“Watch the sides!”
“I am. I am!” I shrieked. “Oh my God!”
I could see out of the corner of my eye that Alex had put his face in his hands and was covering his eyes.
“HEY! I wasn’t the one who told you to hire the biggest vehicle that has ever been built!” I gripped the steering wheel with both hands and tried to navigate my way down the long driveway. We weren’t even out on the open road yet and I was having this much trouble. “You should have got the small one!”
“I thought you said size didn’t matter as much as we thought?” Alex looked up at me and smiled now.
“Ha, ha funny,” I said sarcastically, trying desperately to maneuver the thing onto the road without causing a major international incident.
“But you did, didn’t you?” Alex’s tone changed. “In fact, didn’t you say you could handle them all? Big, medium or small?”
At this, I burst out laughing.
“What are you doing?” Alex suddenly shouted and I jumped in fright.
“What?” I asked frantically.
“You’re driving on the wrong side of the road.”
“Really?” I looked around at all the signs and the lights and the markings on the road. He was right! “Shit.” I put the massive thing into reverse and readjusted.
Alex started laughing again as I managed to get the car facing in the right direction once more.
“It probably would have been safer if I drove,” he said.
“Are you trying to insinuate I’m a bad driver?” I didn’t tell him that a few days ago I’d smashed into two parked cars.
“No. Of course not,” Alex said, keying the destination into his phone. A friendly British voice filled the car and started telling me where to drive.
After about ten minutes of driving, I finally got the hang of it all. It helped that we were on a very wide road. The road was high, running along a hill. On our right, the sea was far below us and from this vantage point you could see all its different colors swirling together beautifully.
And then the direction of our drive changed. We moved inland, away from the sea. The landscape changed dramatically and quickly. Suddenly, I felt like I was driving in a totally different country. The tropical vegetation was gone and it felt like we were in the English countryside. Rolling hills, cows grazing on the side of the road, haystacks lying in open fields. But as soon as I’d gotten used to these new surroundings, it changed again.
We were no longer driving through open fields, rather a dense wooded area closed in on us. Massive pine trees, so thick and high that they blocked out the sun. The trees surrounded us on all sides, and seemed to go on forever. The road also started getting steeper and narrower.
“Route du Volcan,” I read the sign out loud when I saw it on the road.
“I don’t need to translate that, do I?” Alex asked facetiously.
“Nope. I’ve got it.” I smiled at him and continued to drive. And then the landscape changed once more. We popped out of the forest and back into the sun. There were no longer any trees, instead, the ground was covered with low, thin shrubs. The road got steeper, and the more we drove the rockier and less shrubbier it became until,nothing.
No trees. No grass. Just red sand and black rock as far as the eye could see. This landscape was like nothing I’d ever seen before, it was almost Martian. The road beneath us was no longer tarred either, instead, it was red and sandy. Up ahead of us was a car park. We pulled in and climbed out.
“I guess this is where the walk starts,” I said, looking around.
We strolled through the car park and followed a group of people who were already walking. The ground beneath our feet was strange so I bent down to look at it. It was obvious that the lava flow had created rocks that looked rippled, almost as though piles of black satin ribbons had fallen to the floor. I ran my hand over them—they were smooth and strange to the touch.
We continued to walk along the path until we heard someone shouting.
“It’s erupting!”
“What?” I looked at Alex.
“It’s started erupting,” someone else said.
I turned around and was just about to start running in the opposite direction, when out of nowhere, people began running up the path.Where had they all come from?
