Occasional Scribbles

I’ve been watching a programme called Elephant Diaries lately.  It’s about an elephant santuary in Nairobi where orphaned baby elephants are rescued and eventually released back into the wild after intensive care by their keepers who are quite fantastic with them.  These poor little Ellies have seen their mothers butchered and family groups split up and terrorised and they are desperate when they are finally rescued by the sanctuary.

Animal presenter, Michaela Strachan presents the programme having witnessed and taken part in the whole process, travelling in giant trucks with young elephants in the back while they move on to the next part of the rehabilitation; meeting up with other older elephants who have been released earlier from the sanctuary.

It’s very moving stuff.  Watching the bonds formed between elephants and keepers who invariably sleep with the animals, keeping them calm and warm with blankets over them on a bed of straw, shows incredible dedication.  Each time the animals are moved on, there is a huge sense of loss on both sides, though the keepers know they are doing what is best for these lovely animals.  Watching this, has reminded me of my own visits to Africa.

I’ve been lucky enough to visit Africa three times as my cousins were born in Rhodesia after my uncle and aunt emigrated there in the late fifties.  The first time I went was just before my sixteenth birthday and I was very nervous about going.  I wanted to see Africa but I had a rediculous fear of spiders and imagined that Africa must be teeming with them, around every corner, walking down the street, in the houses and so on.  I have a genuine fear of the wretched things and this coloured my entire feeling about visiting my family over there.

As has happened so often to me when I travel, things went wrong almost immediately.  I was asleep on the plane when I awoke to find the other passengers talking excitedly and nervously.  It turned out that while I was asleep and blissfully unaware, there had been a large explosion as one of the main engines blew up.  A man next to me explained what happened and that we were quite safe as the plane could fly on two engines out of the four and that we were making an emergency stop in Nairobi instead of Harare while they fixed the engine.

I was absolutely beside myself at this news.  Firstly, I knew my uncle would be meeting me at Kariba after the second flight I was taking at Harare and that I wouldn’t be there and worried about letting him know.  But mainly, I was terrified at the idea of being plonked in Nairobi on my own – with it being full of spiders.  Such was my phobia, that as we came into land at the airport and the terminal came into view I swore I could see large cobwebs in the corners of the building and I refused to get off the plane.  A kindly air hostess, seeing my distress came along and gently explained that I had to get off the plane while they tried to fix it as they would be carrying out test flights before we would be allowed back on and they couldn’t really have any passengers on the plane at that time.  I had to go.

I walked off the plane as if I was walking the plank.  I kept my hands close to me, clutching my hand luggage and walked stiffly to the terminal.  Inside, it was like any terminal though it was dark and dingy rather than bright and cheerful.  I didn’t allow myself to look at the cobwebs as I went inside and found a seat to sit down and wait.  Worse was to come.  They had to wait for an engine to be flown out which meant we were to be put up in an hotel.  Somehow we got there with me checking that no spiders were anywhere near me, in the bus, under the seat and so on.  I was given a large miserable room with a dark brown carpet and dull looking drapes and it crossed my mind that I probably wouldn’t be able to see any spiders on the dark pile, which made me more nervous.  It was very hot but I dared not open a window.  It was also early evening and I wondered what to do with myself.  I wondered down to reception and a boy and some girls about my own age who were on my flight recognised me and offered to take me into the city for the evening and so I hooked up with them.

They were all seasoned travelers, the girls returning home from boading school for the holidays, had done the journey lots of times.  I began to feel a bit better and the boy looked after me as we milled around the city, making sure none of the endless hawkers bothered me and that I didn’t get my bag stolen.  I was very grateful.  He did try it on when we returned to the hotel but I managed to send him off to his own room after he’d walked me back to mine, without too much trouble.

I finally arrived in Kariba having got hold of my uncle from the hotel where they stole a huge amount of my English pounds, asserting that I had spent £30 in phone calls which I clearly hadn’t.  I was very worried about going to Kariba as a woman on the plane on asking me where I was going and knowing about my phobia, told me Kariba was full of spiders being largely out in the bush.  Nice of her, I thought to tell me that. 

My uncles house was lovely after the dingy hotel.  The garden was full of bright flowers and trees and Bougainvillea.  Most of the rooms were arranged around a large covered patio painted white which was immediately cheerful and the only odd part was that there were burglar bars on the outside.  This I learned was because Rhodesia was becoming unsafe what with the recent war and Magabe now president and bad feeling was running high against the whites there.  I met up with my cousins and thankfully shared a room with one of them so I felt a lot safer.

