's what matters about that.
Um So, because I was on the track team, I
eventually got promoted to captain because I had leadership qualities
and as a captain, it's my job to facilitate team bonding.
(02:55):
Was like, hey, alright, Lonnie, it's your job as team
captain to make sure everybody has bonded on the team
and that everybody's getting along well. So, in my lightning
fast mind, I said, there's no better way than to
get these freshmen integrated into the team than to take
them on a tour of the beautiful, magical Daytona Beach.
This is the perfect place to show these freshmen what
Embry Riddle and Daytona Beach is all about. A tour
(03:17):
of the city. I get one of the freshman his
name is Chad. Coaches like, this is your freshman buddy.
Make sure he gets integrated on Like cool, Hi, Chad,
how are you? Chad sits there and grunts at me.
He says, basically, I would describe him as a garden
gnome like. He was about four ft eight. Uh, it
might have been a medical condition. I don't know. Uh,
(03:37):
he was really short. He always worth the same like
black converse and his torso was three times in the
length of the rest of his body. But believe it
or not, the kid was a sprinter and he was
very very fast, So respect him on that. But I
think it was one of those trade off things where
God's like, Okay, you know what, you might be very fast,
but also you're gonna have the brain cells in Neanderthal
So this is a prime target for my scheme that
(03:58):
I figured out. Unleash on him on the line. So
we're walking through Daytona Beach and again we're seeing all
the nightlife. You're seeing like the dead people on the
side of the road and whatnot. Uh. You can see
some of the bikers like their Harley's and all this
fun stuff. It's also midnight, because what better time to
explore Daytona Beach a place I could kill you just
from walking barefoot and you know you step on a
heroin needle or come across an angry biker group than midnight.
(04:21):
So we're out walking and we come to basically what's
the tallest bridge in Daytona Beach, and it's called the
International Speedway Boulevard Bridge or whatever. It's like a mile long.
It is probably about twelve stories high. I'm like, hey, Chad,
we're gonna skate down this bridge. I got you this
long board. And at this point Chad realizes that I'm
(04:42):
trying to kill him, but he agrees. He's like, sure,
that sounds good, let's do it. He's like, his grunt
is gonna and I'm like, okay, that's gonna be a Yes.
I have my longboard, Chad has his. We're at the
apex of this thing. I'm looking out. You can literally
see all of Daytona Beach from here. It's not that big.
You can see the airport and it's actually really really beautiful.
And I'm like, all right, Chad, listen to me. We're
about to do something very dumb here again. Just kinda.
(05:07):
I'm like, okay, Chad, thank you beautiful, very well, said,
I want you to get on your longboard and we're
gonna skate all the way down there. We're not actually
gonna have to push and mind you, like honestly, literally,
the bridge, the sidewalk is about us. Like imagine going
into a library and having to like kind of slide
between the bookshelves. That's how wide this sidewalk is going
down the freaking bridge because they have the railing on
(05:30):
one side that on the other side of is a dark,
inky blackness of death. And on the left side they
have giant Ford rafters driving by or whatever just being
loud as hell because again it's Daytona Beach. So dad
on either side, and I'm like, there's no better way
to integrate a freshman into the team than to have
him risk his life with me. After that, there's really
you can really only go up from there, you know.
(05:50):
So I'm like, this is gonna be a great idea,
and I get Chad. I said on my board. My
Chad said, on your board, And so he steps on
and we're just standing there and I looked down again
and it looks like it's even further away. This sound
like this to be a terrible idea. Maybe this is
a mistake. And so I'm like I realized, like slowly
but surely, like we're kind of moving. I'm like, Chad,
this is our last chance, and not do this. If
this is a terrible idea, please say anything other than
if you don't want to do this. And Chad is like,
(06:14):
at this point, I realized, all I hear is kt
kt k and we're moving. I look at the bottom
of the bridge and it turns like the sidewalk cuts away,
(06:37):
and I'm like, that's no good. That's no good at all.
That's a that's a big oof. That's a large oof.
And I'm like, okay, all right, Chad, we should stop.
Chat I was kidding. I don't know what I was thinking, Chad,
we should stop. I don't see Chad. Chad's gone. And
then I start to see the cars over to the
left of me. They start going backwards, they start moving backwards.
