Friday, 16th August, Entebbe Time: 8:31pm
Well, here it is. My last blog entry from Uganda. I’ve just returned from town where I enjoyed a final meal of the suitably Ugandan dish “chipsgoat” before wandering around Entebbe in search of some last minute supplies. My first stop-off was at the groceries store where I thought I’d buy some chocolate for the trip. As I browsed the chocolate selection, I noticed a moustached Indian man beckoning me over and pointing to some biscuits. He told me that I should buy ‘glucose’ biscuits, because they were very cheap. Assuming he was one of the shop staff, I asked him how much the packet of ‘fruitella’ that I was holding cost. He told me not to worry and that he’d buy them for me. Noticing something was a little wrong, I turned and raised my eyebrows. Just as I my head turned, I noticed his left hand making a beeline for my balls. I jumped back and caught the tail end of the attempted grope square in the goulies. Beating a hasty retreat, I trotted quickly towards the checkout and bought the fruitella without thinking. I didn’t really want fruitella…
Somewhat rattled from my brief encounter with the amorous Asian, I drifted towards the local pharmacy in search of some sleeping tablets to help shorten the plane journey. “Do you have anything that would help me sleep”, I asked. A bottle of valium was thrust into my hands. Inquiries into whether they stocked anything “a little weaker” met with a blank stare. To be honest, I was sorely tempted just to buy just a couple of tabs and wake up in blighty. If it worked for Anna Karenina and Eminem, why shouldn’t it work for me. Upon further reflection I realised that valium abuse had resulted in a terminal visit to a train terminal and that train wreck of an album “Recovery” respectively. I left empty handed and wandered back to the guesthouse.
And, well, here I am, waiting for a final snack before I turn in for three or four fleeting hours sleep before the taxi to the airport. Hopefully by the time I’m on the plane I’ll have recovered suitably from the sexual harassment and will be ready to face the rigours of the horrifically long voyage to the UK. And that’s it from me. I hope you enjoyed the blog.
So long, Uganda, and thanks for all the Chimps!
Thursday 16 September 2010
Lakeside Mother-something-or-other.
Thursday, 14th August, Entebbe Time: 7:58am
Being in Entebbe feels like I’ve left Uganda already. The town was, until the English buggered off in 1962, where the colonial administration of the protectorate was based, and it shows. The whole place feels quite a bit more like an English village than an African town and wide streets, quiet little gardens, mown lawns and country manners abound. These peculiarly anachronistic ‘anglicisms’ are, of course, interspersed with palm trees, men balancing two-tonne calabashes on their heads and those horrendously ugly marabou stalks. The place is jarring and beautiful in fairly equal measures.
Yesterday I wandered around ‘town’, if a single street of shops quite can ever merit that title, and then headed down to indulge in that traditional Ugandan experience of pizza and masala tea on the edge of lake Victoria. The lake was really beautiful, though the banks are crammed to bursting point with bilharzia snails. None the less, this didn’t stop a few foolhardy (or undereducated) families from splashing around in the schistosomiasis infested shallows. One natural danger I didn’t reckon with was the reflective qualities of water and, by the time I’d endured the hour-long wait for tea and pizza and then eaten the pizza, I was the same colour as the tomato sauce. The situation was certainly not ameliorated by the fact that I’d forgotten my hat and my sun cream was buried deep at the bottom of my tightly packed steel suitcase. I’m afraid that I look like a Mzungu no longer, but some more interesting and far redder strain of humanity.
Apart from the Pizza and having my face slowly burned off, yesterdays most remarkable discovery was a drink called ‘Obushera’. As I was walking through a marketplace on the side of town I noticed a small shack with a large bold sign boasting ‘OBUSHERA SOLD HERE!’. Not being one to pass up the opportunity of expanding the realms of personal experience, I made a beeline towards to mysterious vendor and boomed “One Obushera please!!”. The woman behind the counter jumped nearly out of her skin and, once she’d suitably composed her epidermal, mixed up a mug of something that looked like it had passed through the digestive system of a cat suffering from acute food poisoning. With a certain amount of trepidation, I took a gulp. The stuff was delicious! Not unpleasantly gritty, tangy and sweet in fairly equal measures. After some pidgin English probing I gathered that the drink was made by boiling water and mixing it with sorghum flower. Our corn, barely and wheat based economies are certainly missing out – malt drinks are far inferior. On the other hand, Alex’s verdict was ‘it tastes like stomach bile’, so maybe I just have atypical taste buds.
After quite a lovely day, I headed into our rather ‘cozy’ tent for a lovely nights sleep. No such luck. There was a guy sitting about 50 meters away with a CD player blasting out low-quality indie rock at a very high volume. After a quarter of an hour or so, I decided that I’d try reasoning and wandered up to him. I noticed that he was sitting in front of a lighted candle in the centre of a scruffy pentagram. Somewhat nonplussed, I pressed on.
“Sir, your music is a little loud”. I ventured.
“Yes.”, He replied in a deep Ugandan accent.
“Could you turn it down?”
“Yes.”
He pressed the volume dial once, so that the music was imperceptibly less horrifically loud.
“That… sir that is still quite loud!”
“Yes.”
‘Do you have headphones?”
“No.”
“Do you know what time you’re heading to bed?”
“When I finish.”
“Do.. do you know what time you’re expecting to ‘finish’”?
“No.”
“Could you try and turn it off in half an hour or so.”
“Yes. ‘Try’”.
At that, I gave up and headed to bed and resigned myself to a late evening of god-awful music. My taciturn friend’s battery ran out a few minutes later. He obviously forgot to include Duracell in his deal with the devil.
Being in Entebbe feels like I’ve left Uganda already. The town was, until the English buggered off in 1962, where the colonial administration of the protectorate was based, and it shows. The whole place feels quite a bit more like an English village than an African town and wide streets, quiet little gardens, mown lawns and country manners abound. These peculiarly anachronistic ‘anglicisms’ are, of course, interspersed with palm trees, men balancing two-tonne calabashes on their heads and those horrendously ugly marabou stalks. The place is jarring and beautiful in fairly equal measures.
Yesterday I wandered around ‘town’, if a single street of shops quite can ever merit that title, and then headed down to indulge in that traditional Ugandan experience of pizza and masala tea on the edge of lake Victoria. The lake was really beautiful, though the banks are crammed to bursting point with bilharzia snails. None the less, this didn’t stop a few foolhardy (or undereducated) families from splashing around in the schistosomiasis infested shallows. One natural danger I didn’t reckon with was the reflective qualities of water and, by the time I’d endured the hour-long wait for tea and pizza and then eaten the pizza, I was the same colour as the tomato sauce. The situation was certainly not ameliorated by the fact that I’d forgotten my hat and my sun cream was buried deep at the bottom of my tightly packed steel suitcase. I’m afraid that I look like a Mzungu no longer, but some more interesting and far redder strain of humanity.
Apart from the Pizza and having my face slowly burned off, yesterdays most remarkable discovery was a drink called ‘Obushera’. As I was walking through a marketplace on the side of town I noticed a small shack with a large bold sign boasting ‘OBUSHERA SOLD HERE!’. Not being one to pass up the opportunity of expanding the realms of personal experience, I made a beeline towards to mysterious vendor and boomed “One Obushera please!!”. The woman behind the counter jumped nearly out of her skin and, once she’d suitably composed her epidermal, mixed up a mug of something that looked like it had passed through the digestive system of a cat suffering from acute food poisoning. With a certain amount of trepidation, I took a gulp. The stuff was delicious! Not unpleasantly gritty, tangy and sweet in fairly equal measures. After some pidgin English probing I gathered that the drink was made by boiling water and mixing it with sorghum flower. Our corn, barely and wheat based economies are certainly missing out – malt drinks are far inferior. On the other hand, Alex’s verdict was ‘it tastes like stomach bile’, so maybe I just have atypical taste buds.
After quite a lovely day, I headed into our rather ‘cozy’ tent for a lovely nights sleep. No such luck. There was a guy sitting about 50 meters away with a CD player blasting out low-quality indie rock at a very high volume. After a quarter of an hour or so, I decided that I’d try reasoning and wandered up to him. I noticed that he was sitting in front of a lighted candle in the centre of a scruffy pentagram. Somewhat nonplussed, I pressed on.
“Sir, your music is a little loud”. I ventured.
“Yes.”, He replied in a deep Ugandan accent.
“Could you turn it down?”
“Yes.”
He pressed the volume dial once, so that the music was imperceptibly less horrifically loud.
“That… sir that is still quite loud!”
“Yes.”
‘Do you have headphones?”
“No.”
“Do you know what time you’re heading to bed?”
“When I finish.”
“Do.. do you know what time you’re expecting to ‘finish’”?
“No.”
“Could you try and turn it off in half an hour or so.”
“Yes. ‘Try’”.
At that, I gave up and headed to bed and resigned myself to a late evening of god-awful music. My taciturn friend’s battery ran out a few minutes later. He obviously forgot to include Duracell in his deal with the devil.
Tuesday 14 September 2010
Better Lake than Never
Tuesday, 14th August, Semliki Time: 7:08pm
Guess who’s back! Back again! Well. No prizes there. As you might have guessed, its me. I’m back! At least, back in a place with wireless internet. And Sofas.
I’m sure you’re all just dying to know what happened to me over the last week. In fact, the wait probably drove a few of you to an early grave. I’m afraid if you’re looking for anything in depth, you’re going to be a trifle disappointed – I’m completely out of it. I will, however, try to relate a few small bits ‘n’ pieces from my last week in the Mugiri jungle.
Perhaps the most startling affair was last Friday when I was desperately trying to get some important e-mails done with about 30% battery left in the middle of the night. Usually when I wrote e-mails outside the tent I’d be bothered by a couple of moths, and maybe a few hungry mossies, but nothing much more serious than that. On Friday, however, just as I’d pressed the ‘connect’ button, I was attacked by three or four translucent, diaphanous, swallow-shaped insects with huge wings. I put my torch on the table opposite me in order to draw them away, but within 30 seconds, there were not four or five, but about fifty swarming around the light. This number seemed to pretty much double every ten seconds and by the time I’d snapped the lapton shut and made a dive for the torch, I couldn’t actually get to it without grabbing a handful of the unidentified flying insects. When I’d finally managed to rescue the torch and restart the laptop indoors, the darn thing was so confused at being shut in the middle of the long ‘connection’ process, that it refused to link to the internet at all and all further efforts to sesnd e-mails were in vain. The insects themselves, a species that swarms every so often after heavy rain, continued to flutter around outside in their hundreds and, in the morning, we found about 300 dead insects which had each excreted a small dollop of green ooze. Ask no questions, get no answers. I swept them of the balcony. Unpleasant.
Other exciting happenstances from the last week? Well, I was sure there were some, but they’ve slipped my sleep deprived mind completely so I’ll make do with relating our journey to the ‘entebbe backpackers hostel’ where I’m now pleasantly ensconced. Our journey to Kampala from Fort Portal began rather well. We bought some tickets and threw our bags into a minibus with some pleasant smelling, though rather soupy incense sticks covering up some smell or another. They tried to charge us extra for our bags, but we pleasantly refused and settled down ton the cozy seats, waiting for the engine to start. About 20 minutes later, everyone else started getting off the buss. It turned out that another, better bus had arrived for Kampala and people had jumped ship. As the first bus was not going to leave with only two passengers, we untied our heavy bags and trudged to bus number two, which took us all the way to Kampala.
Instead of dropping us in the Kampala bus station, however, we were turfed out in a rather too heavily populated high street opposite Owena market. We were then mobbed by taxi drivers and, upon finding one who said he would convey us to Entebbe for 50,000 ugandan shillings, a pleasant chap seized both of my cripplingly heavy bags and balanced them on his head and sprinted off through the crowds. Dodging past fast moving motor bikes and throngs of people we managed to chase him all the way to the taxi.