I had many experiences while I was there and a few were related to spiders.  I was sitting on my bed one day chatting to my cousin when she sat bolt upright and told me not to move an inch.  I sat there and watched as she was looking at somethng over my shoulder on the wall behind.  She got up carefully and grabbed a can of bug spray and I heard a whoosh as the poison sprayed out.  “You can move now”, she said, laughing at me, as I leapt up.  I finally looked behind me and there was an enormous spider about the size of a side plate on the white wall, woozilly, drunkenly moving across the wall.  It was absolutely vile.  I jumped onto my cousins bed tucking my feet under me and wrapping my arms tightly around me in fear, while she removed the offending thing.  This type of spider was called a ‘flatty’.  It was common on walls and would flatten itself, usually hiding behind pictures or posters until when it wanted to move it would get up on its legs and run!!  It makes me feel creepy just writing about it.  It was quite bad luck to see it, as my uncle, bless him, had the whole house sprayed before my arrival, knowing how pathetic I was about insects anywhere near me.

I became a bit braver over time and began to enjoy myself once I realised that mainly, if there were spiders, they kept well out of the way other than the ‘flatties’.  But one evening when my cousin and I went to visit some friends of hers, the boys there thought it amusing to place a pet spider they had in their apartment, into a large box of cigarettes and offer it to me.  Luckily my cousin guessed what they were doing and told me not to open it. Very mean thing to do indeed.  But I survived that one.

On another visit a few years later, I was alarmed, when every where I went people were talking about the rain spider.  My heart sank.  I would be at my uncles yacht club having a nice drink and the conversation would turn to this creature that I had not yet encountered.  Or when I went to the shops, someone would ask, ‘have you seen the rain spider yet?’ It became clear after a while, that this spider, which I was told was large and poisonous would come into houses and buildings just before the rains are due which is of course significant in a country so dry. Everyone was waiting for the relief of the rain after the hot dry summer and the spider’s arrival to signal a change in the weather.  It was like some sort of nightmare and my imagination ran wild as I wonderd what the wretched thing looked like.  I imagined it to be like a Tarantula (a word I can hadly bring myself to type) as that is one that I am most scared of.

I was working myself up into quite a state about this imminent arrival and was sitting at my uncle’s bar one evening having our customery drink when it finally appeared.  All the houses have bars, like a small pub with stools, a wooden bar and bottles up on optics behind.  My uncle’s bar was very smart indeed with lots of different drinks and it was where we spent many enjoyable evenings.  I was sitting on one of the bar stools chatting away when my uncle, a big man, leapt up in alarm and shouted, “rain spider, it’s here, the rain spider!”  Yet again I had been caught with something nasty behind me and I daren’t look around.  My uncle was unusaully panicked, I wasn’t used to seeing him like this and it was clear that he was anxious that I didn’t get attacked as I was nearest to the spider.  He told me to keep dead still which I did, terrified and he came out from behind the bar with a large swotter and swotted it firmly, stamping on it for good measure.

I was incredibly relieved and turned slowly round to see the the monster.  And all my fears desolved.  It was so unlike the way I had imagined it to be.  It was a sort of rust colour, shaped a little like an ant though obviously much larger but there was no large body and black hairy legs that I was expecting and so fearful of.  I laughed with sheer relief and then laughed at the site of my uncle practically dancing around this thing on the floor, such an unlikely move for someone of his stature.

I felt I had finally managed to deal with my fear.  I had got it to a point where I could just about deal with it up to a point.  I had by now seen so many creepy crawlies including a small snake that came up through the bathroom sink just as I was spitting my toothpaste into it which surprised the snake as much as it did me.  I had for many evenings, run the length of the wide steps leading down to my uncles house from the red dirt road, where I had to avoid stepping on Chongalorlors; large, very large, brown centipedes with revolting white legs and under belly and large plate shields on top.  I even survived my uncle kicking one at me one day as I legged it down the steps in my usual fashion, and he laughed his head off when the wretched thing caught me on the ankle.  I had also survived sitting on top of a black scorpion in amongst some thatching being taken up by boat to a new adventure camp being built on one of the islands on Lake Kariba.  Even the black porters ran away when they saw it just under where I had been sitting in the bow of the boat. 

To finish this tale I must come back to the elephants.  For my birthday, my family took me up to Victoria Falls in a little tiny float plane.  It was terrifying in that weeny plane as the pilot, spotting elephant dived down in one of those scary manoeuvres that make your tummy leap about.  We flew over these magnificent wild animals and it was a real treat to see them in their own habitat.  They are truly majestic.  Before my family lived at Kariba, they lived in Zambia where the elephants used to wonder into their garden.  They actually caused a nuisance really but were still exciting to see up close.

But my uncle also told me that the spiders on his thatched roof were so big, he used to shoot them off his house, so I’m glad I didn’t visit him there.   

 *More Africa Tales to come – A naughty little monkey wrecks a bar.  My visit into the African bush.  Out on  Lake Kariba.  Victoria Falls and the mighty God of the Zambezi- Nyaminyami.