Loafing on New Year's Eve

I'm attracted to superstition, but I'm not superstitious, except perhaps when it comes to natural processes. It doesn't seem to me to be black magic to feel that if the rivers are flowing and the clouds are blowing and the trees are growing as they should, then there is room for optimism. This is the source of the solace I take from the natural world, from wild places. The tide has gone out, but it will come in again.

So I took it as an auspicious auguring that the loaves of bread I baked as my contribution to a New Year's eve dinner last night were, if I say so myself, magnificent. The dough behaved as I expected it to, it swelled and rose in accordance with my understanding of the natural cycle of fermentation, understanding gained after significant effort and observation and much poking and prodding of moist compilations of flour and water. This is a blow-hardian way of saying that my sourdough starter is kicking ass right now.

It has been months since I used commercial yeast. I have no use for the stuff. An untouched jar of it sits in the fridge in the ghetto of mouldering condiments. This bread is made from water, flour and salt, one less ingredient than the Germans allow in their beer. Unless you count life itself as an ingredient, the wild, living yeasts of the air, which find their way into the starter to feed and multiply and expand. When they are doing their job this well, it is hard not to take it as a sign that it will be a glorious 2012!

I'm not bragging, I'm just saying: I would put these loaves up against Balthazar's in a shaolin kung-fu battle for bread supremacy. I apologize that there is no crumb shot, but I didn't want to bust any of these open before taking them to dinner, and snapping pictures of my own bread laid out on the groaning buffet table seemed dreadfully gauche, even for me. Technical details in the comments.

Suspension of Fishbelief

Taman Negara, Malaysia's spectacular and gigantic park, billed as "the world's oldest rainforest," is home to some amazing creatures, including the great argus, essentially a long-tailed chicken, but one so spectacularly plumed as to make peacocks seem rather petite by comparison. Tigers live here, as well as wild Asian elephants and neck-crookingly tall mahogany trees. I saw some spectacular birds (but not the argus--I'll have to go back!), but one of the oddest creatures was this fish, out for a stroll along the driveway, in its own fashion. Casual googling suggests it is an anabantoid, or climbing gourami, one of a number of species perfectly content to leave the water and walk about on the land for hours at a time, presumably in the interest of expanding territory and range.

When I first saw this fish I had an experience you will perhaps share while watching the beginning of this video, namely that the poor animal was being pulled along by some unseen hand, in the manner of a Times Square prankster dragging a twenty-dollar bill along the pavement on a bit of invisible monofilament. I looked around, to see if someone was having me on. Then I followed this little creature for a good hundred feet. Strangely, it stayed on the asphalt. After a time, perhaps exhausted, or having concluded that it was not going to have the luck suddenly to come across an unknown pond, it turned around, and started moving back in the direction from whence it had come.

What was that Boy Scout motto, again?

 

 

 

 

 

   

The very beautiful Taman Negara, or National Park, in peninsular Malaysia, has one major drawback. It's infested with leeches. Luckily, I have some leech socks. Unfortunately they are at the moment in the rubbermaid bin full of camping supplies, back home on the shelf in Brooklyn, NY. 

"They're not going to do you very much good there, are they?" snarked a fellow birder, when I explained my situation. I was admiring his pair and wondering where he had gotten them. 

I'm starting to feel more like a World War One battle re-enactor than a birder.

Right Foot

Achilles

The problem with forgetting your leech socks is you end up going through a lot of regular socks. I suppose you could just call them "leeched socks."

Left foot. Absolutely painless, but the vast quantities of blood are stress inducing nonetheless. Leeches apparently have a combination therapy analgesic and anticoagulant which they apply while incising, so that even if you catch them at their meals and flick them off, the wound continues to bleed. And bleed.

Simba!

My most recent flurry of travels included flying from Somalia to Calcutta with a layover in Kenya, permitting me to revisit a favorite haunt.

The vast, sprawling city of Nairobi, and both of its airports, butt right up against a premier game reserve, Nairobi National Park, the splendid legacy of a time when the city was little more than a tiny high plains retreat for British colonials. Imagine if New York's Central Park was the size of Queens, and roamed by herds of wild game. The park holds all of the so-called "Big Five," the animals on the "must see" most-wanted list: elephant, buffalo, rhinoceros, lion and leopard.