I'm like, oh my god, I'm passing cars. I'm like,
(06:59):
I'm I said cars. This is no good. This is
no good at all. And I'm like, oh my god,
oh my god. I try to put my foot down
to stop, and the board does this whole like wobble thing,
and I'm like, oh, that's no good. That's no good.
I can't stop. The wind is picking up, but I can't.
I don't know where Chad win. I'm like, oh God,
I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die. The bottom of the
hill is getting closer and closer. It's literally about I obviously,
(07:21):
it's probably about four to the bottom of this bridge
before the turn, and I'm going so fast. As I
try to step off, like every time I lift my
foot up, it wobble. So I'm like, I'm gonna die.
Chad could already be dead or either he was smart
and didn't come down anyways. And so I kind of
crane my head back because I'm going try to keep
my whole body balance. I see Chad. He is behind me.
He also started, but a little bit later than me.
I don't know. I don't know if he thought it's like, yeah,
(07:42):
Fannie can do this, I can do I'm like, that
was a mistake, Chad, I say, And I'm like, I'm
there's no way I'm gonna have to jump off the board,
like because if I keep going, I'm literally going to
hit the bottom because you can't turn at this point.
It's just a matter of keeping it steady. So as
like the wind is flying through my hair and my
eyes are starting to water because we're going so fast,
and I'm like feeling all the bounces in the road
or whatever on the sidewalk, and I'm like, I'm gonna
(08:04):
pop my hamstring and die, but I have to step
off otherwise I'm gonna die. Whatever. So I lift my
foot over the edge and I'm like, okay, here we go.
I'm just gonna put my foot down. I'm gonna run.
And I jump off the board and I feel my
hamstring say, and I try to run, and I'm like
and I run and I tumble onto the ground and like,
I'm okay, but I barely missed the barry. I'm like,
(08:25):
oh my god, I'm okay. I'm alive. And I look
back and Chad is coming down behind me. I'm like,
oh no, he has to jump off. But again, his
body proportions are terrible. His legs are much shorter than mine.
His tors like I said, as three times as long
as the rest of his body. So my Chad, be careful,
and I see his board wobbles as he tries to
step off, and it goes towards the railing and he
(08:46):
hits the railing and I'm like no, and he pinballs.
He's straight pinballs. His body goes ragged all and limp.
He hits the side. He hits the barrier. His board
goes up in the air. It's like about to go
off the railing. He is airborne now in the middle
of the air or whatever, and he hits the railing.
It tossed him over and he's coming down, coming down
the walk whatever, sliding on his back like a turtle.
(09:09):
And he's like, jacket is absolutely burned through because of
the concrete and the way he slid down the back
of it. And I'm like, oh my god, he's dead.
Coach is gonna kill me? My Chad, Chad, are you okay?
And he possibly says that was so cool? As again
his back is bleeding. He has he literally has a
hole in the back of his jacket and I'm like, dude,
are you serious. He's like that was so crazy. The
(09:30):
board is like in the ocean now. It popped off
and went over the edge and he fell on his
back and slid He's like that was so great, And
I'm like, all right, dude, okay, man, whatever you say,
if you if you think so, we're not telling anybody
about this. And so he like gets up off the
ground and we have to limp back the campus for
an hour and a half. And I'm like, you know what,
maybe this wasn't such a bad team building experience. Jeez,
(09:54):
I wonder what other team building activities Captain Lonnie put
Chad through. Maybe he trust falls off of a edge.
How about a ropes course? But with no ropes? Why
don't we do an escape room, except it's inside a
burning building. By the way, my hamstrings make that exact
same sound every time I put my socks on. Guys,
I highly recommend following Lonny marts, just not down a
(10:14):
hill on a skateboard links in the description. Okay, so
my first adventure simply takes me on the long journey
from my bedroom to my mother's kitchen. See, my palette
(10:34):
isn't what Gordon Ramsey would call the most refined. I
really only eat ten different foods in different combinations. So
I'm gonna try some new and hopefully tasty foods. Okay,
So first on the list, lettuce. Yeah, I've actually never
eaten lettuce before, but I have come close. One time
at a buffet, a piece of lettuce was stuck in
(10:55):
a deviled egg, and it did make its way into
my mouth, but I caught the little stow away and
spit it out right away. So, in honor of the Titanic,
I decided to go ahead and try iceberg lettuce. As
you get it, iceberg run. Okay, here we go. Yeah, a,
(11:19):
oh god, what is that? What is that? Why do
people eat that? It tastes like bland, crunchy water. Oh
why do you why? Why? Oh? There's like entire restaurants
that are dedicated to this. Gross shit. God, okay, gross
zero for one. Off to a rough start. What do
we have next? Okay? Oh okay, So next I'm going
(11:40):
to try a peach, which realistically I should like because
there's nothing I enjoy more than lounging in the sun
and sipping on a fuzzy naval wine cooler. But this
is hard because fuzzy fruits really weird me out. Why
are they fuzzy? Other fruits aren't? What makes them so
special that they get to have like a little blanket
around them? Are they cold old. It doesn't make any sense. Okay,
(12:02):
all right, I'm just gonna cut it is hard in
the middle. I don't like the fuse. It's really terrible.
