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 18^th 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.

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 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!

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.

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!

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!

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?

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

Sunday, 8th August, Kampala Time: 4:35

There are many things in which the people of Uganda display admirable tenacity. One of these things is enduring large amounts of noise pollution. The only thing that the people here excel at more than enduring the most bone-shaking cacophonies is creating them. A couple of nights ago, we stayed at the ‘New City Annex’ Hotel, where we paid though the nose for the only available room, a “luxury double suite”. The word luxury was perhaps an exaggeration, but it did have clean sheets and an electric fan, which was more than most places offer. Sadly the dream did not last. Our room, while comfortable, didn’t have any glass in the window it shared with the hotel kitchens. All that separated us and the hotel's dishwashing facilities was strip of thin wire mesh. This would have been fine if it weren’t for the fact that the dishes were washed in large, steel pans, starting from around midnight. Each time I wandered towards a temperate and blissful dreamland, I was dragged back to reality by the sound of someone filling these stupendous metal resonating chambers with water from what I can only imagine was one of those hoses you use to blast the dirt of the side of houses. At 1:30, I stormed downstairs.
“WHEN WILL THE WASHING UP BE FINISHED IN THERE”, I yelled at their unfortunate shift manger.
“Sir” he replied politely, “they shall be working … all night”.
They worked … all night. They were nice enough to fill the tubs up more slowly for us, but this simply drew out the pain.

Last night we were stranded in Fort Portal and endured a similarly excruciating experience. The main-road noise running right under our window was bad enough, but it was nothing compared to the 100-decibel instrumental nursery rhyme music that pumped from a concealed source somewhere over the road. This was replaced at about 1 a.m. with the sound of terrible terrible African pop music from the next door night club, which was in turn replaced at 6 a.m. by the sound of someone somewhere else in the guest house having a fraught argument in Swahili. When the apocalypse comes, I do not envision the sound of screams and hellfire. Oh no. There could surely be nothing more fitting to the end of the earth than a tinny recording of “When the saints come marching in” played louder than a Black Sabbath concert. This morning we discovered that the kindergarten choonz were being played by a lone woman attempting to draw visitors to her shop. The mind boggles.

The news has just arrived that that the car is leaking radiator fluid and we’ll be spending another night in the same place. Tonight I shall go to sleep dreaming of my bed in the jungle. The sounds of colobus fighting, cicadas calling, lions roaring, leopards growling and lizards running past the bed aren’t exactly soporific, but compared to African hotels, it will be heaven.


(P.S. Happy 28th Birthday, Mom!)

Service with a frown

Friday, 6^th August, Kampala Time: 6:33

If there’s one thing that Kampalans have mastered, it's the art of obviously not giving a flying hoot. From the humble restaurant waiter to the district police chief’s deputy, each one has perfected a set of mannerisms which clearly say “Not only do I not care about you as a person, not only do I resent your presence and wish you had chosen to bother someone else, I am interacting with you purely because I am being paid to and, only then, because I haven not yet concocted a palpable excuse to ignore you and go somewhere else”. This atmosphere of complete indifference is so perfectly executed that I’ve started to quite admire it. When it's not getting in the way of important business, it's semi-amusing, it isn’t malicious, and it's completely honest. Many a time, during my dark teenage past as an inept purveyor of service to customers, I’ve wished that I could simply ignore a rude or pushy patron. Instead, one’s contract forces one to grit one’s teeth, pull a crocodile smile and think of England. Or, if exposed to the typically British distain for shop clerks, think of some other country entirely. Many Ugandans simply do not attempt to be nice to their customers, and it's something I’m beginning to respect.

There are times, however, when the Ugandan “service with a frown” is less than helpful. One such situation is when you’ve had your wallet stolen. Sadly, the aforementioned “catastrophe number two”, due to a combination of bad luck and profound stupidity, involved the disappearance of my wallet, along with a couple of hundred pounds. I’d just taken out extra funds to last me to the end of my trip and the wallet theft happened at the exact worst time. A sizable portion of today, as well as yesterday, was spent in the Kampala police station dealing with ‘bureaucracy’. Yesterday I went in, reported the theft, and wrote down exactly what was in the wallet. I was told to return after 11 the today to pick up my report. Today I returned at 12 noon to pick up my report. I was told to return at 3 p.m. to pick up my report. I sat in the sizzling heat, slowly burning for an hour and had a nice chat with the head of a police division, who probably wanted to extract money from me. I gave him my e-mail none the less, he was a very genial fellow and is welcome to try!

