Zapp! English Listening 3.4 - Travel

The last boat for three days had already gone, so when some fishermen offered a lift to an island instead, the sensible reaction was suspicion: "they look dodgy, they look scary". Three hours in a small fishing boat later, "with a group of people that looked like pirates", three eighteen-year-old backpackers were dropped on a one-kilometre island near the Cambodian border with three other people on it. That's the first of six travel stories in this episode, and they get stranger.

What you'll hear in this episode

We recorded this one outdoors: "Hi, I'm Tom and I'm sitting in the park with Katie and Stuart." Tom and Stuart then trade travel stories, good and bad, and the workbook breaks the conversation into six listening tasks with answers after each one.

Stuart's first story is a calmer version of Tom's island: a boat through the mangrove on the coast of Ecuador to a tiny island where one family had "turned their house into a restaurant" — cold beers, fresh fish, no electricity, and no drinking ban even though it was voting day. The place is called Muisne, "which has nothing else going for it", followed immediately by "Sorry people from Muisne."

Then it turns properly odd. Staying with an indigenous family in the Andes, Stuart describes a shaman treating the father's stomach problem with cigarettes, sugar cane spirit and guinea pigs, in a storm, at night. Tom's reaction is the best moment in the episode: "My first pet was a guinea pig, I couldn't cope with that." Stuart's verdict: "blew my mind, blew my mind".

After that: dawn at Tikal, where "the mists parted like curtains in a theatre"; an elaborate gem fraud in Bangkok involving several thousand dollars on their parents' credit cards and a phone call home about "villas in Spain"; police with pump action shotguns on a Mexican hillside; and a night in Mexico City that one of the speakers "hated every second of".

Quick facts

What you'll learn

The tasks move you through different kinds of listening. Task 1 and Task 5 ask for detail and outcome. Task 2 asks you to hold two stories in your head at once and spot what they share — both speakers hired a fisherman, both ended up swimming somewhere beautiful. Task 3 is pure inference: you choose between scared, confused, sad and amazed, and the answer key argues that Stuart was confused and amazed but never actually frightened. That kind of question trains you to hear attitude, not just facts.

The language itself is worth studying. Listen for how English speakers quote themselves while telling a story: "we were like, oh God" appears twice, doing the work that "we thought" would do in writing. Notice the self-corrections that native speakers make and repair without stopping — "I take them to England and sell them no I send them to England" — and the vague fillers kind of like, sort of, and stuff. There's also a lovely example of understatement: an entire shamanic ritual summed up as "it was mental".

Vocabulary from the workbook

The glossary has 27 entries. A few that carry the stories:

• dodgy (adjective) – not correct, maybe dishonest, not as it should be. The first impression of the fishermen.
• astute (adjective) – can understand situations and people's characters quickly and correctly. Said of the family with the island restaurant.
• shaman (noun) – in some cultures a religious person who is believed to be magical and can cure illness.
• gulps (noun) – amounts of a liquid that you swallow down your throat. The grandmother and the puntas.
• impounded (past participle) – took from you and locked away because there is something illegal about it. What customs did with the gems.
• bandit (noun) – a thief / robber with a weapon. The reason the police turned up on the hill.
• paranoid (adjective) – think people are talking about you / wishing bad things for you when they aren't.

What's in the workbook

The workbook for this unit is part of the paid all-in-one pack. It gives you the six listening tasks with their questions and answers, and the full transcript of the conversation, so you can go back and find the line you missed.

After the main tasks there are extra materials. The listening section adds twelve true/false statements, two per task, with explanations rather than bare answers — you learn that they slept in beach huts rather than tents, that the gems went on their parents' credit cards, and that Cuba came after Mexico, not before.

The vocabulary section is getting the meaning from context: six multiple-choice items built on real lines from the recording, including turn into, mental, gulps, bring up, blew my mind and ended up. Then comes the 27-entry glossary, from mangrove to blame.

Every episode in the pack is built this way, and it's all in one download for €39.

Get the complete courseAll workbooks and audio — €39

Common questions

Is the audio scripted?

The conversation isn't. Tom and Stuart are telling each other real stories, with the hesitations and false starts that come with that. The teaching sections that set up each task and give the answers are scripted, so the instructions stay clear.

Is the audio free?

Yes. The English conversations are free to download. The workbook is the part you pay for, inside the pack.

How hard is this episode?

It's Level 3, and two speakers talking quickly to each other is harder than one speaker talking to you. As the workbook itself puts it: "You might have found some of that difficult, but listening to natural unscripted conversations is great for your listening skills."

What topics does it cover?

Backpacking, islands, jungle temples, an Andean healing ritual, a gem fraud and travel paranoia — plus the vocabulary you need to describe places and travel experiences.

Can I read along?

Yes. The full transcript is in the workbook, and we'd suggest listening twice before you use it.

Get this episode

• Download Ebook
• Download Audio/MP3

To save the audio, right-click the MP3 link and choose Save link as.

Listen on