Dung Beetle

Dung beetles are fantastic animals. You can't really understand work ethic until you have sat and watched a dung beetle. They move tremendously fast. They have to stand on their heads and push with their rear legs. From that position they can't see where they are going so they have to stop every few seconds and jump on top of their ball of dung and turn in a circle to scope the route. Then they leap off and start pushing again like mad.

There are several kinds of dung beetles. Some are iridescent green.

This beetle got combative when I tried to take a picture of it. Looking at the photos I see that it has something clinging to it's underside. I don't know if those are little flies or if they are baby dung beetles. Perhaps it was protecting them or perhaps it was in a foul temper before I found it.

Nanyuki

I am in Botswana now. In Botswana there are only three affordable places to sleep in the whole country so mostly it's going to be camping in the forest. I still have tons of old blog posts from Ethiopia and every other country that I wanted to write... Here is a random post from Kenya. The picture is also random, taken from a game drive in Swaziland.

Nanyuki is one of the starting points for Mount Kenya expeditions. I had passed through the town in 2004 with a friend from Sudan, Lagu, when we climbed the mountain together. That time we didn't sleep in town so I didn't know where the hotels were.

I cycled for a while looking for one, but eventually just went with a street hawker who said he take me to a hotel that was pretty cheap. It turned out he was really a mountain guide looking for clients. He remembered Lagu. The first Sudanese man to climb Mount Kenya. He had been guiding two German women that time. We had met the women at the top and hiked down together.

The hotel where he led me, was next to the Montana Guide Company which Lagu and I had used. I saw our old guide in the hotel restaurant when I went to supper. We talked for a bit. He seemed despondent. Guiding is supposed to be a career. These guys are trained in safety and mountain lore. Normally it takes people four days to climb the mountain, but the guides can run to the top in eight hours if they need to. Business was down 90% because of all the post election killings. I offered to buy him supper or a drink, but his wife had already cooked dinner and it was almost night. It's dangerous to walk through town after dark.

After he left, a woman came over to my table. "I've already ordered," I told her, thinking she was a waitress.

"Oh. No," she says, "I'm not with the hotel. I'm an escort. I came to ask if you wanted a quickie."

I realised then that I had seen her outside talking to some guides. It was cool weather and she was wearing sensible clothes. Jeans. A light sweater. Tallish. Attractive. "Ah," I say, "No. I'm OK thanks."

Suspicious, she asks me, "You're OK? So if I come here later on, I'm going to see you with a woman?"

"Uh... No. It's just that I'm quite religious, yeah?"

"Oh." she says, looking at me as if I had just told her that I was gravely ill. "Oh." she says, "Sorry."

Elephant grass

Just me
And the road
And the wind and sun
And the rustle and smell
Of the elephant grass

Urban Legends...

When I was a kid, I went to a boarding school called Sakeji in the very north west tip of Zambia. It was a bit like something from a Charles Dickens novel. Very strict.

One time someone donated the school a ton of canned potatoes. The bad thing was that the potatoes tasted faintly of gasoline. We complained, but the word from above was that we should eat our potatoes or we would be given something real to complain about. For the next two months we had gasoline potatoes for lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

It sounds like I'm whining about food that I ate twenty years ago, but I'm not. It wasn't that big of a deal. I'm only giving that as example to show how at Sakeji we ate what we were given.

Most people liked the breakfasts at Sakeji. It was the same every day and it started out with a kind of milky, cracked corn porridge. One morning, I was about to dig into my porridge when I noticed a rat dropping on the top.

I didn't know what to do. Eventually, I decided to eat the porridge that was far away and figure out later on what to do about the rat dropping. Slowly by slowly, I nibbled away all the uncontroversial bits, until I had formed a small round island of porridge with the rat dropping at the center and I could not eat any further.

By this point, when I looked at my bowl, I realised there wasn't very much porridge left and I could probably throw it away without anyone accusing me of wasting food. We talked very proper English at boarding school. I asked, “Excuse me, Miss, there is a rat dropping here. Please, may I throw away the rest of my porridge?” My concern was that instead of throwing everything out, the teacher would just spoon the dropping off the top.

Fortunately, I had a new teacher recently arrived from Scotland. Apparently, she must have hated rats and rat related poo or something. Perhaps she had a general dislike of porridge poo combinations. Either way, she was eager that I do throw it out, immediately.

What made me think of that incident, was an urban legend here in South Africa about a tourist who was really paranoid about the drinking water. He did everything right and even used bottled water to brush his teeth, but right before he got on the plane to go back to America he caught leptospirosis and died. Leptospirosis is spread by rat urine. The story is that the tourist got the disease by drinking coke directly from the can. He would have been safe if only he had used a straw.

It's an irritating myth. You explain to people that it's just a made up story and they respond, “Well... It could have happened.” and you respond, “No. It couldn't have happened.” and they respond, “Well... I still think I'm going to use a straw.”

Listen people, just drink your coke. You do not need a straw. You are not going to die today.

Random old posts

This was when Henok and I were on the way to Bahir Dar. The tall kid saw us doing our traditional complete search to make sure we hadn't left anything in the room. He asked us if we had lost something and then gave us the phone number for the hotel and told us if we later found that we had lost something he could send it to us on the next bus.

Basically all other kids in Ethiopia spent every waking hour looking for cyclists to throw rocks at...

Remember when I said I was going to go to Durbin instead of the more traditional Cape Town? I'm in Durbin now. It took ten thousand kilometers worth of cycling to get here.

From here the plan is to cycle north to Botswana and Zambia.

It's winter down here. Apparently desperately cold when you go further inland. A couple weeks ago one of the roads was blocked with snow. Then later another road was blocked because the wind blew a couple trucks over. I was cycling in that wind one day. It was pretty intense. And obviously the stronger the wind the more likely it is to be blowing in the opposite direction from where you are going...

Mostly in South Africa I have been camping in caravan parks next to the beaches. School is out for the next two weeks so a lot of them are charging double the normal rate. Before that it was just Afrikaner pensioners. I'm not sure where I will stay when I go inland.