I went back in at 1:30 to check how things were going. The unhelpful man behind the desk glowered at me.

“What time is it now, sir” he asked.

“It’s half one”, I raised my eyebrows, anticipating the next sentence.

“And what time did we ask you to come” he concluded.

“Three”, the stupid Mzungu replied.

So, after some more waiting, this time with Alex, I headed upstairs at three. This time the unhelpful man had been replaced with an equally unhelpful woman. “We cannot write a report”, she told me, “The district where your incident happened belongs to the Owena police station”. As I was standing in a police station responsible for crime in the whole country, this reply did not quite cut the mustard. I pleaded for a while. Eventually she got fed up with my pleading and sent me to a room with unhelpful man number one and some species of police chief. I asked the unhelpful man number one why they could not write up a report for me at the central police station. He told me it was because they had to finish a report with the words “the scene of the crime has been visited, and the event has been confirmed”. I asked him why we could not visit the scene of the crime (just down the road) and confirm the event. He told me that it was too far away. I asked him whether this particular report could be ended without the words “the scene of the crime has been visited, and the event has been confirmed”. He said that this was impossible. I asked him whether he could just write that the scene of the crime had been visited and the event had been confirmed. He explained this with a very helpful analogy:

“When you get a grade in school, sir, do you get it without doing a test?”

I had to admit the truth of this. Very few of my grades in school have ever been given without taking a test. One thing that was being tested, however, was my patience.

“I HAVE TO LEAVE TOMORROW AND I NEED A REPORT TODAY, PLEASE TELL ME HOW I CAN GET ONE, TODAY”.

At this point the nondescript police chief joined the foray. He said something to the unhelpful man, who scowled. The words “This is Africa!” were spoken and “get him a form”. The unhelpful man turned away, with a petulant look of defeat. A woman came in and started screaming to the police chief about a land dispute. After about ten minutes, I asked the sulking man if he was going to help me get a report. “Well I’m not…” he replied with bad grace. The police chief waved the screaming woman out and ushered me into another room. Here I was left with a group of gossiping women. The gossip switched between English and Lugandan very rapidly, but I picked up enough to know that someone had done something outrageous! I was quite flushed, so they told me to calm down. They seemed very concerned about why I had decided to visit Uganda, and told me that there were better countries to go too. I told them that the Ugandans were very honest and, while shop keepers in India charged tourists 5 times what they charged locals, the Ugandans only charged double. This remark was well received and, after finishing a late lunch, they wrote up my report and sent me on my merry way.

Friday, 6^th August, Kampala Time: 6:33

If there’s one thing that Kampalans have mastered, it's the art of obviously not giving a flying hoot. From the humble restaurant waiter to the district police chief’s deputy, each one has perfected a set of mannerisms which clearly say “Not only do I not care about you as a person, not only do I resent your presence and wish you had chosen to bother someone else, I am interacting with you purely because I am being paid to and, only then, because I haven not yet concocted a palpable excuse to ignore you and go somewhere else”. This atmosphere of complete indifference is so perfectly executed that I’ve started to quite admire it. When its not getting in the way of important business, its semi-amusing, it isn’t malicious, and its completely honest. Many a time, during my dark teenage past as an inept purveyor of service to customers, I’ve wished that I could simply ignore a rude or pushy patron. Instead, one’s contract forces on to grit one’s teeth, pull a crocodile smile and think of England. Or, if exposed to the typically British distain for shop clerks, think of some other country entirely. Many Ugandans simply do not attempt to be nice to their customers, and its something I’m beginning to respect.

There are times, however, when the Ugandan “Service with a frown” is less than helpful. One such situation is when you’ve had your wallet stolen. Sadly, the aforementioned “catastrophe number two”, due to a combination of bad luck and profound stupidity, involved the disappearance of my wallet, along with a couple of hundred pounds. I’d just taken out extra funds to last me to the end of my trip and the wallet theft happened at the exact worst time. A sizable portion of today, as well as yesterday, was spent in the Kampala police station dealing with ‘bureaucracy’. Yesterday I went in, reported the theft, and wrote down exactly what was in the wallet. I was told to return after 11 the today to pick up my report. Today I returned at 12 to pick up my report. I was told to return at 3pm to pick up my report. I sat in the sizzling heat, slowly burning for an hour and had a nice chat with the head of a police division, who probably wanted to extract money from me. I gave him my e-mail none the less, he was a very genial fellow and is welcome to try!