At this point the offer of 50,000 UGS was repealed by the taxi driver – something I’d been expecting, and he asked us for 70,000. I smiled and offered 55. He suggested 60k and, as this was the price I expected to pay from the start, I cheerily agreed. We got in and were about to head off, when the guy who had carried the bags on his head also chipped in. I’d assumed he’d been in kahoots with the Taxi driver and was going to split the cost, but he thought otherwise. I told the taxi driver that the 5,000 that the bag-fellow was demanding would should certainly be included in our fare and, in future, to make this sort of thing very clear before the bags were carried. The taxi driver drove off with the poor bag man wailing in his wake. I felt rather guilty. When we finally arrived, we were harangued for the best part of 15 minutes for an extra 5k to pay our bag carrier and, eventually, he got tired and wandered off. As the normal fare to the airport is 52,000, I felt that our driver had got rather a good deal anyway.
Which, fairly much, brings us to now. I’ve been sitting in the lovely, cozy, Entebbe backpackers hostel sampling ‘Ugandan Sherry’ (The final verdict: Not that bad) and giving my laptop the charge of its life. Lake Victoria is lovely, as is the fact I’m sitting on a seat with a cushion and am about to eat something that isn’t beans.
Apologies for the above lack of cogent sentence structure, grammer and, lets face it, semantics. I’m really quite exhausted!
Guess who’s back! Back again! Well. No prizes there. As you might have guessed, its me. I’m back! At least, back in a place with wireless internet. And Sofas.
I’m sure you’re all just dying to know what happened to me over the last week. In fact, the wait probably drove a few of you to an early grave. I’m afraid if you’re looking for anything in depth, you’re going to be a trifle disappointed – I’m completely out of it. I will, however, try to relate a few small bits ‘n’ pieces from my last week in the Mugiri jungle.
Perhaps the most startling affair was last Friday when I was desperately trying to get some important e-mails done with about 30% battery left in the middle of the night. Usually when I wrote e-mails outside the tent I’d be bothered by a couple of moths, and maybe a few hungry mossies, but nothing much more serious than that. On Friday, however, just as I’d pressed the ‘connect’ button, I was attacked by three or four translucent, diaphanous, swallow-shaped insects with huge wings. I put my torch on the table opposite me in order to draw them away, but within 30 seconds, there were not four or five, but about fifty swarming around the light. This number seemed to pretty much double every ten seconds and by the time I’d snapped the lapton shut and made a dive for the torch, I couldn’t actually get to it without grabbing a handful of the unidentified flying insects. When I’d finally managed to rescue the torch and restart the laptop indoors, the darn thing was so confused at being shut in the middle of the long ‘connection’ process, that it refused to link to the internet at all and all further efforts to sesnd e-mails were in vain. The insects themselves, a species that swarms every so often after heavy rain, continued to flutter around outside in their hundreds and, in the morning, we found about 300 dead insects which had each excreted a small dollop of green ooze. Ask no questions, get no answers. I swept them of the balcony. Unpleasant.
Other exciting happenstances from the last week? Well, I was sure there were some, but they’ve slipped my sleep deprived mind completely so I’ll make do with relating our journey to the ‘entebbe backpackers hostel’ where I’m now pleasantly ensconced. Our journey to Kampala from Fort Portal began rather well. We bought some tickets and threw our bags into a minibus with some pleasant smelling, though rather soupy incense sticks covering up some smell or another. They tried to charge us extra for our bags, but we pleasantly refused and settled down ton the cozy seats, waiting for the engine to start. About 20 minutes later, everyone else started getting off the buss. It turned out that another, better bus had arrived for Kampala and people had jumped ship. As the first bus was not going to leave with only two passengers, we untied our heavy bags and trudged to bus number two, which took us all the way to Kampala.
Instead of dropping us in the Kampala bus station, however, we were turfed out in a rather too heavily populated high street opposite Owena market. We were then mobbed by taxi drivers and, upon finding one who said he would convey us to Entebbe for 50,000 ugandan shillings, a pleasant chap seized both of my cripplingly heavy bags and balanced them on his head and sprinted off through the crowds. Dodging past fast moving motor bikes and throngs of people we managed to chase him all the way to the taxi.
At this point the offer of 50,000 UGS was repealed by the taxi driver – something I’d been expecting, and he asked us for 70,000. I smiled and offered 55. He suggested 60k and, as this was the price I expected to pay from the start, I cheerily agreed. We got in and were about to head off, when the guy who had carried the bags on his head also chipped in. I’d assumed he’d been in kahoots with the Taxi driver and was going to split the cost, but he thought otherwise. I told the taxi driver that the 5,000 that the bag-fellow was demanding would should certainly be included in our fare and, in future, to make this sort of thing very clear before the bags were carried. The taxi driver drove off with the poor bag man wailing in his wake. I felt rather guilty. When we finally arrived, we were harangued for the best part of 15 minutes for an extra 5k to pay our bag carrier and, eventually, he got tired and wandered off. As the normal fare to the airport is 52,000, I felt that our driver had got rather a good deal anyway.
Which, fairly much, brings us to now. I’ve been sitting in the lovely, cozy, Entebbe backpackers hostel sampling ‘Ugandan Sherry’ (The final verdict: Not that bad) and giving my laptop the charge of its life. Lake Victoria is lovely, as is the fact I’m sitting on a seat with a cushion and am about to eat something that isn’t beans.
Apologies for the above lack of cogent sentence structure, grammer and, lets face it, semantics. I’m really quite exhausted!
Tuesday 7 September 2010
Putting the 'big' in 'bigamy'.
Tuesday, 7th August, Semliki Time: 7:57pm
Once more unto the blog dear friends, once more. Tragically, this morning our solar battery, which has been on its last legs pretty much since Alex and I got here, finally gave up the ghost, joined the choir in heaven and started pushing up the daisies. This has wrought various tragedies and calamities on the camp. We no longer have the luxury of taking mobile phones into the jungle, our GPS rechargables can no longer be recharged and, horror upon horror, I only have enough juice on my iPod to listen to another 2 hours of the BBCs ‘From our Own Correspondent’. 2 hours to last me a whole week. Jesus wept. The crowning tragedy, dear readers, is that I will no longer be able to charge my laptop. Among other things, this means no more blogs for Semliki as I will be using the remaining power for e-mails only. Here, then, unless some kind of resurrection occurs, is my last blog entry from the Semliki national park. It occurs to me that, even if there is a resurrection, I’ll be gone before the 12th day. We leave on Wednesday week.
Something that’s been noticed by geographers, sociologists and anthropologists alike is that families who live in poorer areas of the world or inhabit less affluent ‘socioeconomic strata’ tend to have a greater number of children than those with more resources. This seems to be the case across humanity and regardless of access to birth control. The extent of the differences in regional fecundity was hammered home hard yesterday during a cheery conversation with Muhindu, the deputy manager of the Semliki safari lodge. I mentioned that my father, over the course of his somewhat dazzling span, had sired five children. Muhindu smiled, winked and said “Aha, a real man!”. I was inclined to agree. From a Darwinian perspective, my dad has done pretty well for himself. Provided, at least, that he can convince his children to breed. Curious, I asked Muhindu how many children he had himself – only four, Dad was still winning. Muhindu said that his brothers, however, had managed more than ten. I was impressed – any more than that, I said, and one would have to be a monster of a man. He then went on to tell me that he had 17 siblings. I almost spluttered on my tea. “Sure, one or two died”, joshed Muhindu, “but we’ve still got a whole lot left”. My father’s own contribution to the gene pool seemed rather pathetic in comparison. Muhindu’s dad’s motto, apparently, is “family planning is family killing”. Truly a man.
Another eye opening curve ball that Muhindu span my way was that he often joked with his wife about polygamy. If they had an argument, he would threaten to marry another wife. This wasn’t what shocked me though. No. It’s a well known fact that bigamy happens frequently in Africa. What did give me pause was the revelation that, in this part of Uganda at least, it is customary for the husband not to tell his first (or second, or third) wife of his plans to marry again. If a man gets bored, he is entirely at his liberty to swan off and marry another woman. The first (or second, or third) wife will only get news of the partnership through her friends. With only one girlfriend and few children to speak of, I felt really rather emasculated. It all sounds rather too much like hard work, but I’ve promised myself one thing. If I do chose to marry two women at once, I’ll make sure to at least tell wifey number one before saying my vows. Till death do us part. All of us.
Once more unto the blog dear friends, once more. Tragically, this morning our solar battery, which has been on its last legs pretty much since Alex and I got here, finally gave up the ghost, joined the choir in heaven and started pushing up the daisies. This has wrought various tragedies and calamities on the camp. We no longer have the luxury of taking mobile phones into the jungle, our GPS rechargables can no longer be recharged and, horror upon horror, I only have enough juice on my iPod to listen to another 2 hours of the BBCs ‘From our Own Correspondent’. 2 hours to last me a whole week. Jesus wept. The crowning tragedy, dear readers, is that I will no longer be able to charge my laptop. Among other things, this means no more blogs for Semliki as I will be using the remaining power for e-mails only. Here, then, unless some kind of resurrection occurs, is my last blog entry from the Semliki national park. It occurs to me that, even if there is a resurrection, I’ll be gone before the 12th day. We leave on Wednesday week.
Something that’s been noticed by geographers, sociologists and anthropologists alike is that families who live in poorer areas of the world or inhabit less affluent ‘socioeconomic strata’ tend to have a greater number of children than those with more resources. This seems to be the case across humanity and regardless of access to birth control. The extent of the differences in regional fecundity was hammered home hard yesterday during a cheery conversation with Muhindu, the deputy manager of the Semliki safari lodge. I mentioned that my father, over the course of his somewhat dazzling span, had sired five children. Muhindu smiled, winked and said “Aha, a real man!”. I was inclined to agree. From a Darwinian perspective, my dad has done pretty well for himself. Provided, at least, that he can convince his children to breed. Curious, I asked Muhindu how many children he had himself – only four, Dad was still winning. Muhindu said that his brothers, however, had managed more than ten. I was impressed – any more than that, I said, and one would have to be a monster of a man. He then went on to tell me that he had 17 siblings. I almost spluttered on my tea. “Sure, one or two died”, joshed Muhindu, “but we’ve still got a whole lot left”. My father’s own contribution to the gene pool seemed rather pathetic in comparison. Muhindu’s dad’s motto, apparently, is “family planning is family killing”. Truly a man.
Another eye opening curve ball that Muhindu span my way was that he often joked with his wife about polygamy. If they had an argument, he would threaten to marry another wife. This wasn’t what shocked me though. No. It’s a well known fact that bigamy happens frequently in Africa. What did give me pause was the revelation that, in this part of Uganda at least, it is customary for the husband not to tell his first (or second, or third) wife of his plans to marry again. If a man gets bored, he is entirely at his liberty to swan off and marry another woman. The first (or second, or third) wife will only get news of the partnership through her friends. With only one girlfriend and few children to speak of, I felt really rather emasculated. It all sounds rather too much like hard work, but I’ve promised myself one thing. If I do chose to marry two women at once, I’ll make sure to at least tell wifey number one before saying my vows. Till death do us part. All of us.
Saturday 4 September 2010
Of all the Bars
Friday, 3rd August, Fort Portal Time: 7:47pm
The evening finds me sitting in a dark dingy bar in fort portal. The smell of alcohol wafts through the air and some very loud, very drunk fellows are having a very loud, very protracted conversation about the state of Ugandan politics. Cardinal Julius’ election defeat, subsequent trip to Kampala with “somebody’s wife” and the mystifying “cow of Kasese” have just been mentioned. I am “brother Mzungu”, it seems, and I was just asked to confirm that Kampala U was the best university in sub-saharan Africa, discounting South Africa. I was very willing to agree that it had recently been ranked the second best, after Nairobe and was one of the best. The man yelled “You mean I am right” and I just didn’t have the heart (or the balls) to answer in the negative.
Woh, woh, okay, talking about balls, the man just struck up a conversation with me. He was very keen to hear that I liked Uganda, and I told him that it was a lovely country. He was very pleased and asked me how old he was. “22”, came the reply.
“Do you have children?”
“Why, no!”
“Sir, brother Mzungu! You must promise me! You must promise me!”
“Promise you what?”
“When you are 23, you must have children”.
I was rather abashed at this, and said that I would give the matter some consideration, but that, even if my inclinations veered in that direction, my girlfriend might protest.
“Yes. Yes.”, he sighed “brother, you know castration?”
I raised my eyebrows.
“I’ve heard of it… yes.”
“My wife… my wife…” he wailed with a tone of lugubrious inebriation.
