Ant Lions

It’s only been a couple of weeks since I last wrote anything but it seems like forever. A lot of nothing happens in Africa in two weeks. Right now as I write, I’m sitting with my feet up on the desk in our room and they’re almost black from the dust in the road where I just spent the last three hours with a broken down car. Ruth’s trying to get me up to head for dinner at the next house over but I think I’ll stay here for a minute. It seemed like a simple trip into Mang’ula to get supplies: eggs, papaya, oranges, soap, water and a crate of beer. But it turned out to be a class of car repair African style 101. It was like if a guy’s bike broke down in front of the Federal in Durham on a Sunday night and out streamed the whole bike COOP crew with messenger bags full of bike tools pulling a high speed NASCAR pit crew repair on it. If my writing seems hard to follow it’s because I broke into Babu Tom’s crate of beer a little earlier in the day than I should. Anyway, I went to Mang’ula to buy all these supplies for Tom, Ruth’s professor, who arrived in Tanzania three days ago. He’s also known as greybeard, and to the locals he’s a revered figure. He spent decades in the forest in Uganda studying the red colobus monkey and has published a few important books. There is also a greater respect for elders here than in many western cultures, and there may not be another man sporting such a respectable beard and head of grey hair within 100 miles. Anyway Babu, which means grandfather, likes to have a few beers of the evening and talk about the effects of indigenous and migrant human overpopulation on Africa’s last pristine forests causing the inevitable extinction of endangered primate species enabled by corpulently corrupt National Park officials. That’s a long sentence, but it’s a long story. It’s not a conversation that you can have sober because it’s too depressing. So anyway, I went to town to get some groceries and beer. Unfortunately after I had walked around the market looking for an edible papaya for about an hour, I got in the car and it wouldn’t start! Classic case of the non starts. The motor kept turning over and over and just wouldn’t catch. This happened to my Volvo in Durham and sidelined that car for about 8 months but that’s another story- how many physicists does it take to change a relay switch? I felt truly F$%^ked. No tools and pretty much in the middle of main street Mang’ula in front of the egg man’s shop. I was also supposed to pick up Ruth and Babu Tom from the forest in 1 hour and knew that wasn’t going to happen. So I got out and popped the hood and kicked the tires hoping that there would be an obvious solution. Of course there wasn’t, but popping the hood was like a secret signal to the African version of the Green Angels and soon there were not one but ten heads peering into the engine compartment. Of course the first order of business is to determine whether it was a fuel or an electrical problem. It wasn’t firing due to no igniting spark or no explosive gas. So we took the plug wire off, grounded it and turned her over. There was a spark! Not an electrical problem, or so it seemed. We also checked the air filter and the fuel filter as I suspected these might be clogged from the dusty roads and the dirty gas but at this point I could hardly even budge my way in close enough to see what was going on. I was doing my best to keep track of all the loose parts and bolts being cast aside. It was practically out of my hands so for the next two hours I watched an impressive display of intuitive yet primitive (e.g. the rear of the car was lifted by 6 men onto bricks) collaborative mechanics. There were two main guys who took over. The primary genius, with an intellectually promising stutter arrived on the scene out of a crack in the wall and took his good pants and clean shirt off before crawling under the car to determine the source of the fuel problem. Some bystanders accused me of letting the car run out of gas, and for a minute there I felt like it might become very embarrassing but after removing fuel lines at the motor, turning the key and listening for pump action with an ear to the gas tank cap we (they) were soon convinced that it was a fuel pump failure and so the gas tank was removed to gain access to the pump. Not a minor job. However it was done without a second thought or even with my permission. I became another bystander, occasionally adding my encouragement or once pointing at the correct electrical connection and grunting when I saw a guy make an obvious mistake. I didn’t know any good Swahili words for car repairs. With the car lifted onto bricks in the middle of town and an endless stream of gawkers, these guys methodically backtracked from the fuel pump through the electrical system, using a light bulb and two wires to check for current, to a small relay/fuse (flash box? I didn’t know the Swahili word for this connector) which was malfunctioning and repaired it, perhaps just bypassing it, with another short section of copper wire. Once the tank was put back on, along with the air hoses/filter and fuel lines on the motor, the car was good as new (at least for now). By then, Ruth and Babu Tom had come to find me wondering where the case of beer was and fearing that I had been kidnapped by Somali pirates since I didn’t show up at our meeting time.