I went back in at 1:30 to check how things were going. The unhelpful man behind the desk glowered at me.

“What time is it now, sir” he asked.

“It’s half one”, I raised my eyebrows, anticipating the next sentence.

“And what time did we ask you to come” he concluded.

“Three”, the stupid Mzungu replied.

So, after some more waiting, this time with Alex, I headed upstairs at three. This time the unhelpful man had been replaced with an equally unhelpful woman. “We cannot write a report”, she told me, “The district where your incident happened belongs to the Owena police station”. As I was standing in a police station responsible for crime in the whole country, this reply did not quite cut the mustard. I pleaded for a while. Eventually she got fed up with my pleading and sent me to a room with unhelpful man number one and some species of police chief. I asked the unhelpful man number one why they could not write up a report for me at the central police station. He told me it was because they had to finish a report with the words “the scene of the crime has been visited, and the event has been confirmed”. I asked him why we could not visit the scene of the crime (just down the road) and confirm the event. He told me that it was too far away. I asked him whether this particular report could be ended without the words “the scene of the crime has been visited, and the event has been confirmed”. He said that this was impossible. I asked him whether he could just write that the scene of the crime had been visited and the event had been confirmed. He explained this with a very helpful analogy:

“When you get a grade in school, sir, do you get it without doing a test?”

I had to admit the truth of this. Very few of my grades in school have ever been given without taking a test. One thing that was being tested, however, was my patience.

“I HAVE TO LEAVE TOMORROW AND I NEED A REPORT TODAY, PLEASE TELL ME HOW I CAN GET ONE, TODAY”.

At this point the nondescript police chief joined the foray. He said something to the unhelpful man, who scowled. The words “This is Africa!” were spoken and “get him a form”. The unhelpful man turned away, with a petulant look of defeat. A woman came in and started screaming to the police chief about a land dispute. After about ten minutes, I asked the sulking man if he was going to help me get a report. “Well I’m not…” he replied with bad grace. The police chief waved the screaming woman out and ushered me into another room. Here I was left with a group of gossiping women. The gossip switched between English and Lugandan very rapidly, but I picked up enough to know that someone had done something outrageous! I was quite flushed, so they told me to calm down. They seemed very concerned about why I had decided to visit Uganda, and told me that there were better countries to go too. I told them that the Ugandans were very honest and, while shop keepers in India charged tourists 5 times what they charged locals, the Ugandans only charged double. This remark was well received and, after finishing a late lunch, they wrote up my report and sent me on my merry way.

Bollards, Mzungu and Stairs, Oh my!

Wednesday, 4th August, Kampala Time: 4:27

The last two days have not been the best of my life. In the space of 24 hours, I managed to loose a pair of PJ bottoms, roughly £150 and, temporarily, the use of my left leg. Let's start with that. We were off to “Garden city” once more to indulge in the pleasures of civilization (Toy Story 3 and the Food Court). You will be disappointed to hear that the Food Court’s “Italian and Persian” restaurant was closed, but this was not the worst of it. After a rather excruciating mtatu (a kinda make-shift bus) ride though rush-hour traffic, we arrived outside Garden City. All that stood between us and a world of food and films was a road, divided by a row of bollards strung together by chains. As we nimbly hopped over the first of the two sets of chains, the bollards appeared fairly innocuous. If I’d inspected them further, I would have noticed that they were covered in twisting pointed spikes. In fact, closer inspection proved unnecessary for, as I hoisted my leg over the second set of chains, their presence was driven home hard. Not only was it driven home hard, it was driven right into my kneecap. Hard.

Thinking I’d knocked my leg, I’d did the whole “Oh! Ow! Aren’t I stupid” song and dance and began to cross the road. I noticed my vision had started to go a bit fuzzy and my hearing had lessened, but I didn’t think too much of it. The words
“Duncan, are you bleeding” roused me from my stupor. “Oh, yes, yes, I rather am”, I replied.

Feeling quite faint by now, I stumbled to a low wall and sat down. A friendly and sympathetic Ugandan asked if I was okay and, when I showed him the neat puncture mark in my knee, started to shake his head and click his tongue sympathetically. Another Ugandan, equally kind and with more initiative than the first, grabbed my leg and looked at me sternly. “Does this hurt?” he said, swinging my leg from side too side. I was somewhat to preoccupied by the pain to answer him, so he started kneading the knee itself. “How does that feel?”. I whimpered perfunctory thanks and hobbled away from my benefactors as fast as my working leg would carry me. We were off to meet a pair of American primatologists who will be with us in Semliki for the remainder of our stay though I can’t say I made a fantastic first impression. I grimaced all through the meal and was told that I looked “pale”.