“My wife and I had a third child by accident”.
“Oh dear…” I said, wondering if I had guessed correctly what was coming next. With a few wild gesticulations he indicated that he was talking about his testicles.
“She made me have this castration, the balls, the balls which make the semen. They are gone!”.
“Oh no!”, I awkwardly sympathised!
He then started quizzing my about what I was doing on my computer. Multi-tasking, as usual and, not feeling quite brave enough to tell him that I was transcribing our conversation word for word to amuse the people back home, I told him that I was actually e-mailing the girlfriend in question. He insisted that I tell her that it was very important that I had children soon and, hoping that poor old Lana would also see the funny side, I obliged, with a brief explanation. Satisfied, he interrogated me until he got my e-mail address left me alone.
I was intending to talk about a completely different part of the day, but having been talked to at several intervals, I’ve quite lost my train of thought, and might tell you more tomorrow. Edson has arranged some species of meal – I think it’s fried chicken – and I have really no option but to go and eat it.
The evening finds me sitting in a dark dingy bar in fort portal. The smell of alcohol wafts through the air and some very loud, very drunk fellows are having a very loud, very protracted conversation about the state of Ugandan politics. Cardinal Julius’ election defeat, subsequent trip to Kampala with “somebody’s wife” and the mystifying “cow of Kasese” have just been mentioned. I am “brother Mzungu”, it seems, and I was just asked to confirm that Kampala U was the best university in sub-saharan Africa, discounting South Africa. I was very willing to agree that it had recently been ranked the second best, after Nairobe and was one of the best. The man yelled “You mean I am right” and I just didn’t have the heart (or the balls) to answer in the negative.
Woh, woh, okay, talking about balls, the man just struck up a conversation with me. He was very keen to hear that I liked Uganda, and I told him that it was a lovely country. He was very pleased and asked me how old he was. “22”, came the reply.
“Do you have children?”
“Why, no!”
“Sir, brother Mzungu! You must promise me! You must promise me!”
“Promise you what?”
“When you are 23, you must have children”.
I was rather abashed at this, and said that I would give the matter some consideration, but that, even if my inclinations veered in that direction, my girlfriend might protest.
“Yes. Yes.”, he sighed “brother, you know castration?”
I raised my eyebrows.
“I’ve heard of it… yes.”
“My wife… my wife…” he wailed with a tone of lugubrious inebriation.
“My wife and I had a third child by accident”.
“Oh dear…” I said, wondering if I had guessed correctly what was coming next. With a few wild gesticulations he indicated that he was talking about his testicles.
“She made me have this castration, the balls, the balls which make the semen. They are gone!”.
“Oh no!”, I awkwardly sympathised!
He then started quizzing my about what I was doing on my computer. Multi-tasking, as usual and, not feeling quite brave enough to tell him that I was transcribing our conversation word for word to amuse the people back home, I told him that I was actually e-mailing the girlfriend in question. He insisted that I tell her that it was very important that I had children soon and, hoping that poor old Lana would also see the funny side, I obliged, with a brief explanation. Satisfied, he interrogated me until he got my e-mail address left me alone.
I was intending to talk about a completely different part of the day, but having been talked to at several intervals, I’ve quite lost my train of thought, and might tell you more tomorrow. Edson has arranged some species of meal – I think it’s fried chicken – and I have really no option but to go and eat it.
Friday 3 September 2010
Let them know its Christmas time!
Friday, 3rd August, Fort Portal Time: 1:59pm
So, again, I find myself sitting in the gardens restaurant, watching the denizens of Fort Portal wander past and listening ‘the winner takes it all’, which is being blasted from a nearby but concealed speaker. One of my favourite things about Africa…. and this might sound trite… but one of my favourite things about Africa is the wonderful collection of clothing on display. Fantastic as the traditional garments are, I’m not talking about the brightly coloured, high shouldered, interestingly tailored African clothes. No, I’m talking about the western clothes that seem to have ended up here by accident. Firms like Oxfam and Unicef have done a laudable job at supplying the continent with our cast-off t-shirts and coats and, I’m sure, have kept a great number of poor rural labourers and impoverished slum children dressed and warm. What they’ve also done is created one of the strangest spectacles of cultural juxtaposition I’ve ever experienced. As one drives through the rural hillside farms and winds one’s way through the patchwork-agricultural-valleys, one sees young children herding African long-horn cattle and sporting garments emblazoned with pictures of late 90s stars such as Eminem, Michael Jackson and Ali-G.
More jarring still are the seasonal hats and the ladies coats. More than three times on the two hour journey here, I saw grizzled old villagers with huge unkempt beards ensconced in extraordinarily effeminate, thigh-length women’s trench coats. Twice I’ve had to double take people swerving up hills with huge bunches of bananas on the back of their rickety bikes and fluffy Santa hats on their shaved heads. If I’d been driving, I would have crashed the car and sent both myself and the African saint Nick to an unexpected and untimely demise.
Best of all, though, are the of-cast shirts with strange slogans that seem to have made their way here in huge quantities. Today I saw a rather humble looking man with a shirt that said “I am always right!”. Last time we visited fort portal, there was a young boy in a tie-die shirt which bore the inexplicable slogan “Sexy Crab’s Shack of Fish” and, when I first got here, I saw an old, old man in a rather ragged “Condoms, not Bombs – I want to score, not go to war” tee. So, if you’re ever thinking of throwing away some clothes that are just too bizarre or inappropriate to wear, make the world a weirder place, donate them to Oxfam!
So, again, I find myself sitting in the gardens restaurant, watching the denizens of Fort Portal wander past and listening ‘the winner takes it all’, which is being blasted from a nearby but concealed speaker. One of my favourite things about Africa…. and this might sound trite… but one of my favourite things about Africa is the wonderful collection of clothing on display. Fantastic as the traditional garments are, I’m not talking about the brightly coloured, high shouldered, interestingly tailored African clothes. No, I’m talking about the western clothes that seem to have ended up here by accident. Firms like Oxfam and Unicef have done a laudable job at supplying the continent with our cast-off t-shirts and coats and, I’m sure, have kept a great number of poor rural labourers and impoverished slum children dressed and warm. What they’ve also done is created one of the strangest spectacles of cultural juxtaposition I’ve ever experienced. As one drives through the rural hillside farms and winds one’s way through the patchwork-agricultural-valleys, one sees young children herding African long-horn cattle and sporting garments emblazoned with pictures of late 90s stars such as Eminem, Michael Jackson and Ali-G.
More jarring still are the seasonal hats and the ladies coats. More than three times on the two hour journey here, I saw grizzled old villagers with huge unkempt beards ensconced in extraordinarily effeminate, thigh-length women’s trench coats. Twice I’ve had to double take people swerving up hills with huge bunches of bananas on the back of their rickety bikes and fluffy Santa hats on their shaved heads. If I’d been driving, I would have crashed the car and sent both myself and the African saint Nick to an unexpected and untimely demise.
Best of all, though, are the of-cast shirts with strange slogans that seem to have made their way here in huge quantities. Today I saw a rather humble looking man with a shirt that said “I am always right!”. Last time we visited fort portal, there was a young boy in a tie-die shirt which bore the inexplicable slogan “Sexy Crab’s Shack of Fish” and, when I first got here, I saw an old, old man in a rather ragged “Condoms, not Bombs – I want to score, not go to war” tee. So, if you’re ever thinking of throwing away some clothes that are just too bizarre or inappropriate to wear, make the world a weirder place, donate them to Oxfam!
Thursday 2 September 2010
Check your e-mails, Parents!!
Odd blog entry I know - Ma, Pa, if you're reading this, hit your respective inboxes!
Wednesday 1 September 2010
Chewing the Crud
Wednesday, 1st August, Semliki Time: 7:26pm
Considering that so many animals and insects flit and fly around it, the jungle seems to be quite free of yummy things to each. Maybe us folks at the top of the food chain are a bit picky, but the Saba florida munched by the chimps is a bit too sour for my tastes and everything else either wriggles away, bites or is made of indigestible plant cellulose. Without going away and putting a concerted effort into evolving several more stomachs or a large caecum, I think I’d have considerable trouble living as a hunter gatherer and it's a wonder that humans managed to do it for more than 99% of our history.
Still, today, I did give hunter-gathering a shot. Just a try, mind you. Just a we dabble. As we were squelching through a thicket in our rainy-season sodden walking boots (the waterproofing helps keep water in in these conditions) my guide, Moses, pointed to a though looking thorny green vine that was hanging in front of the path. I almost managed to pop a thorny stem in my mouth before Moses grabbed my arm and shook his head. Nono! You eat the roots. Well, of course! He pulled out the bayonet of his Automatic Kalashnikov and set to work removing the soil from the base of the unfortunate plant.
After a thorough rinse in not-quite-opaque water the dish was ready to be eaten. The taste was somewhat indescribable, but I’ll try. The first flavour that hit you was a little like sucking the dirt off a pine cone. About half a second later, this was replaced by a taste not unlike marzipan with a hit of liquorice and a dash of peppermint. Then the plant started to taste like those artificial sugar lumps that you put in coffee if you’re weight conscious or diabetic and, finally, the taste was overwhelmed by the slightly unpalatable sensation of chewing fibrous grit. After you’d swallowed, a cold, lingering ghost of the flavour stayed on the tongue for a good five minutes.
I was unable to elicit the name of this peculiar creeper – Moses only knew it in his local language- but apparently its sold at markets and eaten by chimps. If anyone knows the species that I spent half an hour munching perplexedly, spill the beans, do.
Considering that so many animals and insects flit and fly around it, the jungle seems to be quite free of yummy things to each. Maybe us folks at the top of the food chain are a bit picky, but the Saba florida munched by the chimps is a bit too sour for my tastes and everything else either wriggles away, bites or is made of indigestible plant cellulose. Without going away and putting a concerted effort into evolving several more stomachs or a large caecum, I think I’d have considerable trouble living as a hunter gatherer and it's a wonder that humans managed to do it for more than 99% of our history.
Still, today, I did give hunter-gathering a shot. Just a try, mind you. Just a we dabble. As we were squelching through a thicket in our rainy-season sodden walking boots (the waterproofing helps keep water in in these conditions) my guide, Moses, pointed to a though looking thorny green vine that was hanging in front of the path. I almost managed to pop a thorny stem in my mouth before Moses grabbed my arm and shook his head. Nono! You eat the roots. Well, of course! He pulled out the bayonet of his Automatic Kalashnikov and set to work removing the soil from the base of the unfortunate plant.
After a thorough rinse in not-quite-opaque water the dish was ready to be eaten. The taste was somewhat indescribable, but I’ll try. The first flavour that hit you was a little like sucking the dirt off a pine cone. About half a second later, this was replaced by a taste not unlike marzipan with a hit of liquorice and a dash of peppermint. Then the plant started to taste like those artificial sugar lumps that you put in coffee if you’re weight conscious or diabetic and, finally, the taste was overwhelmed by the slightly unpalatable sensation of chewing fibrous grit. After you’d swallowed, a cold, lingering ghost of the flavour stayed on the tongue for a good five minutes.
I was unable to elicit the name of this peculiar creeper – Moses only knew it in his local language- but apparently its sold at markets and eaten by chimps. If anyone knows the species that I spent half an hour munching perplexedly, spill the beans, do.
Tuesday 31 August 2010
The Democratic State
Sunday, 31th August, Semliki Time: 7:38pm
Well, who’d have believed it. In two weeks today I’ll have finished my last jungle foray and in two weeks tomorrow I’ll be on the bus from Kampala, homeward bound. As it were. I’d like to report that tomorrow I’m in for another rest day, I really would, but I’ve forsaken my rest day in favour of heading out to Fort Portal on Friday. Apparently the very notion that a paying volunteer in the camp should take two rest days in a week may lower moral. I don’t know who’s, but it ain’t mine. Maybe I’m being ungrateful, but if one is going to pay for the privilege of working for someone, one should probably told beforehand what the deal is. Especially if they’re going to top it all off by not feeding us enough. For the sake of social decorum, however, I must swallow my grievances . It’s all worth it for the wonderful landscape and the rare opportunity to see chimps, of course, but here, for posterity, I record that I am peeved. Somehow, the telling of this fact lessens the peevences and the grievances.