As the city expands, the pressure on this real estate must be significant, but so far the park survives, ringed by dozens of miles of electrified fence, minimizing contact between urban human and dangerous wild game. The insensate Buffalo is the most dangerous; it will rear and charge and trample you under its mighty hooves before it has even evaluated what sort of threat you might pose. The hippo, separated from its offspring, or rushing back to the safety of the water, will flatten you like a diesel road roller. In East Africa, the elephant, a genial creature by nature, has had too many unpleasant experiences with humans. It does not trust you, and the rogue, lone male will sometimes attack even your vehicle. For all these reasons and more, it is prohibited to descend from the car in many African game reserves.

But this regulation makes birdwatching difficult. One wants, always, to follow that elusive call into the bush, to peer deep into shrubs, to get out of the car and stroll in the forest. I cautiously ignore regulations against walking in Africa. After all, millions of carless Africans have been living in relative harmony with all these animals for years. If someone is occasionally munched, or flattened, that is the way of things. I accept that. In Rwanda's Akagera National Park I have camped, alone, where I liked, hiked into the acacia forests, startled giant crocodiles at the edges of the swamp, and even skirted herds of elephant on foot. Always keeping a healthy distance dictated by respect, but not paranoia.

On my last trip to Nairobi National Park I had therefore fearlessly gotten out of my hired taxi whenever I spotted a bird, which is to say, almost constantly. But on this visit, within minutes of pulling through the front gates, I was embarrassed  to be busted by a park ranger, who pulled up short in his green Toyota Landcruiser when he saw me standing in the road, some fifty yards from my van and driver. "What you are doing is very dangerous. And it is not permitted," he said, in crisp, officious, post-colonial English. "Yes, sir," I said.

"Return to your vehicle at once." After I complied, the ranger drove up and held a brief conference in Swahili with my driver, the excellent George Olukuye. Then he sped off, and George and I wrestled open the safari pop-top of the van. "He said that if he sees you out of the car again, you will be fined," George told me. I fumed. Birding out of a van, even a convertible one, was not what I had had in mind.

Tourists in game reserves demonstrate a herd mentality, as if eager to prove they are not so very different from the animals they are watching. Pause for a few moments looking out of the top of a van through binoculars, and every other van within sight will hurriedly u-turn its way back to your patch of track, fearful of missing something. "Een ornitholoog," I heard one disgusted dutchman tell his family, after they sped over, only to realize that I was looking at a small, nondescript bird.

An Ostrich might get a pause and a glance, but what most visitors really want to see are the Big Five. Two drivers passing in the track pause and ask each other if there have been any rhino sightings. "Simba?," they ask, in hushed tones. The lion is king. It is possible, but difficult to see. It is perhaps at the top of the list for most visitors. (You could spent twenty days of layovers here and never see a leopard, so that spectacular cat generally remains in the realm of fantasy).

Imagine our joy, then, as we were driving slowly up the track, to come upon a lioness, drinking from a puddle in the road.

In the natural state of things, unless startled, harassed, or abnormally hungry, the lion does not attack we humans. Like bullies, they prefer prey smaller than themselves. The phenomenon of the man-eater, of the lion that has tasted human flesh and found it to his liking, gives one pause, but the presence of lions is not normally enough to keep me in the car. (However, I would never get out of a car in the presence of a lion).

Where there is one lion, there are generally more, and as we sat, parked in the track, watching and waiting, another one appeared from an insignificant shrub beside the road, just the sort in which on another day I might have searched for a singing bird. If they are unlikely to attack humans, they also care little about them. Simba is not scared of you, and he will walk languidly across the road and examine your car with a slow twist of his powerful neck.

Soon, three lions had settled into the shade of the only shrub found on our patch of savannah. Had you told me that the lone bush, above, provided sufficient cover for three lions, I would have laughed at you, but I saw the lions go in to it and become invisible. Had I not seen them I must admit that here I would happily have gotten out of the car after looking around, certain that there was no big game, no threat, just open bush. A lesson learned.

Half an hour later, when we passed back that way, they were still there.

Leeches, Part Deux: Leech avoidance in the Himalaya

You may wish to read part one of the leech sock saga, if you haven't enjoyed it already

On the trail in Lava, near the Bhutanese border, northern West Bengal

...The leech socks remained tucked into the bottom of my backpack during a two-week stay in Somaliland. Somalia may have certain security issues, but leeches are not one of them. After a pleasant sojourn amongst the acacias of the Horn of Africa, I then flew to Calcutta and took an overnight train to the base of the Himalayas, in the northern extremities of West Bengal.  In Darjeeling, I hired a jeep to drive me east, to the village of Lava, surrounded by leech country. Here, finally, I would have a chance to put the leech socks, and the handiwork of my friend Ashley Singer, to the test. 