From the best parts of Tanzania to the worst, Ruth’s professor’s visit has been eventful. We drove to Dar es Salaam, against our better judgment, to pick Tom up from the airport on Wednesday. It’s basically an 8 hour hell drive. Along the way there’s the Mikumi Park where we saw all kinds of African game but the majority of the drive is spent gripping the wheel with sweaty fists and neck muscles flexed twanging taut and dodging potholes, devastating speed bumps and oncoming semis and buses which use your lane like it’s their own and will out chicken you every time. Along the roadside there’s dudes in robes carrying spears, burning grasslands and masses of impoverished humanity giving the whole experience a surreal feeling. Dar is a cesspit. The city is insane and going back there brought back memories of our three-week stay. Along the way in, we were backed up in traffic for hours and even watched a guy violently slugging another man through the window of a stopped dalla-dalla on the side of the road. I could only wonder what will become of this main artery and the rest of Africa when fossil fuels become scarce. Perhaps it’ll return to the days of HM Stanley and Dr. Livingstone where years and many lives were lost crossing and discovering the Dark Continent. It only took us hours to retrace parts of their historic paths back to the coast – too little time to develop yellow fever and not stopping to trade beads for food and safe passage with the local tribes. Today’s porters are the roadside mechanics and the kids who pour buckets of petrol into the tank through a dirty rag. We naively returned to our old stomping grounds, staying the night at the Jambo Inn in the middle of town. We said hello to all our old ‘friends’ who were working the same scams on fresh batches of tourists. Tom probably knew better, but he had been on a plane for 32 hours when we picked him up that night and would hardly complain about the hotel that we took him to. Luckily when we parked the car we gave the guard 1,000 shillings to watch it and promised another 1,000 in the morning because we woke up to find that the car had been broken into and damaged during the night and it turned out that our only recourse was to lay the blame on the suspicious acting guard who had either fallen asleep or was in cahoots with the thieves. The criminals were long gone and whether they were known by our old friends is impossible to say. However, Tanzanian justice is pretty simple in that those in any way responsible must make amends. Ruth was a force to be reckoned with and unleashed her wrath on all those who stood between us and our release from the city’s diseased grip. What sucked was that it took us 5 hours to navigate the intricate and irresponsible hierarchy of the guard company and the hotel management to decide who would pay and to arrange for a mechanic to make the repairs. While we were disappointed of our hope for a smooth arrival and trip back to Mang’ula, Tom eased back into the African routine immediately. We were delayed by crime and disorganization then we were slowed by traffic and stopped along the way by police and finally made our way home to Mang’ula in the middle of the night regaled with Tom’s stories of being held up at gunpoint at army checkpoints during various Ugandan revolutions: classic African road trip? Driving through Mikumi we noticed reflective eyes shining back from the car’s high-beams in the trees on the side of the road and pulled the car over to discover that these were galagos (bushbabies), which are small tree dwelling nocturnal primates. These are super cute and elusive and Ruth had been hoping to see one for some time which made her really happy. I was glad since she also had to endure the pain of trying to close our old bank account in Dar. At one point they were refusing to let us withdraw our money! Such a pain, but all our cares were washed away when we got back to the research station. There is still peace and some reason in this little pocket of nature and we’re glad to be here.

Ahh, well I wish I had a picture of Babu Tom lecturing us on the global human pestilence for the blog but that’ll have to wait and I’m going to fill this one with nature photos which have been backing up on my hard drive. My favorite bird, aside from Georgia, is the owl. There are huge impressive ones in Magombera forest.



If you look up at the trees too much and not down at your feet then you’re likely to walk into siafu or into a spider’s web. God knows how many spider bites we’ve had so far but I don’t think that I’ve been bitten by the spider that makes this web.



Somehow, I get the feeling that it would cause an intense quantum physical hallucination and you’d wake up in an alternate universe. On the other side of the wormhole you might meet strange intelligent creatures like the mantis.



Even cooler though is the Mdudu of the day: the ant lion. These are all over the US but I’m not sure what they’re called here or whether these are distinct from the US version. They're great cuz they feed on siafu. They make a little funnel in the sand and lurk at the bottom and when an ant crawls in it gets trapped by the slippery slope and inevitably falls into the ant lion’s waiting jaws. To record this video, I dropped an ant into the pit after it was captured from our house then tried, convicted and sentenced to death for trespassing. The battle is lightening fast so I slowed it down 2x and was tripping when I heard the devil laughing in the background.



Uh, this is a surprise. It’s a shame to spoil the mystery, but this is what the ant lion looks like when dug out of its pit.