Another far more important issue that has both peeved and grieved me is the state of Africa’s politics. From what I’ve gathered over my brief encounters with Ugandan civilization, Uganda is brimming with highly intelligent, self-educated educated people stuck in dead end and low paid jobs. This isn’t the mzungu trying to justify the following rinsing of African politics with a few sentences validating the fact that he’s not a rampant colonialist, this is the impression that is painfully driven home to me every time a taxi driver eloquently explains the countries corruption or a bedraggled beggar engages me in a startlingly erudite conversation about the conversion of Uganda to Christianity. While many intelligent and adroit Africans seem to be stuck in dead-end jobs driving boda-bodas (motorbike, previously bicycle taxis) or shovelling westerners’ shit in Chimpanzee camps, the countries of Africa look to be run by power hungry clowns. To be fair, Uganda’s own Museveni is one of the better ones, but even he has been in power for 20 years and regularly wins elections by 95% of the vote.
Neighbouring Rwanda also had what looked like a well meaning, transparent government but in this month’s round of elections, many supporters of the opposition party ended up dead in a ditch and the elections were, of course, as rigged as an 18th centaury navy. And these are the better countries. You’ve doubtless all heard of Zimbabwe, and of the Congo next door, but pick almost any place in sub-Saharan Africa that isn’t Zambia or South Africa and there isn’t a democracy. All the trappings of a democracy certainly, but none of that ‘one-person, one-vote’ stuff that they rave about in the good old US of A. I’m sure Plato would applaud it, but I have my reservations. Anyway, better sign off now 6am start tomorrow. And every day till Wednesday week. I’ll keep you updated on the morale.
Neighbouring Rwanda also had what looked like a well meaning, transparent government but in this month’s round of elections, many supporters of the opposition party ended up dead in a ditch and the elections were, of course, as rigged as an 18th centaury navy. And these are the better countries. You’ve doubtless all heard of Zimbabwe, and of the Congo next door, but pick almost any place in sub-Saharan Africa that isn’t Zambia or South Africa and there isn’t a democracy. All the trappings of a democracy certainly, but none of that ‘one-person, one-vote’ stuff that they rave about in the good old US of A. I’m sure Plato would applaud it, but I have my reservations. Anyway, better sign off now 6am start tomorrow. And every day till Wednesday week. I’ll keep you updated on the morale.
Well, who’d have believed it. In two weeks today I’ll have finished my last jungle foray and in two weeks tomorrow I’ll be on the bus from Kampala, homeward bound. As it were. I’d like to report that tomorrow I’m in for another rest day, I really would, but I’ve forsaken my rest day in favour of heading out to Fort Portal on Friday. Apparently the very notion that a paying volunteer in the camp should take two rest days in a week may lower moral. I don’t know who’s, but it ain’t mine. Maybe I’m being ungrateful, but if one is going to pay for the privilege of working for someone, one should probably told beforehand what the deal is. Especially if they’re going to top it all off by not feeding us enough. For the sake of social decorum, however, I must swallow my grievances . It’s all worth it for the wonderful landscape and the rare opportunity to see chimps, of course, but here, for posterity, I record that I am peeved. Somehow, the telling of this fact lessens the peevences and the grievances.
Another far more important issue that has both peeved and grieved me is the state of Africa’s politics. From what I’ve gathered over my brief encounters with Ugandan civilization, Uganda is brimming with highly intelligent, self-educated educated people stuck in dead end and low paid jobs. This isn’t the mzungu trying to justify the following rinsing of African politics with a few sentences validating the fact that he’s not a rampant colonialist, this is the impression that is painfully driven home to me every time a taxi driver eloquently explains the countries corruption or a bedraggled beggar engages me in a startlingly erudite conversation about the conversion of Uganda to Christianity. While many intelligent and adroit Africans seem to be stuck in dead-end jobs driving boda-bodas (motorbike, previously bicycle taxis) or shovelling westerners’ shit in Chimpanzee camps, the countries of Africa look to be run by power hungry clowns. To be fair, Uganda’s own Museveni is one of the better ones, but even he has been in power for 20 years and regularly wins elections by 95% of the vote.
Neighbouring Rwanda also had what looked like a well meaning, transparent government but in this month’s round of elections, many supporters of the opposition party ended up dead in a ditch and the elections were, of course, as rigged as an 18th centaury navy. And these are the better countries. You’ve doubtless all heard of Zimbabwe, and of the Congo next door, but pick almost any place in sub-Saharan Africa that isn’t Zambia or South Africa and there isn’t a democracy. All the trappings of a democracy certainly, but none of that ‘one-person, one-vote’ stuff that they rave about in the good old US of A. I’m sure Plato would applaud it, but I have my reservations. Anyway, better sign off now 6am start tomorrow. And every day till Wednesday week. I’ll keep you updated on the morale.
Neighbouring Rwanda also had what looked like a well meaning, transparent government but in this month’s round of elections, many supporters of the opposition party ended up dead in a ditch and the elections were, of course, as rigged as an 18th centaury navy. And these are the better countries. You’ve doubtless all heard of Zimbabwe, and of the Congo next door, but pick almost any place in sub-Saharan Africa that isn’t Zambia or South Africa and there isn’t a democracy. All the trappings of a democracy certainly, but none of that ‘one-person, one-vote’ stuff that they rave about in the good old US of A. I’m sure Plato would applaud it, but I have my reservations. Anyway, better sign off now 6am start tomorrow. And every day till Wednesday week. I’ll keep you updated on the morale.
Sunday 29 August 2010
Bufallo Bill
Sunday, 29th August, Semliki Time: 7:33pm
The rainy season is approaching and I find myself hauled up in our wind-shaken tent listening to the sounds of rain pattering overhead. I must confess, of late there has been not a lot to report. Here are a couple of vignettes from the last couple of days that may well delight and hurt not.
As I believe I’ve mentioned on a couple of occasions, for the sake of her project Alex has taken to hauling my up and down rivers for hours at a time. All is fair – I make her gaze at flies landing on bark in the hot sun until she begins to look like a zombie – but even so, if it weren’t for the BBC world service, I would find these river trudges almost suicide inducing. The monotony of the trudge was broken, yesterday, by a rather peculiar sound. From a few meters upstream of us drifted a tremulous mooing followed by a loud thump. We came round the bend and saw a young cow, nose deep in the water and trying desperately to run away from us up a very steep, very muddy bank. It ran up the bank again, before sliding back down with another pathetic and painful thud. I must say, seeing a cow in the middle of a tropical jungle was surreal enough, no less a cow intent on causing itself grievous bodily harm. The feeling of bemusement was replaced by sympathy at the third failed attempt, and I would have helped the poor beast, if it weren’t that it would probably try to maul me. Because, of course, it wasn’t a cow, it was a young buffalo that had become separated from the herd and, from the uncontrollable trembling, was obviously very cold and worried for its like. Second to elephants, buffalo are the most dangerous mammals in Semliki, so we patiently waited for it to run away upstream.
Today’s adventure was also moderately exciting. After a fruitless hour of chimp searching, Alex, Ellie (our current ranger) and I found ourselves well on the way to the Semliki waterfall. Having heard rumours that the chimps sometimes went up there, and quite curious, we set forth. Our camp is 3km up the Mugiri trail and the Mugiri waterfall was over the 10.6km marker and uphill. The walk was quite long, but certainly worth it, for the ten meter high Mugiri waterfall was truly beautiful. Vines and tall trees stood either side and tropical birds flitted about in the barely visible, bright blue sky. The temperature was also very nice and, while Ellie shivered and complained of the chill, the climate felt normal to me for the first time in two months. Of course, there’s not else to really say about a waterfall, so I’ll sign off there and bid you adieu!
The rainy season is approaching and I find myself hauled up in our wind-shaken tent listening to the sounds of rain pattering overhead. I must confess, of late there has been not a lot to report. Here are a couple of vignettes from the last couple of days that may well delight and hurt not.
As I believe I’ve mentioned on a couple of occasions, for the sake of her project Alex has taken to hauling my up and down rivers for hours at a time. All is fair – I make her gaze at flies landing on bark in the hot sun until she begins to look like a zombie – but even so, if it weren’t for the BBC world service, I would find these river trudges almost suicide inducing. The monotony of the trudge was broken, yesterday, by a rather peculiar sound. From a few meters upstream of us drifted a tremulous mooing followed by a loud thump. We came round the bend and saw a young cow, nose deep in the water and trying desperately to run away from us up a very steep, very muddy bank. It ran up the bank again, before sliding back down with another pathetic and painful thud. I must say, seeing a cow in the middle of a tropical jungle was surreal enough, no less a cow intent on causing itself grievous bodily harm. The feeling of bemusement was replaced by sympathy at the third failed attempt, and I would have helped the poor beast, if it weren’t that it would probably try to maul me. Because, of course, it wasn’t a cow, it was a young buffalo that had become separated from the herd and, from the uncontrollable trembling, was obviously very cold and worried for its like. Second to elephants, buffalo are the most dangerous mammals in Semliki, so we patiently waited for it to run away upstream.
Today’s adventure was also moderately exciting. After a fruitless hour of chimp searching, Alex, Ellie (our current ranger) and I found ourselves well on the way to the Semliki waterfall. Having heard rumours that the chimps sometimes went up there, and quite curious, we set forth. Our camp is 3km up the Mugiri trail and the Mugiri waterfall was over the 10.6km marker and uphill. The walk was quite long, but certainly worth it, for the ten meter high Mugiri waterfall was truly beautiful. Vines and tall trees stood either side and tropical birds flitted about in the barely visible, bright blue sky. The temperature was also very nice and, while Ellie shivered and complained of the chill, the climate felt normal to me for the first time in two months. Of course, there’s not else to really say about a waterfall, so I’ll sign off there and bid you adieu!
Wednesday 25 August 2010
The Oasis
Wednesday, 25th August, Semliki Time: 1:49pm
Ah, the weekend, the weekend. Don’t ask me why but Wednesdays have always been my favourite day of the week. Maybe it’s because I was born on a Wednesday or something, but good things always seem to happen on Wednesdays. It just so happens that, for reasons that I shan’t go into, Wednesdays are also our one day weekend. I find myself, therefore, sitting in the lap of luxury in the Semliki safari lodge having just had a nice relaxing dip in the pool. The laptop is plugged into the mains, god is in his heaven and all is right with the world. Not only is the lodge a fantastic place, but I really relish the change of scene.
The journey here was tough. Alex and I, with a bit too much foolhardiness for our own good, headed out on a bicycle into elephant country with the laptop, two bags of swimming things and various pieces of electrical equipment and their respective chargers. We both jumped upon the bike and merrily sallied forth straight off the path and into the long grass. We rearranged the stuff, swore a bit and started out again. We got a couple of meters before ending up, again, in the long grass. After this process was repeated four or five times, I gingerly suggested to Alex that we swap round so that I could cycle. She accepted my proposition far more readily than I’d anticipated and after two attempts I’d managed to get us going. This continued for a good two minutes until my knee injury started playing up and we careered into the long grass.
-- Pause here: A very pleasant member of the lodge staff has just come to tell me how nice the British are and that the Italians are "bad people”. His English isn’t so hot, but apparently the Italians got mud on his car… or the lodge’s car… or something --
Eventually we elected to just walk it and we were nearly halfway there when I realised that I’d left the laptop charger at home. It was now midday and the sun was beating down. I cycled off to get it. To cut a long story short, we eventually got to the lodge, I only fell over on a muddy puddle once and am now reaping the rewards of swimming pool and electricity. Anyway, I’d better stop writing and have another dip before we make the journey back!
Ah, the weekend, the weekend. Don’t ask me why but Wednesdays have always been my favourite day of the week. Maybe it’s because I was born on a Wednesday or something, but good things always seem to happen on Wednesdays. It just so happens that, for reasons that I shan’t go into, Wednesdays are also our one day weekend. I find myself, therefore, sitting in the lap of luxury in the Semliki safari lodge having just had a nice relaxing dip in the pool. The laptop is plugged into the mains, god is in his heaven and all is right with the world. Not only is the lodge a fantastic place, but I really relish the change of scene.