It makes me feel like I'm a thirteen year old
boy again. I hate it. Okay, here we go. It's
not that bad. It's not so bad. I don't I
don't need to ever do it again. But it's not
that bad. Um am I supposed to eat the rock
(12:24):
in the middle. Okay, I'll try taking a bite of
this weird rock. Oh all right, No, that's not edible.
I think I think I've chipped a tooth. This is great.
I'm really having fun here alright. Moving on. Next up
on the list is cottage cheese, which I love the
sound of. I feel like, you know, it's just this
(12:44):
cheese that lives a life of relaxation. Like it. It
just it moved away from the city to live in
a little shack and get away from society, and it
takes a lot of afternoon naps and probably owns a
golden retriever that it rescued from a shelter in some
overpopulated big town and spends its free time embroidering cute
little things on pillows. Cottage cheese has really got it
(13:05):
figured out. Let's try it. Nope, nope, nope, What the
is that? Oh, forget cottage cheese. It should be renamed
deception cheese. No, the texture is just all wrong. It
tastes like like cheese took a ship in my mouth.
How is it solid yet also watering? No? God, no,
(13:28):
oh God, you guys. Enjoy the story from Maitland Hanley
while I go wash this cheese arrea out of my mouth.
So this story is about the day of my partner
and I thought we were actually going to die. Um.
It all started when one of my friends asked me
to go to India for his wedding, which obviously I
said yes to. The only issue was my job at
(13:48):
the time wouldn't allow me to have a holiday and
needed with my partners, and obviously my partner Jess, had
to come with me to India if we were gonna
if I was going to be traveling. So we sat
down that night, we had a chat and we had
to come up with some sort of solution for the
problem that we had at hand. And I took about
five seconds to work out this solution. After that we
(14:10):
we sat down, we put on Netflix and went to bed. Obviously,
the next day we both went into work and it
was time to set the plan into motion. The plan
was quite simple. Actually, we quit our job. That was
the plan. That was my genius plan. We quit our job,
very smart. So literally one month later, we're on a
(14:31):
plane to India, jobless, feeling super excited and care free,
uh and just living life. But before we were going
to the wedding, we decided, you know what, there's not
going to be many opportunities for us to actually travel
to India and see everything. So we decided before the wedding,
we're going to go around India a bit and we're
going to have a look at some of the places.
(14:51):
We might even visit some other destinations as well. So
we did. We started in Dubai, which had ridiculously fast internet,
amazing for up learning videos. Then we moved on to
Sri Lanka. That's where our first seen a squirrel, which
was super cool. Then after that we went to Goa
where we arrived to a bug infested, blood stained room.
But that's that's a story for another time, I guess.
(15:14):
Before we finally arrived in New Delhi, which is where
the wedding was being held for my friend. Now, a
lot of stuff happened while we were in New Delhi.
In fact, a lot of stuff happened over the whole
time we were overseas. But the only thing you really
need to know for this story is I had a
terrible case of bronchitis and I was not a happy
(15:34):
boy on this day. All right, it's time. It's November
two thousand and seventeen. I have bronchitis. I've got a camera,
a girlfriend, which is cool, and a little French girl
that was traveling with us named Miriam Ah. On this day,
we decided, you know what, let's go see the taj Mahal.
We haven't seen the taj Mahal. Tourists always go and
(15:54):
see the taj Mahal, so we have to do this.
We needed a cab though, we needed a way to
get there. Luckily, the person who was having the wedding
had a friend that drove taxis and he hooked us up.
So at ten am in the morning, this taxi arrives,
as dude arrives and he hops out of his car.