One looks a right nerd wandering the muddy cobblestoned streets of Lava in puffy blue gaiters, so I stashed the leech socks in my field bag and headed for the hills. After less than a kilometer climb up into the forest, I paused to catch my breath. There, bobbing and weaving at the tip of my boot, was my first leech. I flicked it off. Now paranoid, I had no desire to sit down anywhere to put on my socks, as this would doubtless allow hordes of leeches direct access to my soft, white flesh. Swaying on one foot, I removed the boot from the other. Standing on the one leg like a stork, I realized I was imminently going to fall over and harm myself. I sat down hastily on a somewhat dry rock and "socked up" in a hurry.

Like a lover, leeches smell your heat, inching their way towards where you stand in a moist and misty forest grove, contemplating the bounty and beauty of nature. Do you think inchworms are cute? There are only two differences I can find between them and their Austro-Asian cousins: arboreal leeches are black, and they like to suck your blood. They move exactly as inchworms do, by alternately moving the front and back halves of their bodies, stretching forward, then bending double as they bring their rear grabbers up to meet their front. This might look cute in green; on a leech, that moment of indecision when the creature lifts up on its hind whatevers, swaying its body this way and that, is particularly revolting. Because you know it is sniffing the air for flesh, your flesh.

If you think the answer to this problem is not to sit on mossy logs, then beware the leech that senses your warmth below and drops silently out of a tree onto your hat like a ninja. Or the posse of leeches that wait on the underleaves of a shrub, grabbing onto your pants as you brush past. I suppose technically they are insects, but I call them devilspawn.

User view

For the next seven hours or so, I thrashed about in the jungle, searching for rusty-bellied shortwing, blue-fronted robin,  hoary-throated barwing and other birds most people have never heard of.* Between bouts of sweating profusely, I obsessively examined the rich blue denim surface of my socks, I found nary a leech, and can therefore proclaim the leech socks an unqualified success. 

Warning: Graphic images follow. Parents, please control your childrens' internet privileges. I cannot blame any failure of the socks for the disturbing images you are about to see; I suspect the guilty leech came from somewhere up above.

Undoubtedly mashed to death by the binoculars bouncing on my chest, the remnants of the disengorged leech are here clearly visible.

*All seen except the blue-fronted robin. Leeches or no leeches, I suppose I shall have to go back.

Stalking the wild leeches of Red Hook

Now, I love nature and almost everything in it, perhaps more than most people, but there are a few creatures out there revolting enough to make one question the existence of God. The leech, for instance. Those which swim about in the warm shallows of pebbly freshwater lakes waiting for plump toddlers to go wading are bad enough, but the swimmers scarcely rank on the grotesque-o-meter when compared to the arboreal varieties of Asia and Australia. These prowl through the moist monsoon jungles, inconspicuous and thirsty, until, sensing the body heat of a passing mammal, they leap from the trees like kamikaze caterpillars. Brush up against the wrong leaf and your flesh will promptly be swarming with black, blood-sucking inchworms.

At home in Red Hook during a "comfort and fashion" leech-sock evaluation session in early April.

Short of a full-body Tyvek suit of the sort used to combat radioactive discharge at earthquake-damaged nuclear power plants, there is no entirely leech-proof costume. Precautions are possible, however. At Cat Tien National Park in Vietnam in late January, I met a party of German adventurers in the outdoor canteen, looking rather bashful as they sat drinking beers while wearing four sets of matching purple twill gaiters. These, they explained, were "leech-socks." January in Vietnam is the height of the dry season, widely advertised as leechless. Nonetheless, I had managed to collect two of the gruesome creatures that day, during a ten kilometer hike on a narrow and overgrown forest trail. I stared at the Germans in their aubergine accoutrements for so long that I was finally forced to assure them that I was not making fun of their socks, but was rather jealous. Where, I asked, had they obtained them?

Their outfitter had provided them. As it turns out, there are few places to purchase leech socks. The locals of the leech-infested zones don't seem to use them, and I could not find any for sale in Vietnam, much less in purple. Knowing I was to be in the Indian Himalaya in mid-May, primo leech drinking season, I attempted the mail-order route when I returned from Vietnam. Googling revealed this guy, who claims to sell the world's best. I briefly considered dropping the forty bucks he charges for a pair, but when I realized shipping and handling was not included and that I was looking at a $55 tab for a pair of socks, I temporarily forgot my fear of leeches. More googling. At last I found the sort of post I had been looking for.