The journey here was tough. Alex and I, with a bit too much foolhardiness for our own good, headed out on a bicycle into elephant country with the laptop, two bags of swimming things and various pieces of electrical equipment and their respective chargers. We both jumped upon the bike and merrily sallied forth straight off the path and into the long grass. We rearranged the stuff, swore a bit and started out again. We got a couple of meters before ending up, again, in the long grass. After this process was repeated four or five times, I gingerly suggested to Alex that we swap round so that I could cycle. She accepted my proposition far more readily than I’d anticipated and after two attempts I’d managed to get us going. This continued for a good two minutes until my knee injury started playing up and we careered into the long grass.
-- Pause here: A very pleasant member of the lodge staff has just come to tell me how nice the British are and that the Italians are "bad people”. His English isn’t so hot, but apparently the Italians got mud on his car… or the lodge’s car… or something --
Eventually we elected to just walk it and we were nearly halfway there when I realised that I’d left the laptop charger at home. It was now midday and the sun was beating down. I cycled off to get it. To cut a long story short, we eventually got to the lodge, I only fell over on a muddy puddle once and am now reaping the rewards of swimming pool and electricity. Anyway, I’d better stop writing and have another dip before we make the journey back!
Sunday 22 August 2010
The Southern Block
Sunday, 22th August, Semliki Time: 3:59pm
The problem with the jungle is that it just doesn’t give that much to blog about. Okay, so its all very exciting and exotic and full of ants and snakes and elephants, but I if I did a daily journal entry about ants snakes and elephants, I’m sure you’d all stop reading at the first paragraph. Most of you probably do anyway, but that's not the point. Chimp watching, while good for the soul and very exciting, also leaves a little to be desired in the way of anecdotes. Yesterday a chimp ran very close and jumped over a stream right in front of my eyes, which was thrilling at the time, but the story stops there. Again, today we met two snakes and heard an elephant, which is a good story as far as it goes but, as we did not run into the elephant or get bitten by either of the snakes, has a rather disappointing payoff.
Camp life is a trifle more filled with human interest. Jeremiah, one of the staff, recently had an attack of malaria, Moses and Justuce, the two trail-makers, often play exciting games of ‘African Draughts’ (a game very similar to draughts in which the Kings act like Queens in chess) and Edson has some interesting stories to tell about his dreams of having his own restaurant. Still, again, they all tend to rub along nicely and leave something to be desired in the way of drama. I asked this before but I’ve forgotten the answers, is there any particular aspect of life in Africa upon which you’d like to be enlightened? I must confess that, with a whole three-and-a-bit weeks to go, I’m starting to run low on raw material.
The problem with the jungle is that it just doesn’t give that much to blog about. Okay, so its all very exciting and exotic and full of ants and snakes and elephants, but I if I did a daily journal entry about ants snakes and elephants, I’m sure you’d all stop reading at the first paragraph. Most of you probably do anyway, but that's not the point. Chimp watching, while good for the soul and very exciting, also leaves a little to be desired in the way of anecdotes. Yesterday a chimp ran very close and jumped over a stream right in front of my eyes, which was thrilling at the time, but the story stops there. Again, today we met two snakes and heard an elephant, which is a good story as far as it goes but, as we did not run into the elephant or get bitten by either of the snakes, has a rather disappointing payoff.
Camp life is a trifle more filled with human interest. Jeremiah, one of the staff, recently had an attack of malaria, Moses and Justuce, the two trail-makers, often play exciting games of ‘African Draughts’ (a game very similar to draughts in which the Kings act like Queens in chess) and Edson has some interesting stories to tell about his dreams of having his own restaurant. Still, again, they all tend to rub along nicely and leave something to be desired in the way of drama. I asked this before but I’ve forgotten the answers, is there any particular aspect of life in Africa upon which you’d like to be enlightened? I must confess that, with a whole three-and-a-bit weeks to go, I’m starting to run low on raw material.
Saturday 21 August 2010
Stygian Verbiage
Saturday, 21th August, Semliki Time: 7:43pm
Well, you know, I am just yonked. As we lost a week of time in Kampala, Alex and I both have data worries and, as Alex has to map an entire river, we spent a very long day trudging through water measuring out clay deposits with a spool of cotton. The day just didn’t seem to end, and I estimated that our progress though the clay deposits was around about 200km every 15 minutes. By the end we were most flushed. I got ghastly revenge, however, by asking her to help me do my “fly test” for sugar, and we both sat for two hours watching flies land on strips of bark. She looked like she wanted to die by the end… I’d like to say that revenge was sweet, but I just felt cruel. Oh well… two more hours tomorrow.
As a break from War and Peace, I’ve been working through a couple of shorter books recently and yesterday I finished “Heart of Darkness”. I am a huge fan of ‘Apocalypse Now’, that epic voyage up the Mekong starring president Jed Bartlet, and I had high hopes for the classic it was based on. Sadly, Conrad did not deliver. The man took every excuse to show of his command of the English language by using every long word he could think of. Culprits included “diaphanous”, “pestiferous”, “recondite” and “rapacious”. These were just the ones I could remember – there were far more recondite words ensconced within the recesses of every page. The horror. One could argue that this was just par for the course in the late 19th century, but one would be wrong. I’ve read plenty of books by 19th-century authors, and there are many wonderful authors who don’t have to fall back on such blatant verbiage. The book had some wonderful ideas, and I loved the figure that had been built up around Mr. Kurtz, but Mr. Kurtz himself was a complete disappointment. There are pages and pages about how Mr. Kurtz is an amazingly eloquent, lofty, moral, fallen man, but in reality, Mr. Kurtz simply mumbles “The Horror, The Horror” and bumbles off. Anyway, surprisingly, Apocalypse Now is actually far better than Heart of Darkness - a proud exception to the ‘book > film' rule if ever there was one.’’
Yesterday I started the classic thriller ’39 Steps’ and I’m pleased to say that it has to be among the best things I’ve ever read. Buchan set out to create a rip-roaring, no-holds-barred, ridiculous penny shocker and he succeeded in almost every respect. Within the first five pages the main character, a near-omnipotent but altogether-quite-humble South African with a penchant for almost every task the universe throws at him, finds himself talking about a conspiracy to start World War One with a master of disguise who has just faked his own death and is, two pages later, brutally murdered by a secret underground organisation called 'The Black Stone'. It just gets more bizarre from there on, and the protagonist dodges police, crashes cars, avoids planes, and blows up houses, while dressed up in Scottish drag. There whole thing is balls-out self-consciously ridiculous and utterly wonderful, and if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get a few more pages read before dinner! Someone has just been murdered and it's not going to end well for Blighty!
Well, you know, I am just yonked. As we lost a week of time in Kampala, Alex and I both have data worries and, as Alex has to map an entire river, we spent a very long day trudging through water measuring out clay deposits with a spool of cotton. The day just didn’t seem to end, and I estimated that our progress though the clay deposits was around about 200km every 15 minutes. By the end we were most flushed. I got ghastly revenge, however, by asking her to help me do my “fly test” for sugar, and we both sat for two hours watching flies land on strips of bark. She looked like she wanted to die by the end… I’d like to say that revenge was sweet, but I just felt cruel. Oh well… two more hours tomorrow.
As a break from War and Peace, I’ve been working through a couple of shorter books recently and yesterday I finished “Heart of Darkness”. I am a huge fan of ‘Apocalypse Now’, that epic voyage up the Mekong starring president Jed Bartlet, and I had high hopes for the classic it was based on. Sadly, Conrad did not deliver. The man took every excuse to show of his command of the English language by using every long word he could think of. Culprits included “diaphanous”, “pestiferous”, “recondite” and “rapacious”. These were just the ones I could remember – there were far more recondite words ensconced within the recesses of every page. The horror. One could argue that this was just par for the course in the late 19th century, but one would be wrong. I’ve read plenty of books by 19th-century authors, and there are many wonderful authors who don’t have to fall back on such blatant verbiage. The book had some wonderful ideas, and I loved the figure that had been built up around Mr. Kurtz, but Mr. Kurtz himself was a complete disappointment. There are pages and pages about how Mr. Kurtz is an amazingly eloquent, lofty, moral, fallen man, but in reality, Mr. Kurtz simply mumbles “The Horror, The Horror” and bumbles off. Anyway, surprisingly, Apocalypse Now is actually far better than Heart of Darkness - a proud exception to the ‘book > film' rule if ever there was one.’’
Yesterday I started the classic thriller ’39 Steps’ and I’m pleased to say that it has to be among the best things I’ve ever read. Buchan set out to create a rip-roaring, no-holds-barred, ridiculous penny shocker and he succeeded in almost every respect. Within the first five pages the main character, a near-omnipotent but altogether-quite-humble South African with a penchant for almost every task the universe throws at him, finds himself talking about a conspiracy to start World War One with a master of disguise who has just faked his own death and is, two pages later, brutally murdered by a secret underground organisation called 'The Black Stone'. It just gets more bizarre from there on, and the protagonist dodges police, crashes cars, avoids planes, and blows up houses, while dressed up in Scottish drag. There whole thing is balls-out self-consciously ridiculous and utterly wonderful, and if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to get a few more pages read before dinner! Someone has just been murdered and it's not going to end well for Blighty!
Thursday 19 August 2010
V&A
Thursday, 19th August, Semliki Time: 4:26pm
Lake Albert, second only to lake Victoria, is the second biggest body of water in Uganda. It's famous not only for its size but also for its animal life and earlier Alex, David, Holly and I headed out with the owners of the Semliki Safari Lodge for an Albertan adventure. One species, in particular, had piqued our interests and this was the rare and elusive Shoebill – an unusual, almost prehistoric bird with a beak resembling, unsurprisingly, a shoe!
At 9am sharp, after a tremendous lie-in, we all jumped into the Semliki Lodge’s whopping tank of a Safari Jeep and headed out into the open savannah. Though we’d travelled the same track time and time again, being a meter above the grass changed the vista substantially. Where before, all I could see were the odd tops of trees, the whole grassland unfolded in front of us like a sheet. Water buck and kob jumped around, and families of warthog shaded themselves underneath thorny acacia trees. Soon enough we reached the golden red main road and, after half an hour or so, we pulled up in a village on the shores of Lake Albert. While I’ve become used to children in foreign countries yelling “Hello, how are you”, the Albertian kids yelled with such verve and gusto that it was almost impossible to keep a straight face. Millions of tiny, chubby, partially clad toddlers relentlessly pursued us down the road screaming their greatings repeatedly till all that could be heard was a yodelling whoop of “Owayowayowayou?!”. By the end I felt like a practical messiah, leading my followers to the promised land. Sadly, we were going a little too fast for their young legs and the faithful were periodically left behind in the dust.
Lake Albert more closely resembles a sea than a lake and the far bank is significantly further away than Dover is from Calais. The Lodge’s small boat was parked next to a bunch of thirty-somethings gutting fish and I waved my camera at them questioning whether I could take a photo. The answer was a negative and one particularly obstreperous fellow started screaming blue murder. After I had backed away and turned the camera off, he gestured that he wanted some money in return for the favour. I snapped a rather kinder man gutting fish on another bank – photos are a free market.
After no sooner than 15 minutes of chugging along in the smooth, greenish waters of the lake, a majestically ugly black shape hove into view, perched on a patch of water hibiscus. This was the shoebill in person, and it glowered at us over its bizarre beak. Up in the sky, kingfishers swooped, dug-out fishing boats glided past, and we sat and stared at the shoebill for almost an hour. The shoebill, not at all non-plussed by the attention, stood its ground and scanned the water for fish. After a very long time, it struck and proudly retrieved a plastic bottle. After some confused gnawing, it gave up and stalked around for some more forgiving prey.
The rest of the day was spent floating, fishing and drinking beer in the middle of the lake. Nothing else particularly eventful happened, but it was all very pleasant indeed. After a long while of fruitless fishing, we all headed back and jumped into the safari jeep for the drive home. The day was not yet finished though and, just as we’d arrived in the park, Alex gave a cry of “ELEPHANT!”. I started. David and Holly started. The Elephant gazed over curiously. As soon as Keith, who was driving, heard that there was an elephant, he rocketed the safari car forward into the long grass. The thing was more robust than a tank and chugged through the long grass with ease. It wasn’t long before we were just a hair's distance from the Elephant, and the sight was amazing.