The first thing I noticed is he's got this massive
scar across his face from like the top of his
(16:17):
head on the left hand side all the way to
the bottom of his draw on the right hand side.
It was insane um and all I could think was, Dude,
I need to hear this story. I need to hear
how this happened, because that's ridiculous. The early problem was
he could not speak a word of English, so we
had quite a language barrier, which which did not help
(16:38):
anything throughout this whole day. Regardless of not being able
to communicate though, we decided to just hop in and
go to the Taja my health from which was about
a four hour drive give or take. The start of
the driver was fine. We're just relaxing, We're taking in
the scenery. I'm I'm holding in all my coffing because
obviously I've got bronchitis. I'm not feeling and it gets you.
(17:00):
About one pm, we've been driving for three hours. The
driver pulls over into like a little food stall area
and goes inside and orders food. He sits down and
eats his food For about thirty minutes. We're stuck in
the car. The car is locked. We we obviously we
could unlock it from the inside. Maybe I don't know.
And the windows we couldn't roll down because they're electric windows.
(17:23):
There was no aircorn on. So we're in this car
just like boiling, sweating like crazy while he's inside having
a good little, good little feed. Now, after the driver
finished his chicken and rice, which I hope was delicious,
we continued on our journey and kept driving. It hits
about three thirty pm, right and I'm starting to wonder
(17:44):
why we haven't arrived yet. I'm like, it's only a
four hour drive. We've been driving for approximately four and
a half five hours. Surely we should be at our destination,
Na taj Mahal, but we weren't. So for thirty comes
around and we're starting to get real irritated. Were all
on the back. We're like, I'm like talking to each other.
If you swear words drop out our guess um. But
(18:05):
we just we just chill a little bit because the
taj Mahal closed up five. This is what you understand.
The taj Mahal close at five, which is in half
an hour. But we just relaxed a little bit. We're chilling. Okay,
we're chilling. We're on holiday. It's okay. It comes to
about four p m. We got ten minutes to make
it to the taj Mahal and we arrive. The only
problem is that we arrived on the opposite side of
(18:26):
where we needed to be, so we all had to
get out of the car. We all started running, sprinting
towards the taj Mahal and we finally make it to
the taj Mahal. Life is great at five o two pm,
which means it closed two minutes before we got there.
That's not so great. The security at the front gate.
They've all got rifles and stuff like that. The little
(18:46):
French girl that we are with, she goes up to
the security guards or army men whatever and starts arguing
and like abusing them. I'm like, oh my gosh, this
is amazing content, but also it is terrible for our lives.
Little French girl, please stop, please stop that, have a
cross on and just chill out, okay. Um. So, after
(19:07):
about ten minutes of her arguing and getting literally nowhere,
we decided, you know what, We're just going to go
back to the taxi. He's our man, he's a cool guy.
He's done really good for us so far. Let's go
back to him and get him to drive us just
back to where we're staying, and so begins the second
half of our journey, the part that literally almost killed us.
(19:28):
Fun times ahead. As we were driving, it was getting darker,
it was getting later, we were getting hungrier because we
hadn't eaten anything all day. We left at ten am
in the morning. We didn't have breakfast. He has though,
remember he had a good lunch, so I'm happy for
him right now. Then suddenly we get stopped by a
blockade of army men. They had blocked off the whole highway.
(19:48):
We couldn't get through. They all had guns and stuff
like that, and they turned us around. So we got
turned around and we had to go down these back roads.
Now it hits about ten pm. There's no street lights,
there's no signs of other cars, and soon we realized
the driver is actually lost. He has no idea where
we are. After driving around for another hour, he turns
down this dirt road that is only meant to be
(20:11):
accessed by like big trucks and stuff like that, because
there's massive potholes all right, so little cars don't actually
go down there very well. As we're going down this
random dirt road with with no lights, The girls are
getting more and more worried. Time is getting later, and
the driver's car is getting more and more dented and
messed up. He also lost his front bump buck, poor dude. Finally,
(20:33):
after roughly two hours of going down this dirt road,
we make it out onto actual concrete roads. Yeah, is
what we're thinking. We're safe. It's awesome. Yeah, or so
we thought. It's it's not true. We weren't safe and
we should not have let out that little yee heart
that I did earlier while driving down this now well
(20:53):
lit populated road. Something happened that we we never thought
would happen, and I guess no, whenever things would happen,
we get smashed by a bus. A bus rear ends
this dude's taxi and wobbles us like crazy. I checked
on I checked on my partner, obviously, then I checked
on the little French girl before pulling out my camera
(21:16):
and being like, wow, this is really good log content.