During the film it was a lot better. In fact, by the end of Toy Story 3 (Good, but not as good as 1 or 2 or Ratatouille or Up), I’d completely forgotten the pain. Standing up at the end of the film swiftly reminded me, however, and the 100m walk downstairs was enough to necessitate another rest. It was nothing, however, compared to the taxi drive home, by the end of which I’d broken into a cold sweat and my eyes were watering profusely. I’m not sure how far the spike had gone in, but my body was complaining. Luckily, the stiff gin and tonic, followed by a strong anti-inflammatory and pain killer meant that, by the time I woke up, I could pretty much walk unaided. This was a relief, as if it had not got better, I would in not was have been prepared for catastrophe number two. But let’s leave that for another blog entry, shall we..?

Civilisation too!

Monday, 2nd August. Kampala Time: 07:21pm

For people as civilization-deprived as Alex and I, Kampala is an absolute delight. There’s good food to eat, chocolate to buy, I managed to buy a charger for my phone, a battery for my watch, a new towel, some new socks and enough chocolate to sink a ship. Did I mention the chocolate? Squandering a day in an interesting and exciting foreign city by running around a shopping centre initially inspired a feeling of guilt, but after a hazelnut coffee, a hotdog and a visit to the “crafts market”, this quickly vanished.

Yesterday, although one of the most exhausting days of my life, was also rather exciting. Alex and I decided that, after four weeks of jungle, we would treat ourselves to a ride in Kampala’s “revolving restaurant”. The place was lush, lush in a very stereotyped was, but lush none the less. The chairs were seated next to the window on a doughnut shaped conveyer belt, which did a full trip of the Kampala skyline once every 90 minutes. Disconcertingly, the middle of the restaurant was quite stationary, not only did the vista of Kampala leisurely wander by, but so did the bar, the toilets and the lifts. Although the experience of a changing view was novel, the fact that the walls kept moving past was mildly nauseating. The food was also not the best food in the entire world, but was very ample indeed and steak, although its been nicer, has never tasted it. We’re only in Kampala till Wednesday, so tonight we’re off to a restaurant called “Boda boda”, which promises African fusion cuisine and cocktails into the bargin. Providing no one decides to bomb it, we should be okay!

After not sleeping a lick, or a wink, or whatever it is that you kids are calling it these days, Alex and I tumbled out of bed at 5:30 for the drive in to Fort Portal. In Fort Portal, I picked up some African cocoa and “two bacon piece” for breakfast, as well as a copy of Red Pepper, to entertain me on the coach journey.

After being cooped in the same place for the best part of four weeks, it's amazing how refreshing a change of scene can be. The many and varied people we saw from the bus windows, doing many and varied things, excited and delighted the senses. Humans really are a fascinating species – so adaptable, so diverse. “Culture”, or something like that, they call it. Anyway, evidence of “culture” abounded, as it does anywhere you’re not familiar with. The brightly-painted houses advertising various soft drinks and phone networks, the people cycling with bunches of bananas larger than their bikes, the women carrying large buckets of water on their heads, the general variety of human activity thrilled my inner anthropologist no end. Never is ‘culture’ so obvious and vibrant as when you’re not used to it. Tiredness has seriously set in, so I apologise if that was somewhat garbled. What I’m trying to get across is that seeing so many people after seeing only five or six for the past age was wonderful.

Not so wonderful was the woman on the bus, who borrowed my copy of Red Pepper. I was perfectly happy to lend out Red Pepper, of course, but the problem was that she wouldn’t give it back. After reading it cover-to-cover, she proceeded to go to sleep on it, which I felt rather rude. I waited for a few minutes for her to wake up, but when next I looked, my Red Pepper was gone, and the woman was still asleep. Looking across the bus, I saw another fellow cheerily reading the publication, without a care in the world. I watched as Red Pepper wound its merry way around almost everyone in the bus. Eventually, it made its way back to the woman, who went to sleep on it again. To cut a long story short, when she stopped for a toilet break, I stole it back and pointedly read it.

The story continues. There are shopping centres, revolving restaurants and Impala, but I’m afraid that's it for the time being, I’m just too tired to tell it. Goodnight!