As the solar generator has gone awry and I don’t know how I’m going to ration the rest of the battery, I will stop writing there. If there are no blogs for a while, this is the reason! Suffice it to say, I had an incredible day and have truly “seen Africa”, if that means anything at all!
Lake Albert, second only to lake Victoria, is the second biggest body of water in Uganda. It's famous not only for its size but also for its animal life and earlier Alex, David, Holly and I headed out with the owners of the Semliki Safari Lodge for an Albertan adventure. One species, in particular, had piqued our interests and this was the rare and elusive Shoebill – an unusual, almost prehistoric bird with a beak resembling, unsurprisingly, a shoe!
At 9am sharp, after a tremendous lie-in, we all jumped into the Semliki Lodge’s whopping tank of a Safari Jeep and headed out into the open savannah. Though we’d travelled the same track time and time again, being a meter above the grass changed the vista substantially. Where before, all I could see were the odd tops of trees, the whole grassland unfolded in front of us like a sheet. Water buck and kob jumped around, and families of warthog shaded themselves underneath thorny acacia trees. Soon enough we reached the golden red main road and, after half an hour or so, we pulled up in a village on the shores of Lake Albert. While I’ve become used to children in foreign countries yelling “Hello, how are you”, the Albertian kids yelled with such verve and gusto that it was almost impossible to keep a straight face. Millions of tiny, chubby, partially clad toddlers relentlessly pursued us down the road screaming their greatings repeatedly till all that could be heard was a yodelling whoop of “Owayowayowayou?!”. By the end I felt like a practical messiah, leading my followers to the promised land. Sadly, we were going a little too fast for their young legs and the faithful were periodically left behind in the dust.
Lake Albert more closely resembles a sea than a lake and the far bank is significantly further away than Dover is from Calais. The Lodge’s small boat was parked next to a bunch of thirty-somethings gutting fish and I waved my camera at them questioning whether I could take a photo. The answer was a negative and one particularly obstreperous fellow started screaming blue murder. After I had backed away and turned the camera off, he gestured that he wanted some money in return for the favour. I snapped a rather kinder man gutting fish on another bank – photos are a free market.
After no sooner than 15 minutes of chugging along in the smooth, greenish waters of the lake, a majestically ugly black shape hove into view, perched on a patch of water hibiscus. This was the shoebill in person, and it glowered at us over its bizarre beak. Up in the sky, kingfishers swooped, dug-out fishing boats glided past, and we sat and stared at the shoebill for almost an hour. The shoebill, not at all non-plussed by the attention, stood its ground and scanned the water for fish. After a very long time, it struck and proudly retrieved a plastic bottle. After some confused gnawing, it gave up and stalked around for some more forgiving prey.
The rest of the day was spent floating, fishing and drinking beer in the middle of the lake. Nothing else particularly eventful happened, but it was all very pleasant indeed. After a long while of fruitless fishing, we all headed back and jumped into the safari jeep for the drive home. The day was not yet finished though and, just as we’d arrived in the park, Alex gave a cry of “ELEPHANT!”. I started. David and Holly started. The Elephant gazed over curiously. As soon as Keith, who was driving, heard that there was an elephant, he rocketed the safari car forward into the long grass. The thing was more robust than a tank and chugged through the long grass with ease. It wasn’t long before we were just a hair's distance from the Elephant, and the sight was amazing.
As the solar generator has gone awry and I don’t know how I’m going to ration the rest of the battery, I will stop writing there. If there are no blogs for a while, this is the reason! Suffice it to say, I had an incredible day and have truly “seen Africa”, if that means anything at all!
Wednesday 18 August 2010
Brushing up.
Wednesday, 18th August, Semliki Time: 01:39am
So, now I’m 22. I don’t know how or why that happened, and it doesn’t seem quite right, 21 maybe, okay, sure, 21, but 22 just seems so ‘adult’. As Tom Lehrer put it “it is a sobering thought to think that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for one year”. Of course, as Tom Lehrer said that when he was 36, the quote is probably less applicable, but I think it's applicable in spirit. I certainly haven’t achieved anything equal to writing ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’ yet.
To celebrate the ‘momentous’ occasion, we headed out to the Lodge for a slap-up meal with steak, beer, wine and the most fantastic chocolate cake. I imbibed alcohol in quantities that may not, under normal circumstances, have constituted excess, but that combined with malaria prophylaxis, dehydration and ‘lack of practice’, had quite a noticeable effect. I think I made an interesting impression on the owners of the lodge, but they’ve invited us on a game drive tomorrow, so I can’t have been irredeemably awful. Yesterday's late, medium-heavy night, followed by a 5:30 start today has left me feeling less than chirpy, so if today’s blog entry doesn’t quite follow, I apologise.
The meal was absolutely wonderful. While the camp is very good as camps go, the $200 per night lap-of-luxury safari lodge was like accidentally wandering into paradise. Keith and Nadia had decorated the wood-panelled room with balloons, and the flickering lamps combined with the sunset over the vista of Semliki was almost otherworldly. When Nadia and Keith proudly presented me the the crate of beer they’d bought “as a birthday present” and served us freshly squeezed “Semliki Sunrises”, I had to pinch myself. The dinner was equally superb. There was the most wonderful soup for starters with bread and real butter, perfectly medium-rare steak for the main with to-die-for honey mustard sauce and, to top it all off, sticky, runny chocolate cake for pudding. Joy!
As I said, however, today’s 5:30 start wasn’t great. It’s 1:43 now, and I’m still not really feeling “with it” but have had a nice morning, none the less. Every second Wednesday is Fort Portal day, so Alex and I are now pleasantly ensconced in ‘The Gardens Restaurant’, Fort Portal’s five-dollar Ritz. My morning has mainly consisted of a quest to find the mysterious toothbrush twigs of Uganda. Bill McGrew, my supervisor, tells me that in many African countries they sell twigs and sticks, which are used by the locals as toothbrushes. I thought that it might be interesting to buy some and see if the chimps chew bark from the same trees. From our pre-trip meetings, I came away with the impression that toothbrush twigs practically littered the streets of Uganda and that I would not be able to walk ten paces without having my pegs polished to a botanical shine. Fort Portal, however, seems to be the exception to the rule. I systematically asked at every stall in the market and, in each case, the conversation was the same:
“Hello, Mzungu, what do you want”
“I want something to brush my teeth.”
“Ah, here is a toothbrush! It will clean your teeth!!”
“This is good, but I am looking for a toothbrush made out of a twig.”
“Sir, you want a twig?”
“I want a toothbrush made up of a twig”
“What is a twig?”
“I want a toothbrush made from wood.”
“Sir, this toothbrush is better, it is made of plastic.”
“Yes, but I have heard you make toothbrushes out of wood here.”
“No… no… Ah…. you want a toothpick!”
“No, I want a toothbrush made out of a branch of a tree!”
“A tree? Where are you from?”
‘The UK!”
“You brush your teeth with trees??”
“No.. no. No, you do. I mean, I thought you did! Does anyone here do this?”
“No, sir. This is Uganda sir, we use “Colgate”.
No-one, no-one in the entire town had the foggiest idea what I was talking about. At one juncture I even mimed with a twig I’d found, something that earned me a very funny look. At another point I wandered into an innocuous-looking DVD and general goods store and found myself in a room hung with photocopied centrefolds indulging in a variety of rather graphic and not-entirely-wholesome pursuits. Thinking that my request for toothbrush twigs might be taken the wrong way, I backed out slowly. I also managed to get into a conversation with a middle-aged Ugandan lady about how Ugandans had much stronger teeth than Wazungu. I nodded politely and smiled a fragile Mzungu smile, leaving hastily before she got the chance to show me photos of her weak-toothed American friends. If there were anywhere else to try, I’d try after lunch, but I think I’ve been everywhere. Does anyone know anything of African toothbrush twigs? Father , father – did they have them when you were here? Have they been superseded by polynolythorypeptide? Will I ever find a Ugandan toothbrush twig?
So, now I’m 22. I don’t know how or why that happened, and it doesn’t seem quite right, 21 maybe, okay, sure, 21, but 22 just seems so ‘adult’. As Tom Lehrer put it “it is a sobering thought to think that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for one year”. Of course, as Tom Lehrer said that when he was 36, the quote is probably less applicable, but I think it's applicable in spirit. I certainly haven’t achieved anything equal to writing ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’ yet.
To celebrate the ‘momentous’ occasion, we headed out to the Lodge for a slap-up meal with steak, beer, wine and the most fantastic chocolate cake. I imbibed alcohol in quantities that may not, under normal circumstances, have constituted excess, but that combined with malaria prophylaxis, dehydration and ‘lack of practice’, had quite a noticeable effect. I think I made an interesting impression on the owners of the lodge, but they’ve invited us on a game drive tomorrow, so I can’t have been irredeemably awful. Yesterday's late, medium-heavy night, followed by a 5:30 start today has left me feeling less than chirpy, so if today’s blog entry doesn’t quite follow, I apologise.
The meal was absolutely wonderful. While the camp is very good as camps go, the $200 per night lap-of-luxury safari lodge was like accidentally wandering into paradise. Keith and Nadia had decorated the wood-panelled room with balloons, and the flickering lamps combined with the sunset over the vista of Semliki was almost otherworldly. When Nadia and Keith proudly presented me the the crate of beer they’d bought “as a birthday present” and served us freshly squeezed “Semliki Sunrises”, I had to pinch myself. The dinner was equally superb. There was the most wonderful soup for starters with bread and real butter, perfectly medium-rare steak for the main with to-die-for honey mustard sauce and, to top it all off, sticky, runny chocolate cake for pudding. Joy!
As I said, however, today’s 5:30 start wasn’t great. It’s 1:43 now, and I’m still not really feeling “with it” but have had a nice morning, none the less. Every second Wednesday is Fort Portal day, so Alex and I are now pleasantly ensconced in ‘The Gardens Restaurant’, Fort Portal’s five-dollar Ritz. My morning has mainly consisted of a quest to find the mysterious toothbrush twigs of Uganda. Bill McGrew, my supervisor, tells me that in many African countries they sell twigs and sticks, which are used by the locals as toothbrushes. I thought that it might be interesting to buy some and see if the chimps chew bark from the same trees. From our pre-trip meetings, I came away with the impression that toothbrush twigs practically littered the streets of Uganda and that I would not be able to walk ten paces without having my pegs polished to a botanical shine. Fort Portal, however, seems to be the exception to the rule. I systematically asked at every stall in the market and, in each case, the conversation was the same:
“Hello, Mzungu, what do you want”
“I want something to brush my teeth.”
“Ah, here is a toothbrush! It will clean your teeth!!”
“This is good, but I am looking for a toothbrush made out of a twig.”
“Sir, you want a twig?”
“I want a toothbrush made up of a twig”
“What is a twig?”
“I want a toothbrush made from wood.”
“Sir, this toothbrush is better, it is made of plastic.”
“Yes, but I have heard you make toothbrushes out of wood here.”
“No… no… Ah…. you want a toothpick!”
“No, I want a toothbrush made out of a branch of a tree!”
“A tree? Where are you from?”
‘The UK!”
“You brush your teeth with trees??”
“No.. no. No, you do. I mean, I thought you did! Does anyone here do this?”
“No, sir. This is Uganda sir, we use “Colgate”.
No-one, no-one in the entire town had the foggiest idea what I was talking about. At one juncture I even mimed with a twig I’d found, something that earned me a very funny look. At another point I wandered into an innocuous-looking DVD and general goods store and found myself in a room hung with photocopied centrefolds indulging in a variety of rather graphic and not-entirely-wholesome pursuits. Thinking that my request for toothbrush twigs might be taken the wrong way, I backed out slowly. I also managed to get into a conversation with a middle-aged Ugandan lady about how Ugandans had much stronger teeth than Wazungu. I nodded politely and smiled a fragile Mzungu smile, leaving hastily before she got the chance to show me photos of her weak-toothed American friends. If there were anywhere else to try, I’d try after lunch, but I think I’ve been everywhere. Does anyone know anything of African toothbrush twigs? Father , father – did they have them when you were here? Have they been superseded by polynolythorypeptide? Will I ever find a Ugandan toothbrush twig?