So I start recording. The bus turns around and starts
driving off. Now usually that's fine. The bus drives off whatever,
It's okay, it's not my car insurance that I have
to deal with the problem. I have right now, is
that our taxi driver decided it's a good idea for
him to turn around and start this high speed freaking
(21:38):
pursuit after this bus with us in the back. He's
yelling like at top at the top of his lungs.
I don't know what he's yelling, but he's yelling, I
assume at the bus, and we're yelling at him, like, dude,
turn the hell around. Like after about like ten minutes
of this high speed pursuit, the bus turns into this
dingy alleyway and drives off into the dark night and
(21:59):
we can't see it anymore. Our driver stops, he hops
out of his car and he starts sprinting down this
alleyway into the darkness, and we're like, what the hell
is going on? Like, you can't just that's weird. You
can't just do that. We closed his door, locked all
the doors, um, and then I went to actually get
out of the car, but Jess asked me to stay
in the car, reason being there was a bunch of
(22:19):
people surrounding us all around like fire barrels of like
like fire like barrel bins I suppose full of fire,
and they were all just staring at us, so Jess
was like, look, you have to stand here, like please,
like look after us, blah blah blah. So I do obviously.
Fifteen minutes later, the cops arrive and tell us to
hop out of the car. But at this point I
am trusting nobody. There is no one that I trust,
(22:41):
so I'm not hopping out of the car. I tell
the police that, and finally our driver comes back from
the darkness and the cops tells us that we're all
going to the police station. So we follow the cop
to the police station, and when we get there, he
asks us to come into the police station and give
a statement. I refused again, as I said, I'm trusting
(23:03):
no one, so I refused to get out of the car.
We stay in the car, but I plead with the
police officer to to just get this guy to take
us back to where we're staying and then they can
continue whatever they want to do. I don't care what
they do. Just take us back to where we're staying,
where our friends are waiting for us. It works somehow,
which is good. We get back in the car, we
start driving. Literally five minutes later, at roughly one thirty am,
(23:25):
we arrived at the place we were staying, so we
were so close and yet so far um. When we
got back, we told our friends the story and they
talked to the cab driver for us, which was great.
The only bad thing is is my friend came back
to me and said, the cab driver said this, he
is asking for double of what you agreed on because
his car is damaged. Honestly, I laughed. I was like,
(23:47):
you have to be joking me, and like double the
zero chance I'm giving him double. In fact, I'm giving
him half. He didn't speak a word of English. He
left us in the car while he ate. He made
us miss out on seeing the taj Mahal, got us
lost hip a bus and in a high speed pursued
over like a seventeen hour time frame. I gave my
friend half the money and went up to the room
(24:07):
with the girls. Left to that didn't say a word
to the cab driver. Luckily for me, after all of this,
like after this big day, I had no injuries. I
was just more sick, more piste off, bronchitis, unhappy, but
had a very good vlog, which was that was the
main thing. My partner, she was just piste off. She
had no injuries as well, but the little French girl
(24:28):
that was with us did end up getting some neck
injuries and the next The funny thing is, the next
day we all decided to just get flights and we
all decided to leave India. Um So when she got
back to France, she did inform us that she had
to wear a neck brace and stuff like six weeks
or something. I guess the moral of this story is
don't hop in the car with the total stranger that
(24:50):
you can't communicate with it all. That's that's the moral
I believe out of that whole story. That's what I
get out of this. Do not hop in a taxi
with someone that cannot speak your language. And that is
why I only travel to places where they speak fluent English,
which explains why I've only ever been to Fresno and Paris, Texas, Paris, Texas.
(25:15):
You know what I was thinking the whole time, What
if that whole story they were on an Indian hidden
camera prank show and they just never told him. That
would be amazing. Go give my mate Maitland to follow
links in the description. I tell you, there is not
(25:40):
enough toothpaste in the world. Pure evil, pure evil cheese.
