Fizz

Today was a long but interesting and worthwhile slog around the rural very southern parts of Tanzania, almost where it meets the Ruvuma River border with Mozambique. The principal reason for taking a circuitous route was to visit the offices of three Wildlife Management Areas, forest areas which we support in various ways. We only managed two as we lost an hour mid-journey whilst the team messed around buying sacks of maize meal from a random village. Maize meal is key to the Tanzanian staple of ugali, but I wasn’t convinced by the effectiveness of the rationale of buying sackloads of it 1,500km from home. It may be ‘cheaper for family consumption’ in this location, but it was a poor use of precious time.

Whilst I waited for the maize meal purchase to be concluded and sacks to be lashed to the roof, I had to shun the opportunity to eat sugar cane. Ripping strips off a stalk is more than my jaw pain can handle at the moment. This issue is persisting and making eating a real chore.

At a snack stop later (I gamely chewed on biscuits through the jaw pain), a motorbike raced past and squashed a colony of black ants, which made a loud fizzing noise as it recovered from the shock. I watched the survivors reeling and regrouping and it was interesting as I don’t think I’ve before considered the noises ants make.

We wound up in the district town of Tunduru, which we’d passed through last week. Maria the Spanish PhD student was on hand to eat dinner with, and she excitingly told me about a place where we could get boiled potatoes. We both requested potatoes with beans, and said we’d prefer no rice tonight. This was outright rejected by the server, who insisted on including rice. If you don’t eat rice or ugali in Tanzania, you are considered not to have eaten a meal.

We crossed many a rickety bridge today.