Sunday 15 August 2010
War and Peace and Aliens
Sunday, 15th August, Semliki Time: 10:04pm
Sundays, at Semliki, are the day of rest. Rest means time to read and this afternoon I finally finished War and Peace , something that I feel is nearly akin to an African coming of age ritual. Sure, I wasn’t circumcised with a blunt, stone implement and, certainly, the elders didn’t scar my forehead with ceremonial cowskin blades and send me off into the bush to bleed for a month, but finishing War and Peace , I feel, is still at least something of an accomplishment. Having said that, I must profess that I actually really enjoyed it. Tolstoy has a wonderful ability to describe exactly how people act and what motivates them, without prescription and without judgment. His stories have villains, but they are not treated as such and nor are they demonised. Time after time, he perfectly captures the inconsistencies and minor hypocrisies common to human behaviour, without criticism and with an immaculate attention to detail. Okay, so sentences like “as women are apt to think” cropped up a couple more times than I was comfortable with but, otherwise, the man (or maybe the translator, I don’t speak Russian…) is without parallel. Onto the criticism…
The greatest tragedy of War and Peace , ignoring Bolkonsky, is that in the last volume and the epilogue, Tolstoy starts forgetting about the characters he illustrates so well. He focuses less and less on the Rostovs and the Bezukhovs and concentrates more and more of an over-egged and, at times, logically inconsistent criticism of the “great men” theory of history. Its not that I disagree with his argument (In short: Great men are as much subject to the ebb and flow of history as the subjects they supposedly “command”), it’s just that he makes the same point over and over and over again. At the start of volume four I was only passing interested in the epistemological fallacies of the French historian ‘Thiers’. By the end I passionately hated Thiers, not for his mistaken view of the forces driving the Napoleonic wars, but for causing Tolstoy to abandon the characters that I held so dear in lieu of his ceaseless and ultimately banal historiograpical equivocations. The actual ‘novel’ itself, that is, the story of the characters, is abandoned a full thirty or so pages before the book actually ends. I could have cried. Yes War and Peace is, by and large fantastic, yes Tolstoy makes some cogent and interesting points, but ultimately Anna Karenin is a far better novel. It’s among my favourite books, so if you’re ever deciding between the two, pick up Anna K without hesitating... unless you’re reading W&P for the sake of having read it, in which case, shame on you*. For that matter, if you have to choose between Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, the count is the better author, no questions asked.
Continuing in the critical vein but departing somewhat from the lofty heights of classic Russian literature, earlier Alex and I used to last smidgen of the day’s solar electricity to watch Aliens with the camp staff. Aliens is the follow-up to the fantastic Alien, the classic 1979 sci-fi horror flick that gave gory, parasitic birth to a whole series of sequels and spin-offs. To be frank, I was more than a little disappointed. Where Alien was a wonderfully paced, fantastically eerie and perfectly executed sci-fi horror story about a woman’s love for her cat, Aliens was an awkward, badly written and horribly predictable, marginally-above-par action film. Where the terse dialogue and shaky camera in Alien made things seem more real and, thus, scarier, in Aliens it rendered everything predictable and borderline kitsch. The aliens themselves were no longer ominous but just ‘a-bit-of-a-nuisance’ and the surreptitious workings of the mysterious ‘corporation’ were no longer sinister but painfully conventional. It's not that it was ‘bad’ - it was certainly entertaining – it's just that it wasn’t ‘good’. Having said that, Edson, Justice, Moses and Moses were very taken and will doubtless be talking about aliens for days to come.
*He says, with only the smallest nugget of hypocrisy.
Sundays, at Semliki, are the day of rest. Rest means time to read and this afternoon I finally finished War and Peace , something that I feel is nearly akin to an African coming of age ritual. Sure, I wasn’t circumcised with a blunt, stone implement and, certainly, the elders didn’t scar my forehead with ceremonial cowskin blades and send me off into the bush to bleed for a month, but finishing War and Peace , I feel, is still at least something of an accomplishment. Having said that, I must profess that I actually really enjoyed it. Tolstoy has a wonderful ability to describe exactly how people act and what motivates them, without prescription and without judgment. His stories have villains, but they are not treated as such and nor are they demonised. Time after time, he perfectly captures the inconsistencies and minor hypocrisies common to human behaviour, without criticism and with an immaculate attention to detail. Okay, so sentences like “as women are apt to think” cropped up a couple more times than I was comfortable with but, otherwise, the man (or maybe the translator, I don’t speak Russian…) is without parallel. Onto the criticism…
The greatest tragedy of War and Peace , ignoring Bolkonsky, is that in the last volume and the epilogue, Tolstoy starts forgetting about the characters he illustrates so well. He focuses less and less on the Rostovs and the Bezukhovs and concentrates more and more of an over-egged and, at times, logically inconsistent criticism of the “great men” theory of history. Its not that I disagree with his argument (In short: Great men are as much subject to the ebb and flow of history as the subjects they supposedly “command”), it’s just that he makes the same point over and over and over again. At the start of volume four I was only passing interested in the epistemological fallacies of the French historian ‘Thiers’. By the end I passionately hated Thiers, not for his mistaken view of the forces driving the Napoleonic wars, but for causing Tolstoy to abandon the characters that I held so dear in lieu of his ceaseless and ultimately banal historiograpical equivocations. The actual ‘novel’ itself, that is, the story of the characters, is abandoned a full thirty or so pages before the book actually ends. I could have cried. Yes War and Peace is, by and large fantastic, yes Tolstoy makes some cogent and interesting points, but ultimately Anna Karenin is a far better novel. It’s among my favourite books, so if you’re ever deciding between the two, pick up Anna K without hesitating... unless you’re reading W&P for the sake of having read it, in which case, shame on you*. For that matter, if you have to choose between Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, the count is the better author, no questions asked.
Continuing in the critical vein but departing somewhat from the lofty heights of classic Russian literature, earlier Alex and I used to last smidgen of the day’s solar electricity to watch Aliens with the camp staff. Aliens is the follow-up to the fantastic Alien, the classic 1979 sci-fi horror flick that gave gory, parasitic birth to a whole series of sequels and spin-offs. To be frank, I was more than a little disappointed. Where Alien was a wonderfully paced, fantastically eerie and perfectly executed sci-fi horror story about a woman’s love for her cat, Aliens was an awkward, badly written and horribly predictable, marginally-above-par action film. Where the terse dialogue and shaky camera in Alien made things seem more real and, thus, scarier, in Aliens it rendered everything predictable and borderline kitsch. The aliens themselves were no longer ominous but just ‘a-bit-of-a-nuisance’ and the surreptitious workings of the mysterious ‘corporation’ were no longer sinister but painfully conventional. It's not that it was ‘bad’ - it was certainly entertaining – it's just that it wasn’t ‘good’. Having said that, Edson, Justice, Moses and Moses were very taken and will doubtless be talking about aliens for days to come.
*He says, with only the smallest nugget of hypocrisy.
Saturday 14 August 2010
The fate of the lizard who topes...
Saturday, 14th August, Semliki Time: 6:51
My data, compared to poor old Alex’s well data has been coming thick and fast. Still, I’ll admit it, I had started to get a trifle frustrated by the apparent paucity of wadded bark. The chimps seemed to be stripping bark off trees daily but, in each case, has spirited the lumps of chewed tree pith away to goodness knows where. I needed the wads to test for tannins, to test their weight and to compare them to pieces of non-wadded tree bark and it seemed like the chimps were carrying them away from the stripped trees just to spite me. Today they remedied the defect by providing me what is titled in my field journal as “THE MOTHERLOAD”. At 10:31 we heard the hooting of a juvenile chimp and, three minutes later, we rocked up underneath a tamarind tree that had been divested so thoroughly that many of the upper branches lay bare. The chimps had vanished but underneath the tree were not one or two wads but 183 freshly chewed lumps of tamarind flesh. In short, I’d hit the jackpot. Praying that the chimps would stay away long enough for me to collect everything, we got down to business. I picked up wad pieces, Moses (today’s ranger) measured the height of the strips and the arboreal Alex climbed up to take photos. By the time we’d finished, the chimps had vanished deep into the savannah, and I committed the ultimate field sin of convincing Alex and Moses to abandon the chase in order to take the freshly chewed wads to camp to weigh them before they dried. Contrary to the usual scanning of branches for the faintest rustle, on the way home I prayed that the apes would stay out of the way and, luckily, in their absence we made it home in record time. The samples were weighed before they dried and I will now be able to exclusively settle the “do chimps chew bark for the liquid content” hypothesis one way or the other. Sadly, the dental solution I was going to use to test for plaque completely failed, but my newly-devised “how many flies land on this object within two minutes” should give a reasonably accurate, if not a little slap-dash indication of the bark’s sugar and nutrition content.
‘THE MOTHER LOAD” was not the only memorable part of the day, however. The rather laborious process of weighing 183 wads of bark and putting the data into a computer was happily punctuated by a yell of “Duncan, Alex, Come here”. We were greeted by the sight of Edson, Moses and Moses (there are two) cheering at an emerald vine snake in the process of devouring a rather unfortunate gecko. Despite being about one third of the width of a gecko, the gecko slowly disappeared deeper and deeper into the snakes gaping mouth. The snake, with its jaw detached, looked at us with obvious pleasure. After somehow squeezing in the legs – a process that looked somewhat like it was giving birth backwards for its FACE – all that was left was the writhing tail. The round body of the ill-fated lizard could be seen moving inside the snake for a long time after it had been swallowed. The rangers, their third for reptile blood not yet slaked, gleefully chased another gecko round and round the water cooler towards the snake. At one point the snake made a lunge for the second gecko and very nearly caught it, but, having had one meal already, it was obvious that the snakes cold, reptilian heart just wasn’t in it. After a few minutes of stick waving, the snake gave us a tired look and slithered away. Alex and I went back to weighing wads of tree bark.
My data, compared to poor old Alex’s well data has been coming thick and fast. Still, I’ll admit it, I had started to get a trifle frustrated by the apparent paucity of wadded bark. The chimps seemed to be stripping bark off trees daily but, in each case, has spirited the lumps of chewed tree pith away to goodness knows where. I needed the wads to test for tannins, to test their weight and to compare them to pieces of non-wadded tree bark and it seemed like the chimps were carrying them away from the stripped trees just to spite me. Today they remedied the defect by providing me what is titled in my field journal as “THE MOTHERLOAD”. At 10:31 we heard the hooting of a juvenile chimp and, three minutes later, we rocked up underneath a tamarind tree that had been divested so thoroughly that many of the upper branches lay bare. The chimps had vanished but underneath the tree were not one or two wads but 183 freshly chewed lumps of tamarind flesh. In short, I’d hit the jackpot. Praying that the chimps would stay away long enough for me to collect everything, we got down to business. I picked up wad pieces, Moses (today’s ranger) measured the height of the strips and the arboreal Alex climbed up to take photos. By the time we’d finished, the chimps had vanished deep into the savannah, and I committed the ultimate field sin of convincing Alex and Moses to abandon the chase in order to take the freshly chewed wads to camp to weigh them before they dried. Contrary to the usual scanning of branches for the faintest rustle, on the way home I prayed that the apes would stay out of the way and, luckily, in their absence we made it home in record time. The samples were weighed before they dried and I will now be able to exclusively settle the “do chimps chew bark for the liquid content” hypothesis one way or the other. Sadly, the dental solution I was going to use to test for plaque completely failed, but my newly-devised “how many flies land on this object within two minutes” should give a reasonably accurate, if not a little slap-dash indication of the bark’s sugar and nutrition content.
‘THE MOTHER LOAD” was not the only memorable part of the day, however. The rather laborious process of weighing 183 wads of bark and putting the data into a computer was happily punctuated by a yell of “Duncan, Alex, Come here”. We were greeted by the sight of Edson, Moses and Moses (there are two) cheering at an emerald vine snake in the process of devouring a rather unfortunate gecko. Despite being about one third of the width of a gecko, the gecko slowly disappeared deeper and deeper into the snakes gaping mouth. The snake, with its jaw detached, looked at us with obvious pleasure. After somehow squeezing in the legs – a process that looked somewhat like it was giving birth backwards for its FACE – all that was left was the writhing tail. The round body of the ill-fated lizard could be seen moving inside the snake for a long time after it had been swallowed. The rangers, their third for reptile blood not yet slaked, gleefully chased another gecko round and round the water cooler towards the snake. At one point the snake made a lunge for the second gecko and very nearly caught it, but, having had one meal already, it was obvious that the snakes cold, reptilian heart just wasn’t in it. After a few minutes of stick waving, the snake gave us a tired look and slithered away. Alex and I went back to weighing wads of tree bark.