Oh my god, gross. You know what, I think, I'm
good with my diet. I I don't think I need
anything new, but one thing I do need is to
learn how to swim. So I mosey it on down
to the community pool to take some swim lessons. I
know it's weird that I never learned, but I never
(26:02):
really needed to because I'm terrified of water. You see,
my mother told me at a very early age about
the Laya rona ghost that apparently drowns little children, so
that i'd stay away from rivers and pools and not die,
which I guess for her felt like a better option
than just teaching me to swim in the first place.
I've only just recently been able to take a bath,
and the pool it's just like a really big bathtub
(26:23):
with other people in it. Okay, so um. It says
here that I need to take a shower before getting
into the water, for some reason, seems redundant. But what else,
I guess I'll just head into the locker room and
rinse off real Oh hello, goodbye, Nope, nope, fuck this.
Oh my god. There were literally six elderly men in
(26:44):
there with their wieners out. Oh my god, I cannot
unsee that. I cannot unsee what I just saw. It's
burned into my retinas. The wrinkles on their balls had wrinkles.
I mean, if that's part of swimming, I want no
part of it. I'm out, I'm good on swimming. I'm
I'm just I want to go home. Oh my god,
why don't you listen to the story from Monetizabeth while
I washed my eyes out with purell. So in the
(27:07):
summer often I got a Facebook message from a stranger
telling me that my great uncle's plane had been found
on the side of a mountain in Kenya. So, of
course I thought it was a scam, but the story
was true, and that message would mark the beginning of
what I call my real life Indiana Jones Adventure. So
(27:30):
my father was born and raised in South Africa, and
I grew up knowing that my great uncle had gone
missing in Kenya. During military training in nineteen forty two,
he was part of a crew flying British Royal Air
Force planes out of Nanyuki, which is a small town
at the base of Mount Kenya. And on July two,
(27:51):
the day after my great uncle Simon had turned twenty
one years old. He and his crew set off on
a routine practice mission and were never heard from again.
The woman who was contacting me was trying to get
in touch with my father. After several emails back and forth,
my father and I learned that Simon's plane had actually
been found in two thousand two, when a poacher stumbled
(28:14):
upon the wreck at ten thousand feet on the side
of Mount Kenya. The poacher notified the British Army, who
are still stationed in nan Yuki for training purposes, and
the army led four expeditions up to the site in
two thousand two. On the fourth and last expedition of
that year, they brought someone from the UK who was
an expert in Blenheim bombers, which is the specific type
(28:37):
of plane they were flying, and he was able to
confirm that the plane was Z seven seven six three
and that the crew members on board had been Charles Allen,
Hendrik Lemmer, Lloyd Murray and my great uncle Simon Eliasam
On this same expedition, the last of two thousand two,
and where they identified the plane, The Army had also
(28:58):
found some human remains, not many. The biggest was about
the size of a forearm, but without permission from next
of kin, they weren't able to take them off the mountain,
so instead they put the remains in a black plastic
bag and they buried them at the crash site. The
British Army came off the mountain and since the crew
had all been South African, they notified the South African
(29:20):
government saying, hey, we found this plane that crashed in
two and here are the names of the soldiers who died.
Can you let their next of kin know? But you know,
in two thousand two, ten years after the end of apartheid,
the South African government was understandably busy doing other things
and dealing with four white guys who died on a
mountain seventy years ago was not high on their list
(29:41):
of priorities. And that's where the story stalled for about
fourteen years until the Ebo Trust gets involved. The Ebo
Trust is a privately funded organization that helps to bring
back the remains of South African soldiers who have died overseas.
So in when this woman was contacting my family, she
was working on behalf of the About Trust, trying to
(30:02):
get in touch with us to let us know that
one the plane had been found fourteen years earlier too,
that the British Army had agreed to lead another expedition
up to the crash site, and three to get permission
from my father for any remains found to be brought
off the mountain. So my father was like, well, of
course we are going to give them permission, but also
(30:24):
you need to ask them if you can go up
the mountain with them, and I was I was like, Dad,
there is no way that the British Army is going
to let some twenty six year old nobody joined them
up on an expedition up the mountain. And he was adamant,
saying if you do not ask, you are going to
(30:46):
regret it for the rest of your life. So I did.
I emailed asking if I could go up the mountain
and they said yes. So three months later I was
on a flight to Kenya. I arrived in Nanyuki. We
had a couple of days of debriefing at Batok and Nanyuki,
which is the British Army training unit Kenya. There would
(31:07):
be twelve of us going up the mountain, myself who
was the only woman. A South African journalist Chert Obermann,
who is a retired major general from South Africa who's
the head of the EBO Trust, some rangers, porters, mountain guides,
and three members of the Army, including a medic helicopter
(31:29):
specialist and our Captain Tomo. While we were being debriefed,
it actually became pretty apparent that the British Army did
not have high hopes for us finding the plane. Even
though the British Army had been up to the site
in two thousand two, no one from that time would
be going up with us again. And there had been
like a box with all this information about the crash
(31:52):
site and where it was, and that box had been
lost in the intervening fourteen years since they had gone up,
so they were going off of for the location of
the plane was a literal pinhole in a map that
had been hanging in someone's office, And a week before
we went up, a much smaller group from the Army
(32:13):
had tried to go up on their own to find
the plane and they hadn't been able to find it.
They had even flown a helicopter above where they thought
the crash site was, but the bamboo forest of Mount
Kenya is just too thick to see anything in and
there's no space for a helicopter to land near the
crash site, so their chances of us actually finding the
plane we're pretty slim. And so early in the morning
(32:36):
on October we set off on our expedition at Mount Kenya.
It takes about three hours to get to the starting
point um and then when we started hiking, we got
a pretty good introduction to what the terrain was going
to be like. So there are hiking trails up the
north side of Mount Kenya, but on the south side
(32:57):
where we were hiking, the terrain is much steeper and
covered in meandering elephant and buffalo tracks. So for the
first couple of hours we followed a sort of you
can call it a suggestion through the mountain up until
we would need to start chopping our way through the
(33:17):
bamboo forest. And then there are these open areas that
are just filled with man high bramble bushes that have
huge thorns on them, and the brambles stick on everything,
your face, your arms. We were bleeding. The person in
front of you is holding back a branch that comes
back and wax you in the face. My shoe came
(33:39):
off at one point and so we ran into a
couple of complications that first day, which is that we
were going slower than anticipated. We hiked for seven hours
until we started losing light, and on top of that,
we hadn't found any water. It's hard to carry enough
water um for a couple of days of hiking, and
so we had planned that because we were entering the
(34:02):
rainy season in Kenya, we would find water on the mountain,
but we hadn't. So the next morning we hiked um
through the mountain and then we finally reached the spot
where they thought the plane might be. And at that
point it was ten am and we could all feel
that time was just slipping through our hands at that point.
(34:24):
So in order to maximize the efficiency, the captain had
anyone who wasn't from the army sit in a clearing
and he said, Okay, the army army guys are gonna
go in concentric circles or or a clover pattern around
this area. We're going to see if we can if
we can find the plane, or if we can find water.
(34:44):
At eleven am, everyone came back to the clearing and
you could just see right away that they had not
found the plane or water. We started back down the mountain,
our mission essentially having failed, and at this point Captain
made a very interesting decision. So he could either choose
(35:05):
to have us go right, which means we would retrace
our steps and have to go back up the mountain
a bit before following our path back down, which was
obviously the safest route, or we could go left, which
means that we would be trying to forge a new
path through the bamboo so that we could save some
(35:28):
time and hit up with our path just a little
bit lower down. And he, in that moment, chose to
go left. So we were single file. The air was heavy.
You could feel the sadness and disappointment all around. I
(35:48):
was at the back of the line, and then all
of a sudden, up ahead, I can see a commotion,
and then people are tearing off their backpacks, throwing them
on the ground, and they're ripping off the forest growth
from these rocks that are around us. Except they aren't rocks,
they are pieces of metal, more specifically, pieces of plane.
(36:11):
And all of a sudden it is dawning on us
that we have just stumbled onto the plane crash. So
I ripped my camera back out I start filming again.
The captain is raid going down to the station and
nan Yuki saying, you won't believe it, mate, but we
found it. We found the plane. One of the soldiers
called my name from farther down. I run down to him.