The advice was simple. Cut off the legs from a pair of old pants, sew closed the bottoms, and add a drawstring at the top. Apparently leeches cannot penetrate twill or other densely woven cotton, as opposed to regular socks, which they treat like a revolving door, an access-panel to your hard-earned corpuscles. There is no need to use Tyvek, Gore-tex or anything else other than tightly woven cotton.

I'm not much of a quilter, so I consulted my friend Ashley Singer, one of the craftier people you will ever meet. She owns industrial sewing machines and knows Matt Damon's hat size. She spends her days making monsters and goblins for the sets of big Hollywood movies, and blocking custom-made fedoras out of beaver felt. She plays the harp.

"How would you feel about helping me make a pair of leech socks?" I asked. (I suspect both of us knew this really meant: how do feel about making some leech socks for me?) A pair of old lightweight jeans, ten or so minutes with the sewing machine, and presto.

When I asked her if my new leech-socks made me look like a brave and intrepid explorer, Ashley suggested that it might be best if I peered out at the horizon "as if scanning the area for leeches."

All photos courtesy Ashley Singer

COMING SOON: PART TWO, In which THE LEECH SOCKS are PUT TO THE TEST in the LEECH-INFESTED CLOUD FORESTS OF THE INDIAN HIMALAYA, a post that will include GRAPHIC IMAGES OF MY naked TORSO.

The rubber trees shall inherit the earth

One of the things I like best about the tropics is the sense that nature has a chance in the face of mankind's constant assault. The brute power of photosynthesis near the equator gives one the suspicion that our species' eventual and inevitable passing into extinction will be noted here only by a massive spurt of vines, trees, rot and recycling, until in a few short centuries not a cinder block or slab of asphalt will remain to await the discovery of interplanetary archaeologists.


The hotel where I am staying in Cartagena is a riot of buildings and overlapping roofs with multiple patios, all under constant threat from two gigantic rubber trees in the central courtyard. They are the largest I have ever seen, and manage to cast a deep shade across much of the sprawl of hastily conceived additions. They shed prodigious amounts of leaf litter and beefy twigs.


Yesterday, one of the workers here climbed delicately up onto the tile roof to clear it of debris. The leaves of these trees are thick and rubbery like the sap that is tapped from their trunks. They have substance and heft that prevents them from falling far from the tree. Overwhelmed by the piles of litter, my friend on the roof was using a common kitchen broom. It was a Sisyphean task in reverse, pushing the leaves, twigs and sticks off the roof into the patio, only to await the next breath of sea breeze to replace them with another shower of organic material.


The hefty beams placed to prevent the mighty branches from sagging down and crushing the roofs are as matchsticks, engulfed in a spaghetti of the dangling tendrils from what is rather like a gigantic mangrove tree. These strand-like branches become, upon reaching down to the ground, the roots the tree uses to spread itself. The eagerness and ability of these shady giants to envelop the hotel in their embrace is endearing and unstoppable.

A couple of minor offshoots...

By the way, while our species is still thriving, I highly recommend the Bellavista hotel to those travelers tolerant of cracked, upthrust patio tile and a genuinely welcoming atmosphere.

Brooklyn Botanic Garden in full effect

Shopping in Zimbabwe

From our Harare correspondent comes this bit of hidden camera work documenting just how dire things have gotten in the former breadbasket of Africa.

Camping in Rwanda, Part Deux (highlands version)

The contrast between Nyungwe Forest and the Akagera National Park (see Camping in Rwanda, Part One) could not be more extreme. From the baking sun, whining locusts in the trees and a bronzed landscape of blonde hillsides and shimmering lakes I traveled in a few hours to dense, wet, closed forest. At 2400 meters above sea level Nyungwe is chilly and shrouded in clouds. Here the distinction between the rainy and dry seasons, so crucial to Akagera's animals, might better be characterized as the drenched season versus the merely soggy.

The attraction here are the Albertine Rift endemics, both simian and avian. A series of mountain chains running down through the heart of the so-called Great Lakes region of Africa, the Albertine Rift is home to at least 30 species of birds that occur nowhere else. Its plant and insect life is similarly exotic and restricted in range, and Nyungwe is home to no less than 13 species of primates, one of the highest totals for any location on earth. L'Hoest's Monkey is common, and often found patrolling the shoulder of the lone switchback highway that crosses over the mountains to Cyangugu and South Kivu state, in the Congo.

L'Hoest's Monkey

Blue Monkey

At Uwinka camp, on a high mountain ridge, there were no other campers, and I chose the most remote campsite, amongst the dripping epiphytes and soggy mosses of the forest interior, beside a thatched bungalow with a central hearth for cooking. "Est-ce que vous êtes capable d'allumer le feu?" Asked the park ranger. Are you able to light your own fire? His tone suggested he had never yet met a muzungu with these skills. Although I indignantly answered Of course! as if I were some sort of tinder-box wielding eagle scout, it transpired that my campsite came equipped with a kind of African National Parks version of a Filipino house-boy, a young man who, while I was camped out in the middle of the woods, brought me hot water with which to bathe. At the end of my first day, a long mountainous trek in search of the Handsome Francolin, I limped into my campsite to find a blazing fire and a steaming bucket awaiting my bath. I half expected him to stand by holding a towel for me as I lathered up.

My digs at Uwinka

Having had luxurious views of the Handsome Francolin, a skittish, quail-like bird that is actually one of the more common Albertine Rift endemics, but a bird I had missed out on during my last visit to Nyungwe four years ago, I bedded down for the night in the trusty tent.

Superlecker Spargelcremezuppe mit Ramen-nudeln

At 5:50 AM I awoke in a panic; I was due at the headquarters at 6 for Chimpanzee-tracking, a thrill I had forgone on my last, entirely bird-obsessed, visit. The outing is based on the extremely lucrative Mountain Gorilla tracking concession in Volcanoes National Park, which pulls in $700,000 a month in foreign currency earnings just in permit fees. Park rangers, full-time chimp trackers, follow the roaming bands of chimps as they feed during the day, watching them bed down at dusk (Chimpanzees make leafy, mat-like beds high up in the trees each night, used once only), and then returning at dawn to follow them as they move on. Guides, bringing tourists like myself, then coordinate with the trackers via walkie-talkie and determine how best to get the muzungus to the fruiting trees which the chimp pack has chosen for that day's gorging. They range widely, and fast, and spotting them can be a literal half hour walk in the park or an experience more closely resembling the crossing of the Andes on foot.

The "oh-so-very" Handsome Francolin, Francolinus nobilis

In the pre-dawn darkness I scrambled up the steep trail to the guard post, where I found my fellow-travelers, an Indian-American “in software,” living in Mumbai, and the Irish publisher of a “businessman’s lifestyle magazine,” from London. The former was one of the few legitimate tourists I have met in Rwanda; a wildlife aficionado, he had arrived directly from Volcanoes National Park where he had done two back-to-back gorilla trekking excursions. The latter had accompanied a posse of humanitarians from the British conservative party who were touring and participating in various aid schemes, a jaunt he claimed was not quite so completely a publicity stunt as it might sound. I judged him politically suspect but gratefully piled in his car anyway, as I didn’t have one.

Ten kilometers down the road the vehicles left us, and the three rangers, on the side of the road. It was about 6:30 in the morning. “Well,” said Claude, the ranger who had taken me bird-spotting the day before, “unfortunately they are quite far down. There’s quite a walk ahead of us.” The day-before-yesterday, he had told me on the yesterday, the entire group of chimps had been within half an hour’s walk of the headquarters. Chimpanzees move fast over long distances, looking for the best fruiting trees.

I was alarmed to see that my friends had daypacks stuffed with camera equipment, changes of trousers, biscuits and camelback hydration packs; in my stumbling, sleepy getaway I had brought only my camera, binoculars, and half a liter of water. We started down a steep track, winding around the side of the mountain, the valley to our left, the rising hill to our right. We walked fast, ignoring tantalizing birdcalls in our rush to descend and locate the chimps.

I’m generally opposed to these sorts of organized outings for this very reason; all too often they resemble forced marches, with no time for stopping to look at "lesser" wildlife, or just to experience the grandeur of the forest. We were on a mission, however, and, concerned by Claude’s ominous scouting report, I put my head down and hurried on.

A tranquil forest scene

After an hour of dishearteningly steep descent on a trail cut into steps, the future retracing of which made me pant for breath just thinking about it, Claude’s walkie-talkie crackled with an update from the trackers. Soon we heard an unearthly screaming and chattering, which seemed still to come from far below us in the valley. At a meeting of four paths, we paused, and suddenly, there beside us, was a ranger we hadn’t met before. A handful of female chimps were feeding nearby, he said. We waited. The tracker disappeared. I proposed to Claude that he and I move gently down the track away from the group in hope of seeing a bird or two.