Thursday 12 August 2010
Dinner in Semliki
Thursday, 12th August, Semliki Time: 9:48
One problem that plagues Semliki and many other national parks is that of poaching. On one of our first nights in camp, we were greeted by the spectacle of a ring of fire on a nearby hill. Edson told us, with gloomy resignation, that the fire had been started by locals in order to drive out wild animals which could either be caught or sold as bushmeat. Various signs of poaching are visible throughout the park and the remnants of camp fires on out-of-the-way hillsides are a regular occurrence. A less regular, but still common, sight are the little pits dug for animal traps, and these snares pop up often in out-of-the-way places. Some of them are large enough to trap buffalo or even chimpanzee and, while the rangers do their best to find and arrest poachers, the size of the park and the proportion of the total area covered by trails renders the problem similar to that of finding a needle in a haystack. Just now, from outside, I heard something that sounded very much like a gunshot and it is more than likely that some unfortunate rare creature was just sent on an all expenses paid holiday to meet its maker.
The worst thing about poaching is that it is not only very difficult to combat, but completely understandable. If you were living below the poverty line and one of the only ways to get a decent meal for yourself and your next of kin was to go into the forest and bump off a few buffalo, would you care too much about whether the land you were stealing from was protected by law? If an Elephant tusk could fetch as much as you would otherwise earn in a month and elephants regularly marauded past your village, wouldn’t you be tempted take a few pot shots? It is for this exact reason that many of the worlds endangered species are fast making the transition from ‘endless forms most beautiful’ to ‘limited meals most scrumptious’ and, as far as I can see it, there’s absolutely no solution. Depressing, I know, hopefully I’ll think of something more uplifting to write tomorrow.
One problem that plagues Semliki and many other national parks is that of poaching. On one of our first nights in camp, we were greeted by the spectacle of a ring of fire on a nearby hill. Edson told us, with gloomy resignation, that the fire had been started by locals in order to drive out wild animals which could either be caught or sold as bushmeat. Various signs of poaching are visible throughout the park and the remnants of camp fires on out-of-the-way hillsides are a regular occurrence. A less regular, but still common, sight are the little pits dug for animal traps, and these snares pop up often in out-of-the-way places. Some of them are large enough to trap buffalo or even chimpanzee and, while the rangers do their best to find and arrest poachers, the size of the park and the proportion of the total area covered by trails renders the problem similar to that of finding a needle in a haystack. Just now, from outside, I heard something that sounded very much like a gunshot and it is more than likely that some unfortunate rare creature was just sent on an all expenses paid holiday to meet its maker.
The worst thing about poaching is that it is not only very difficult to combat, but completely understandable. If you were living below the poverty line and one of the only ways to get a decent meal for yourself and your next of kin was to go into the forest and bump off a few buffalo, would you care too much about whether the land you were stealing from was protected by law? If an Elephant tusk could fetch as much as you would otherwise earn in a month and elephants regularly marauded past your village, wouldn’t you be tempted take a few pot shots? It is for this exact reason that many of the worlds endangered species are fast making the transition from ‘endless forms most beautiful’ to ‘limited meals most scrumptious’ and, as far as I can see it, there’s absolutely no solution. Depressing, I know, hopefully I’ll think of something more uplifting to write tomorrow.
Tuesday 10 August 2010
Cutting the Crap
Monday, 10th August, Semliki Time: 7:33
It must be beginners luck. Alex and I got five weeks without seeing chimps and today, when the Americans turn up, they basically threw themselves at us. It was not yet eight when we stumbled upon our first cartload of the great apes. As an aside, cartload is the correct collective noun. No jokes. Where was I? Yes. It was not yet eight when we stumbled upon our first bevy of the seemly simians, happily munching figs in the middle of the savannah. The view was tremendous and there were about six of them, three in plain sight. We positively identified one of them as ‘Buzz’ within the first three minutes and pencilled another one down as the chimp ‘McGrew’. One of the distinguishing features of ‘McGrew’, according to our book, is that he’s ‘more robust than Mitani’, a subject of great mirth among us Cantabrigian primatologists. The day was all together quite productive and, while we lost the chimps after about an hour of good observation, we caught up with them for a few minutes at around 10:50. My leg, which I had recently driven a spike through, wasn’t so great on the ascents and descents, but by the end of the day had started to hurt considerably less. Deep heat is a wonderful thing.
Today was also a special day for me. Today I became a man. Today I sieved my first chimpanzee shit. Poo sieving, quite frankly, sounded nasty. As man’s closest living relative, I was expecting chimp dung to smell foul and, under the veneer of someone who was ‘not yet settled in’, I’d managed to put off any form of poo research for weeks. I am happy to report that shit-sluicing is not only completely bearable, but is actually rather fun. The chimpanzee diet is composed of mostly fruit (when they can get it) and vegetation, neither of which are conducive to the bacteria which so revolt the human nose. The poo is collected in the forest in sandwich bags and stored for ‘later analysis’. At the end of the day, the baggies are taken to the stream and, one after the other, filled with water. Once filled, the faeces are kneaded and mushed around within the bags until they form a golden-brown stool cocktail. This is then poured into a corrugated pan and the pan is sluiced through the water, much like one pans for gold. The panning for nuggets of Pan gold was my job. Two pink washing-up gloves being the only thing that stood between me and shitty fingers, I washed and swirled with great gusto. The brown mush gradually disappeared, revealing untold treasures – in this case, a collection of fig seeds, fruit stones and plant pith. The third turd also contained, most excitingly of all, a lithe, wriggling intestinal parasite. My money’s on roundworm! We’ll probably be faeces fishing every day, and if I find any more pooey treasures, you’ll be the first to hear about it!
It must be beginners luck. Alex and I got five weeks without seeing chimps and today, when the Americans turn up, they basically threw themselves at us. It was not yet eight when we stumbled upon our first cartload of the great apes. As an aside, cartload is the correct collective noun. No jokes. Where was I? Yes. It was not yet eight when we stumbled upon our first bevy of the seemly simians, happily munching figs in the middle of the savannah. The view was tremendous and there were about six of them, three in plain sight. We positively identified one of them as ‘Buzz’ within the first three minutes and pencilled another one down as the chimp ‘McGrew’. One of the distinguishing features of ‘McGrew’, according to our book, is that he’s ‘more robust than Mitani’, a subject of great mirth among us Cantabrigian primatologists. The day was all together quite productive and, while we lost the chimps after about an hour of good observation, we caught up with them for a few minutes at around 10:50. My leg, which I had recently driven a spike through, wasn’t so great on the ascents and descents, but by the end of the day had started to hurt considerably less. Deep heat is a wonderful thing.
Today was also a special day for me. Today I became a man. Today I sieved my first chimpanzee shit. Poo sieving, quite frankly, sounded nasty. As man’s closest living relative, I was expecting chimp dung to smell foul and, under the veneer of someone who was ‘not yet settled in’, I’d managed to put off any form of poo research for weeks. I am happy to report that shit-sluicing is not only completely bearable, but is actually rather fun. The chimpanzee diet is composed of mostly fruit (when they can get it) and vegetation, neither of which are conducive to the bacteria which so revolt the human nose. The poo is collected in the forest in sandwich bags and stored for ‘later analysis’. At the end of the day, the baggies are taken to the stream and, one after the other, filled with water. Once filled, the faeces are kneaded and mushed around within the bags until they form a golden-brown stool cocktail. This is then poured into a corrugated pan and the pan is sluiced through the water, much like one pans for gold. The panning for nuggets of Pan gold was my job. Two pink washing-up gloves being the only thing that stood between me and shitty fingers, I washed and swirled with great gusto. The brown mush gradually disappeared, revealing untold treasures – in this case, a collection of fig seeds, fruit stones and plant pith. The third turd also contained, most excitingly of all, a lithe, wriggling intestinal parasite. My money’s on roundworm! We’ll probably be faeces fishing every day, and if I find any more pooey treasures, you’ll be the first to hear about it!
Monday 9 August 2010
The Colgate Frown
Monday, 9th August, Semliki Time: 6:15
After much palaver, muddle and general red-tapery, we’re finally back in camp, our permits sorted and under no danger of being ejected by force. We are also no longer the only wazungu in the chimp project and David (the new camp manager) and Holly (his glamorous assistant) met us in Kampala and headed out with us. We spent the day dealing with a little more bureaucracy, in the from of “Chris Aggrey”, the head warden. They say that power corrupts and, while this might not always be true, it does seem to inflate egos. Aggrey berated us for not turning up at his office three weeks before hand, chastised the camp's lack of progress in habituating the chimps, boasted of his copious experience of Europe and droned on and on about how much improvement had been made to the Semliki National Park during his tenure as Head Warden. David, Holly, Alex and I nodded and made noises of affirmation for at least an hour, until we were actually starting to become hoarse.
I’m happy to have returned to the jungle, although disappointed that one of my tests might prove unreliable. I had the bright idea that we might be able to test whether the chimps were using bark as tooth brushes by dousing the wads in dental disclosing solution. I e-mailed Bill who thought this was a peachy idea and, out of his own pocket, paid for two bottles of “Agent Blue” mouth wash and dental-disclosing solution to be sent to David and Holly and flown to Semliki. Bill, if you’re reading this, I intend to pay you fluid ounce for fluid ounce in whisky. The solution arrived intact and minty fresh, and, first thing on my return, I set to trying it out on my own teeth as well as a few pieces of bark I had lying around. Sadly, it turns out that the stuff dyes not just plaque, but everything. This means than any tests I’m going to be able to do with it will be wholly unreliable unless I find a way to distinguish the blue it dyes plants from the blue it dyes bark. I live in hope, but it came as rather a blow.
Anyway, as we’re now four people using one solar battery, I’ll cut my blog entry off here. Tomorrow, if I’ve enough juice, I intent to wax lyrical about the joys of Fort Portal. If the chimps don’t show up first, that is.
After much palaver, muddle and general red-tapery, we’re finally back in camp, our permits sorted and under no danger of being ejected by force. We are also no longer the only wazungu in the chimp project and David (the new camp manager) and Holly (his glamorous assistant) met us in Kampala and headed out with us. We spent the day dealing with a little more bureaucracy, in the from of “Chris Aggrey”, the head warden. They say that power corrupts and, while this might not always be true, it does seem to inflate egos. Aggrey berated us for not turning up at his office three weeks before hand, chastised the camp's lack of progress in habituating the chimps, boasted of his copious experience of Europe and droned on and on about how much improvement had been made to the Semliki National Park during his tenure as Head Warden. David, Holly, Alex and I nodded and made noises of affirmation for at least an hour, until we were actually starting to become hoarse.
I’m happy to have returned to the jungle, although disappointed that one of my tests might prove unreliable. I had the bright idea that we might be able to test whether the chimps were using bark as tooth brushes by dousing the wads in dental disclosing solution. I e-mailed Bill who thought this was a peachy idea and, out of his own pocket, paid for two bottles of “Agent Blue” mouth wash and dental-disclosing solution to be sent to David and Holly and flown to Semliki. Bill, if you’re reading this, I intend to pay you fluid ounce for fluid ounce in whisky. The solution arrived intact and minty fresh, and, first thing on my return, I set to trying it out on my own teeth as well as a few pieces of bark I had lying around. Sadly, it turns out that the stuff dyes not just plaque, but everything. This means than any tests I’m going to be able to do with it will be wholly unreliable unless I find a way to distinguish the blue it dyes plants from the blue it dyes bark. I live in hope, but it came as rather a blow.
Anyway, as we’re now four people using one solar battery, I’ll cut my blog entry off here. Tomorrow, if I’ve enough juice, I intent to wax lyrical about the joys of Fort Portal. If the chimps don’t show up first, that is.
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