Tanzanian Ants
Things that Bite
19 341 Feet: Kilimanjaro Part IX
We are saying goodnight outside our room in Marangu. There are crickets, birds and all the noises you can find on the box set of Jungle Sounds for Sleep for only $29.99. It’s our final polite exchange of pleasantries with Stan and Dr. Quinn. Tomorrow, we all start up the mountain.
“Ow!”
I assume Claire has stepped on a tack . . . but there are no tacks in the rainforest. I am fiddling with the clumsy key to our door when Claire stridently clarifies.
“Something is biting me!”
Inside the room, with the lights on — because this is one of the happy intervals where the electricity works — we see the little bastards.
Claire hates ants. She declares war immediately. She is taking off her pants — and while I am not entirely unaroused, I am aware this is not a sexual act. She’s removed her shoe and is employing it as a hammer, crushing these millimeter creatures as she leaps in panic at the sight of each new invader.
I’m trying to stifle my laughter — until I feel it too.
It’s a hot pinch, far up my thigh. One of these scoundrels has climbed only a few centimeters south of my crotch, and now I have to dance out of my own pants in the same unsexy fashion. He’s brought a dozen of his friends, and as I try to brush them to the floor, Claire runs to the bathroom to shower these uninvited guests off her body.
“They’re in the tub!”
The ants have established a second front. They are rising from the drain, dozens of them, and our only advantage is that they can’t scale the slippery walls of the bathtub. Claire opens the tap and recreates the Great Flood, sending these demons back to dark places.
Their bites aren’t fatal. Just quick, hot attention grabbers. It’s the thought of more bites that ruins everything. How many of these insects have hitched a ride into our room? How many bugs are crawling through our bedsheets?
We tuck our mosquito netting around the bed as best we can, but even the best mosquito netting can’t save us from the phantom ants in our imagination. With every tickle on my skin, I swear the bastards are back. I spend an hour rolling in bed, frantically smacking at ants that do not exist.
Somehow, we sleep. The next morning, we see our mistake.
We said our goodnights standing in this living river.
These ants are called Siafu — which means ‘Sorry’ in Swahili, as in: ‘You’ll be sorry if you stand in their way.’ They travel in groups of up to twenty million. The driver ants are actually blind, living a life according to pheromones. That might explain how they reached my upper thigh before they started to suspect they had taken a wrong turn.
The local Chagga tribes once used the solider ants — the larger ants that guard the colony — as substitute stitches. The ants clamp down on your skin, and then the Chagga break the rest of the body off, leaving just the pincers to keep the wound closed.
When you come to a foreign land you imagine the big bad monsters: the lions, crocodiles, hippos, and snakes. But it is the smallest of creatures that you really have to watch out for.
Catch the latest in my Kilimanjaro series:
Or go all the way back to Part I:
