Mervyn Lobo's post
The Julius Nyerere National Park in southern Tanzania is larger than Switzerland. It is now home to the fourth largest dam in Africa and the hydroelectricity it produces is sufficient to meet the country’s needs. Parts of the park are still unexplored due to the infestation of tsetse flies in those areas.
Hunting is permitted in the game reserves surrounding the park. We had friends who every now and then would invite us to fill in the ‘extra’ seats on a hunting trip. The more vehicles the hunters had on a trip, the better their chances of returning home on time were. Roads or trails were non-existent for most part. Each expedition included a service vehicle so that when, not if, a vehicle broke down, repairs were done at least to the extent that the troubled vehicle could be towed home. The hunters were seasoned, organized and well equipped. We ‘fishermen’ went along for the adventure just like the hunters did when we required ‘extras’ for a deep-sea fishing trip.
Trails in the bush are usually formed when a bunny rabbit hops from its burrow to the nearest stream. Sooner or later, some other animal will use that path. Then a deer or predator will follow the trail. When elephants use the same trail, the passage becomes wide enough for a vehicle to follow. Following a path down to the stream is easy. The problem is that the bank on the other side is usually two meters high. You may have to travel a few hundred meters on the riverbed, up or downstream, to find a sloping exit point.
At one three km stretch, we had to cross the usually dry streambed three times, so it was decided before one trip that two vehicles would go a day ahead and carve out a new trail, all on one side of the stream. Cutting a trail through the shrubs presents one huge problem. The natural way to cut through a two cm thick bush stem is to swing the machete from top to bottom, hitting the stem diagonally - just like how you cut down a banana plant. The problem is that when you hit a hard wood shrub that way, you are left with a short, pointed stump. A stump that looks and behaves like a nail. That sharp stump will puncture or burst any tire that goes over it in the next five years.
The proper way to clear a trail is by making horizontal strokes with the machete, as close to the ground as possible. One person cuts down the vegetation and tosses it aside. Another follows behind to clear anything pointed that was overlooked. If you have sensitive skin, it is best you remain in the city. The foliage has poisons, irritants and thorns that affect even animals with thick hides. Newbies are warned that if they get an allergic reaction, the only remedy in the bush is for them to apply their own urine to the itchy parts. On the other hand, the cut vegetation releases aromas and other unforgettable scents. Till this very day, the aromas of freshly cut vegetation – even in a city park - will trigger a call for me to return to the bush.
Since the ground is always sloping towards a river or stream, the lead vehicle has to drive ahead in the meter high grass and survey that there are no insurmountable ditches or hurdles. An obstacle found late meant that the last hundred meters of work was wasted. In addition, cutting the grass and shrubs would clear the way for just one season as grass will usually catch fire and regrow. For this reason, the branches of the nearby trees have to be cut or notched in order to find the path the following year.
One of the laws of the savannah is that when you are looking for animals, they all disappear. You can sometimes spend half a day searching before you see one. When you are working in the bush, the opposite happens. You soon get the feeling that something is watching you. Not the eyes of a deer, but the focused eyes of a predator seem to fall on the back of your head.
Then there are porcupines, snakes, scorpions, beetles, ticks and biting insects of all sorts to deal with. When you are swinging a machete to raze their habitat, startled creatures will either fight you or flee. Either way, their sudden movements give you a fright. At times, you feel a bite on your forearm and when you take a look, there is no creature there or an invisible one.
The creature we feared the most was the Safari ant. Those guys do not hesitate when they are disturbed. In five seconds, there will be five ants biting you. For every extra second you stick around, there will be another two ants eating into you. You only need to see one snake and your progress slows down a lot. The puff adder is a well camouflaged, sluggish snake that may not move when threatened. It usually strikes you from behind after you have passed by and not noticed it. The Mozambican spitting cobra can target you accurately to six meters and blind you.
Carving a trail into the bush always has two consequences. One is that you destroy the immediate and nearby habitat. The second is that others will use the new trail to traverse into previously unreachable areas. They then lay traps and snares for game meat. Snares are indiscriminate, they also kill predators. Worse still, the snares maim the bigger animals that manage to escape. It is pitiful to see an elephant with part of its trunk missing.
After completing our new trail, we drove to an abandoned primary school to spend the night. In the first decade of independence, Tanzania embarked on a mission to wipe out illiteracy. Primary schools were built in remote villages using the ideology of self-help. The villagers provided the labour and the government provided materials and funds, which were often insufficient. As such, there were large gaps in some classrooms where there should have been doors and windows. Pupils often sat on the ground, but they were given a chance at formal education, an opportunity that their parents did not have.
The school we were going to sleep at had one building with three classrooms in a row. At right angles to one end, was the headmaster’s office. Adjacent to it was the staff office. A concrete slab, parallel to the complete classrooms, had already been poured. When finished, the school would have had a U shape with a packed earth, assembly yard in the center.
As the school served a wide geographical area, pupils had to start their trek at the break of dawn to get to school on time. Well, one morning a pupil arrived early and saw a pride of lions step out of one of the classrooms. To make matters worse, one lion started urinating on the outside wall. That lion was marking its territory and was sure to return and inspect it. As such, no pupil returned to the school and it was abandoned.
There is a smell that all wild animals, snakes, venomous insects and even ants do not like. They will all keep clear of the smell of diesel. All we had to do to use the abandoned school was to spray diesel on the outside walls. The corrugated iron roof sheets that remained meant that the classrooms were always dry and that we did not need to set up our tents.
Hunting is permitted in the game reserves surrounding the park. We had friends who every now and then would invite us to fill in the ‘extra’ seats on a hunting trip. The more vehicles the hunters had on a trip, the better their chances of returning home on time were. Roads or trails were non-existent for most part. Each expedition included a service vehicle so that when, not if, a vehicle broke down, repairs were done at least to the extent that the troubled vehicle could be towed home. The hunters were seasoned, organized and well equipped. We ‘fishermen’ went along for the adventure just like the hunters did when we required ‘extras’ for a deep-sea fishing trip.
Trails in the bush are usually formed when a bunny rabbit hops from its burrow to the nearest stream. Sooner or later, some other animal will use that path. Then a deer or predator will follow the trail. When elephants use the same trail, the passage becomes wide enough for a vehicle to follow. Following a path down to the stream is easy. The problem is that the bank on the other side is usually two meters high. You may have to travel a few hundred meters on the riverbed, up or downstream, to find a sloping exit point.
At one three km stretch, we had to cross the usually dry streambed three times, so it was decided before one trip that two vehicles would go a day ahead and carve out a new trail, all on one side of the stream. Cutting a trail through the shrubs presents one huge problem. The natural way to cut through a two cm thick bush stem is to swing the machete from top to bottom, hitting the stem diagonally - just like how you cut down a banana plant. The problem is that when you hit a hard wood shrub that way, you are left with a short, pointed stump. A stump that looks and behaves like a nail. That sharp stump will puncture or burst any tire that goes over it in the next five years.
The proper way to clear a trail is by making horizontal strokes with the machete, as close to the ground as possible. One person cuts down the vegetation and tosses it aside. Another follows behind to clear anything pointed that was overlooked. If you have sensitive skin, it is best you remain in the city. The foliage has poisons, irritants and thorns that affect even animals with thick hides. Newbies are warned that if they get an allergic reaction, the only remedy in the bush is for them to apply their own urine to the itchy parts. On the other hand, the cut vegetation releases aromas and other unforgettable scents. Till this very day, the aromas of freshly cut vegetation – even in a city park - will trigger a call for me to return to the bush.
Since the ground is always sloping towards a river or stream, the lead vehicle has to drive ahead in the meter high grass and survey that there are no insurmountable ditches or hurdles. An obstacle found late meant that the last hundred meters of work was wasted. In addition, cutting the grass and shrubs would clear the way for just one season as grass will usually catch fire and regrow. For this reason, the branches of the nearby trees have to be cut or notched in order to find the path the following year.
One of the laws of the savannah is that when you are looking for animals, they all disappear. You can sometimes spend half a day searching before you see one. When you are working in the bush, the opposite happens. You soon get the feeling that something is watching you. Not the eyes of a deer, but the focused eyes of a predator seem to fall on the back of your head.
Then there are porcupines, snakes, scorpions, beetles, ticks and biting insects of all sorts to deal with. When you are swinging a machete to raze their habitat, startled creatures will either fight you or flee. Either way, their sudden movements give you a fright. At times, you feel a bite on your forearm and when you take a look, there is no creature there or an invisible one.
The creature we feared the most was the Safari ant. Those guys do not hesitate when they are disturbed. In five seconds, there will be five ants biting you. For every extra second you stick around, there will be another two ants eating into you. You only need to see one snake and your progress slows down a lot. The puff adder is a well camouflaged, sluggish snake that may not move when threatened. It usually strikes you from behind after you have passed by and not noticed it. The Mozambican spitting cobra can target you accurately to six meters and blind you.
Carving a trail into the bush always has two consequences. One is that you destroy the immediate and nearby habitat. The second is that others will use the new trail to traverse into previously unreachable areas. They then lay traps and snares for game meat. Snares are indiscriminate, they also kill predators. Worse still, the snares maim the bigger animals that manage to escape. It is pitiful to see an elephant with part of its trunk missing.
After completing our new trail, we drove to an abandoned primary school to spend the night. In the first decade of independence, Tanzania embarked on a mission to wipe out illiteracy. Primary schools were built in remote villages using the ideology of self-help. The villagers provided the labour and the government provided materials and funds, which were often insufficient. As such, there were large gaps in some classrooms where there should have been doors and windows. Pupils often sat on the ground, but they were given a chance at formal education, an opportunity that their parents did not have.
The school we were going to sleep at had one building with three classrooms in a row. At right angles to one end, was the headmaster’s office. Adjacent to it was the staff office. A concrete slab, parallel to the complete classrooms, had already been poured. When finished, the school would have had a U shape with a packed earth, assembly yard in the center.
As the school served a wide geographical area, pupils had to start their trek at the break of dawn to get to school on time. Well, one morning a pupil arrived early and saw a pride of lions step out of one of the classrooms. To make matters worse, one lion started urinating on the outside wall. That lion was marking its territory and was sure to return and inspect it. As such, no pupil returned to the school and it was abandoned.
There is a smell that all wild animals, snakes, venomous insects and even ants do not like. They will all keep clear of the smell of diesel. All we had to do to use the abandoned school was to spray diesel on the outside walls. The corrugated iron roof sheets that remained meant that the classrooms were always dry and that we did not need to set up our tents.
After dinner, the first timers unrolled their sleeping bags and went to sleep in one classroom. The rest gathered by the bonfire in the center of the schoolyard to hear tales of past trips. The magic to yapping about past trips is to change the ending. People will enjoy an oft repeated story when they know that there may be a change in or a more entertaining ending. According to their drinking capacity, the bonfire and tale devotees retired one by one and went to sleep in the second classroom. I was half asleep and since er, manual work sometimes gives me entertaining dreams, I was skating perfect figure eights, backwards, on a giant creme caramel pudding when I heard a lion roaring.
This was not my first rodeo. I had a pretty good guess of what was happening. The one or two guys left at the bonfire had got inebriated and thought it would be a good idea to scare the first timers. So, I rolled over and went back to my cold world skating utopias.
Light intensity has always been my wake-up trigger and I usually am awake ten minutes before the sun pops out of the horizon. Those first few minutes of hearing birds herald in the new day and light slowly brightening the skies, are usually the best part of every workday. In the bush, the bonus is that you also hear wood-doves coo. However, on this morning, there was a little extra in the air. I felt I could almost hear two lions roaring i.e. a call and response.
To my surprise, there was no one at the bonfire. In fact, there were no flames at all, only ash and embers! This was strange as the guy who had to maintain the flames the whole night was one of the most reliable people. So, I stumbled to and peeked into the second classroom. The snoring said that there were at least two people there. While the snoring sounds were loud, they did not sound like lions. They had a timbre closer to that of a warthog relaxing in the mud.
The problem was that there should have been at least nine people in that room. As I was scratching my head, wondering where all the missing people were, I thought I heard a faint, dull thumping on metal and muffled shouting. So, I stepped out of the classroom and looked towards the end of the schoolyard, where the bush began. There was only one vehicle in sight when there should have been two. There also seemed to be several frightened people in that vehicle who were waving and shouting. I walked over and they excitedly explained that in their haste to get to the vehicle, they had left the vehicle keys behind. The question the tense people had was, would I be so kind as to retrieve the car keys from the classroom?
In later years, the tale was that all the people in the second vehicle were accountants. They had spent the prior few hours frozen by the sound of the roaring and the knowledge that their classroom had no door. When they heard the first vehicle start and leave, some got unfrozen and scrambled into the second vehicle.
The first vehicle returned an hour later with enough water and eggs to feed twenty people breakfast, but the accountants had lost their appetites. They pleaded to be taken home immediately and by the following weekend were demanding a full refund for the trip. The two mechanics who were snoring later woke up to the smell of coffee and fried eggs.
I went past that school ten years later and it remained abandoned. The corrugated iron sheets were still on. Nowadays, whenever I watch E. African wildlife videos on a cold winter’s night, I get miserable dreams about those kids who were cheated out of a formal education - by a lion pride.
All those who missed their chance at that school would be closer to fifty years old today.
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