(36:34):
I like turn a bamboo corner, and then there it
is the plane. The whole plane is laid out. It
has a tail wing stick sticking up with these spikes
coming out of it. There's a whole wing in front
of me with the turrets going down. It's stripped of metal,
but you can see that it is a plane. It
is there, and the soldier turns to me and says,
(36:55):
your great uncle is here, Monet, and I just start
bawling at the crash site where my great uncle had
died over seventy years before. I just was so overcome
with emotion. It was one of the most incredible moments
of my life. And so now we were we were, all,
(37:17):
you know, on a high that we had found the
plane when we had literally stumbled right into it after
thinking that we had failed. But of course we still
had a very large problem of not having water and
not being able to find it. So luckily this is
where it becomes very convenient to have the British Army
on your side. They were able to helicopter up water
(37:37):
for us, and then it was time to start digging
for the remains, the real real reason that we had
gone up there. So we dug and dug for six
hours until it got dark. Um we found bits of metal,
cereal plates from the plane, an entire machine gun, but
(37:59):
we didn't find any remains, and so we put up
across at the site. Even though my great uncle Simon
and my family is Jewish, but the cross just symbolized
remembrance and respect. We spent the night at the crash site,
and in the morning we collected soil from the site
to bring back down for a memorial for the soldiers.
(38:23):
And going back down was its own form of adventure,
because by that point we continued going left and forging
our own path through the bamboo, and which should have
taken us under five hours, ended up taking us over
twelve hours. We had run out of food because we
didn't expect to be staying out. We were all very hungry,
(38:45):
and there were a couple of times where I was
pretty sure that we were going to not make it
out of this forest. We would have found the plane
and then no one would have even known and maybe
we would never be heard from again. But even though
we hiked through the dark with our head lamps on,
we did make it back down eventually where we tore
into the Army rations that were in the trucks and
(39:07):
we made it back to the army base. And six
months later we had a ceremony um at the Commonwealth
War Graves in Nanyuki where there are currently four headstones
for the four soldiers who lost their lives, and we
were able to put soil at the headstones at that ceremony.
But the story isn't over yet because we are still
(39:28):
hopeful that we can find the remains that were buried there.
So we went back up once up the mountain um
In and we are going back up in September of
this year to go one last time to see if
we can find the remains. And if we don't find
the remains that time, then we are we are going
(39:49):
to say that they don't want to be found. But
this will forever have been the most incredible modern day
Indiana Jones adventure of my life. Amazing. She's pretty much
a real life tune writer I mean, my great uncle
got kicked in the head by a goat and died
(40:09):
in a ditch, so not a great mystery to unravel there.
Monet has made an incredible documentary about her adventure, which
you can find on her YouTube channel, which is always
is linked in the description. Okay, Fable Babies today will
not be a bust. I will have new experiences. Look,
the food wasn't for me, the pool wasn't for me,
But you know what new music might be for me?
(40:31):
So I'm going to go on an oral adventure to
expand my horizons. I heard about this new fellow named
Baruna Mars. Apparently he's very popular, so let's give it
a try. Nope, don't like it. You know what, Fable Babies,
you are perfect the way you are. And technically I
did try a new thing successfully because trying new things
in itself was a new thing for me. The comfort
(40:52):
zone has the word comfort in it for a reason.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. This middle aged
dog doesn't need to be learning any new tricks, although
I still would like to see a horse in person
one day. Now, if you don't mind, I'm going to
enjoy the rest of my afternoon doing things I know
that I will love. I will be watching Golden Girls
while I eat and listen to Meet Loaf. Good day, Hey,
(41:17):
thanks for listening to today's episode. As always, I want
to give a big ass shout out and thank you
to our fearless storytellers. Head on down to the description
and click the links to subscribe to their channels. Would
you like to be a featured storyteller on an upcoming
episode of story Time? If you have a great story
to share, record it and send it on down to
story Time at collab dot Inc. Or you can call
(41:39):
the story Time hotline and leave us a message. Give
us a call at three two three seven four one
eight sevent three, and we'll share our favorites on our
next listener episode. Oh you're you're still listening? Cool? Cool, cool, Well,
if you've gotten this deep into the episode, you might
as well rate it, review it, and share it with
a friend or an enemy. It makes no difference to
(41:59):
me as long as I get those sweet, sweet streams.
Story Time is produced by I Heart Radio and Collapse
executive producers Eric Jack's Song King and Will McFadden. Hosted
by Will McFadden, Produced by Jessica Eckles, Jason Shapiro, DANIELLEA Mora,
and Jenny Olmer. Written by Jenny Olmer, sound designed by
Tony Maddock's original score by Scott Simons. Cover art by
John Kuzakaya, Animation by Bellabusha,
Host
Will McFadden
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