When we had gone a hundred meters or so around a contour the tracker came running back up the path towards us. “Quickly, quickly!,” he said, urging us forward in a sort of shouted stage whisper. I looked behind me. The others were out of sight beyond the bend. We were already a team, we three. Should I abandon them? “Go,” said Claude. “I’ll tell the others.” I rushed headlong down the trail, following the tracker towards a majestic grove of towering trees. He stopped, pointed. Up, far up. I got the binoculars to the eyes and saw her, very briefly, before she saw us, and immediately bolted, shimmying down the trunk and away. The magazine publisher jogged up just in time to see the dark shape of the ass end of a female chimpanzee, flailing away through the mid-story canopy. The software guy, hard on his heels, nothing.

We stood staring longingly up into the trees, as if she might return. “Too shy,” said one of the rangers. The huddle of Rwandans in their green ranger’s fatigues looked at one another with resignation, sharing a look that suggested they knew that their day, which had been so close to being over, had only just begun. “These females,” said Claude, “they are just too shy when they are traveling with the babies. But the trackers say they think the males will be in some fruiting fig trees, beyond the next mountain. We’re going to try for that. I told them it is a good thing we have a strong group of tourists today.”

I thought: beyond the next mountain? The trackers had already melted back into the forest, like Viet-Cong. We set off again, fast, but the sweaty rush to chimpville was only beginning. When we next paused, many ridges further away from where the jeeps had dropped us off hours earlier, Claude simply pointed down over the edge of the trail. “This way.” It looked impassable, a clifflike steepness overgrown with mats of liana and shoulder high underbrush. He went, we followed. It was like walking down a woven web of ropes. There was no ground, just an abyss of compressed vegetation in which to put one’s trust. I am convinced that the descent we made would have been impossible on dry ground; without that choked infinity of vines, branches and trunks we would have fallen right off the side of the mountain. Twigs and leaves whipped our faces and tore at our clothes, but they stopped us from plunging down to the valley floor.

On a parallel spur, visible through the soft edges of the clouds wherever there was a break in the canopy, chimps were feeding. The foliage in those distant treetops moved and swayed unnaturally. We heard eery screams, then, apparently, cackling. In return, we trudged and grunted, slipped, slid and swore. Finally, soggy of foot and streaked green with trails of chlorophyll, we arrived at the foot of the looming fig trees. All was still. “Where did they go?”
“Shhh,” said Claude. “They are here.”

With DNA 97% identical to theirs, it's no wonder you like figs so much.

We heard a rustle in a branch in front of us, visible through a gap between trunks. The branch bobbed up and down. A chimp emerged onto a mid-high branch, some seventy-five yards off, and began acrobatically picking off fruits and stuffing himself. As he ate his fill, we watched until we too were sated, passing binoculars around and snapping one blurry and backlit photo after another. I’m not sure that we actually high-fived, but the mood was certainly of three men who might at any moment break out in an orgy of self-congratulatory palm-slapping.

At last we declared that we were satisfied. The rangers huddled again, and debated. It appeared that we were, as the saying goes, somewhere in the back-ass of beyond. Should we go up through the impenetrable tangle of impossible steepness, or down? The goal being to hit a real trail as soon as possible. Down looked easier, and Claude suggested that the drivers, when we could reestablish radio contact with them, could be instructed to drive down a jeep track to a village on the valley floor, where we might rendezvous with them.

Having seen chimps, we were now rather less motivated. Adrenaline had ebbed. Feet were sore, not to mention moist. It was a hard slog, and I believe it was a good hour of bushwacking before we finally reached the beaten path. After our time in the dense underbrush the narrow dirt trail seemed to us like a broad and sunny boulevard. We paused and I took tiny sips from my much diminished supply of water. Claude radioed. "Unfortunately," he reported, "the drivers are saying they don't have enough petrol to drive down into the valley. They are afraid they won't be able to get back." Our prolonged chorus of groans perhaps reminded the rangers of the chimpanzees they spend so much time with. Looking up at the cloud-shrouded ridges above us, it was impossible to see how far up we would have to climb. "Where's the helicopter?" I asked Claude. "I thought the tracking fee included a helicopter." He laughed, nervously, and set off up the trail. Steely adventurers all, we bravely marched behind. The ascent was long, but finally we emerged at the top, back on the trans-montane highway. Congratulating one another, and ourselves, we piled back into the jeeps and drove back up to the camp, where I looked forward to a hot meal:

Epuisé of Ramen a volonté in West African peanut butter sauce with "overripe" tomatoes

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