Read The Further Adventures of an Idiot Abroad Online
Authors: Karl Pilkington
Tags: #General, #humor
The Further Adventures of an Idiot Abroad (32 page)
Elephants are one of my favourites. It’s their memories that are most amazing.
Some people say their memory is better than that of a human, and they have been known to recognise a family member even though they had been separated for over twenty years.
I do wonder if that’s because they don’t change much, whereas humans can really change.
I heard this story off a mate who went to a school reunion:
‘Have you seen Barry? He’s changed a lot.’
‘Has he?’
‘Yeh . . . He’s got a lovely pair of tits.’
Also I can recognise people but totally forget where from. I once almost went up to someone at Piccadilly train station in Manchester who I thought I knew from school until Suzanne pointed
out I knew the face because it was David Beckham.
Maybe our long term memory isn’t as useful as it was years ago as things change so much these days. No point remembering where the biscuit aisle is in the supermarket as they keep
moving the aisles about. In a way, having a good memory can be annoying as it means we constantly harp on about the good old days instead of just getting on with it. So go and see elephants in
the wild but the elephants might remember your meeting a lot longer than it sticks with you.
When I was on safari with Suzanne in Africa and found lions wandering about outside the tent, I suggested to Suzanne that we should put a half-filled plastic bottle of water
outside as my auntie Nora does this to keep cats off the lawn. It works, apparently.
Suzanne said it was a stupid idea and and told the manager of the place that we didn’t feel safe so he sent down two Masai people to be on security. The lads who turned up looked about
17. Their dress was quite interesting, with braided hair, lots of beads and tight laces strapped round their lower legs. One also had an elastic band around his head. I don’t know if that
was part of the traditional dress or if he was just keeping it on his head so he knew where it was. I couldn’t ask as they couldn’t speak English.
They stuck feathers to certain parts of the tent. Suzanne said that it must work ’cos they are the experts. It annoyed me she thought three feathers could save us from lions and yet she
pooh-poohed my bottle of water idea.
Over a million Wildebeest migrate every year with another half a million zebra, gazelle and impala. What’s mad is, this migration only started in the 1960s when the
population of the wildebeest increased after vets stopped them dying out. Now there’s so many of them they have to move for food and water. I’ve always said how sorting out problems
just creates new problems. The example that springs to mind is the way hospitals used to say they didn’t have enough beds for patients. By the time I went into hospital with kidney stones
they had sorted that problem and had plenty of beds, but were short on pillows. I was eventually given one that still felt a bit warm, as if it had been removed from underneath a dead head. I
can’t sleep without a pillow. I reckon that will be the next evolutionary step. Humans will evolve to have a big bulbous bit at the back of our heads to stop us needing pillows. Think
about it: whenever you see images of aliens, the backs of their heads are normally quite big, and I’d say they’re more advanced and more evolved than us. Just Google the image of
the Roswell incident and look at the alien on the bed. No pillow, but it looks perfectly comfortable. After that, Google the Wildebeest migration on YouTube.
I met Lee the ranger who took me out in his Land-Rover and got talking about the rhino I was here to help with.
KARL
: Why have we got to shift it?
LEE
: This particular rhino is a bull. He’s holding territory which is full of young females – many of them are his daughters – so purely and simply from a
conservation perspective, as soon as you manage a reserve, you need to assist with the management of the animals. The idea is that we’re going to move him to a new territory in a part of
the game reserve where he’s never had access before, and we’re gonna replace him with a bull from that territory where we have the same problem.
KARL
: It’s like a wife swap?
LEE
: Yeah, very much so. Well, husband swap, really.
KARL
: What would happen though if the fella mated with the daughter. What’s the result?
LEE
: The first generation wouldn’t be a problem, but the second or third generation there would probably start to be problems. Genetic
weaknesses might come through, and from the perspective of managing our animals we do not want to end up in a situation where we must manage the animals because of the contrived environment. We
have to find ways to manage them and make sure that what we do is best, and obviously the more DNA you’ve got mixed in there, the stronger these animals are gonna be at the end of the
day.
He pulled up at a pile of dung. I thought he may have been collecting it for the Ndebele tribe to paint their front room with, but he said to hunt the rhinos down he used an
old-fashioned technique of following tracks, which involved tasting their droppings.
LEE
: What I am doing is determining the freshness of the droppings. It can be determined just by taste. A fermentation process takes place with
herbivores, so as it builds up more alcohol, it becomes a bitter or sweeter sort of taste.
KARL
: Is that a last resort?
LEE
: You don’t want to follow the wrong set of footprints, do you?
KARL
: How often each week are you licking shit?
LEE
: It isn’t a bad taste. It’s very dry. Just a little taste, very quickly. Lick it.
KARL
: There’s no sort of germage in it?
LEE
: No, no. If there was anything like that, I wouldn’t be doing it. I wouldn’t be here to tell the story.
(Asks driver Sandro to
pull over).
There was a big pile of dung, or, to Lee, an All You Can Eat buffet. I understood what he said about tasting it, but I’m pretty sure just squeezing it could give you clues, like people do
with melons in supermarkets.
LEE
: Let me show you what’s going on. We have a whole bunch of droppings together. This is normally an indicator that we are dealing with a
male rhino. They make these big droppings that are full of grass. Some are clearly quite old. You can see that.
KARL
: Yeah, I can see that.
LEE
: But over here there’s one I can determine the freshness of. The scrape marks of the male. Look at these two bare patches on the ground.
He kicks it backwards. He kicks his dung like that. It’s all spread out. OK, so now we know we are dealing with a male. This is the rhino we are looking for.
KARL
: I would say that’s fresh just by looking at it. It looks quite moist. Yeah, it definitely is.
LEE
: Taste it. Get that freshness. You’ll pick up how sweet it becomes if it’s not too fresh. It’s experience that you have got
to build. We’ll find an even fresher one later, and you’ll taste how sour it is. You want to try? Just put it on your fingertip and have a taste. It won’t hurt you.
KARL
: You know what’s weird? This is the second time in three days I’ve had my hand in shit.
LEE
: Get your finger in there and get a little bit of it. Taste it. I think you’ll find it’s slightly sweet.
KARL
: ‘Things to do before you die’: stick a finger in a load of shit.
(sticks finger in shit)
LEE
: Did you taste it?
KARL
: Yeah. It’s like Shredded Wheat.
LEE
: Yeah. It’s a little bit sweet.
KARL
: Mmmm, it’s like a wine tasting.
LEE
: Did you just get the smell?
KARL
: That’s why we’re given noses, isn’t it? We know it’s fresh ’cos we can smell. Taste buds for food.
LEE
: Well, it’s the combination. You need to use both skills.
KARL
: Say there were piles of shit, and I blindfolded you and went, ‘What’s that?’ Could you tell just by smell what type of
animal it is?
LEE
: I would give it a go.
KARL
: It’s not a skill to be proud of.
We headed off looking for fresh rhino poo and saw giraffes on our travels. This is the animal that impresses me the most. It’s the best example of evolution to me, the fact that it grew
its neck to help it reach for food. The Ndebele women might one day evolve to have longer necks with all the rings they wear. They’d be able to look in an attic without using ladders.
News came in on the radio that they had tracked the rhino by helicopter, so us licking rhino shit all morning had been a bit unnecessary. By the time we got to the scene the rhino had been
tranquillised and was starting to slow down in its tracks. The mission now was to get the rhino in a place where it could be easily transported into the back of a big metal container and then
shifted quickly before the drugs started to wear off.
