Weather - Maximum temperature 37 degrees Celsius
- Rainfall zero
Highlight of the week
Things that bite and sting
Lowlight of the week
Things that bite and sting
You have to take the rough with the smooth. Everywhere has its foibles. Nowhere is perfect. In the UK, people are forever complaining about the weather. It’s too hot. It’s too cold. It’s too dry. It’s too wet. Forgive me if I seem to be rambling. Don’t worry, I’ll get to my point in a second. Please allow me to give this week’s blog a little context.
In the last few years, we have discovered the west coast of Scotland. I have no idea why it took us so long. Even before COVID-19 and staycations became a thing, we marvelled at how empty the west coast was. Miles of white sandy beaches. Quiet narrow roads and tracks to cycle. Walking routes with barely a soul to spoil the solitude. Spectacular bays and endless lochs to kayak or canoe. The attractions are myriad. So, what kept the tourists away? Well, the weather for one. That one perfect weather day was inevitably sandwiched between a dozen wet windy days. Our friends, Karen and Alan, who live deep in Nicola’s heartland, grade the weather by how many raindrops are forecast on their XC weather app. A good biking day would have 2 raindrops, or less. If we only cycled on one raindrop days, or no raindrop days, we would never go out. Moist doesn’t quite capture it.
Present day South Luangwa valley has a lot going for it. The current weather is what most Brits crave. Consistent sunshine and no rain. The temperature reaches 37 degrees on a hot day. At night it dips to the teens and low twenties. The climate at this time of year is not responsible for keeping tourists away. But come November, we will be complaining about the heat. Later in November we will be carping about the rains.
Back in Scotland the insect life is the second factor that keeps the tourists at bay. Specifically, midges and clegs. We know not to go to Scotland from the end of June until mid-September. Failure to cover up in the hunted season invites total marmalisation. Our beloved Scotland has competition on the bug front through. Zambian bugs seem to be bigger and meaner and they are certainly standing up to be counted at present. Sit back and hold on to your bottle of skin so soft. You won’t sleep easy tonight unless you have comprehensively covered your skin in bug spray. Plan B would be to surround your bed with a mosquito net.
Mosquitos (AKA skitters) are everywhere. Although the rainy season is over, there is still enough standing water for skitters to breed. Our house has nets on all the windows to keep the skitters out. But still they come in. Perhaps our cleaner is not as obsessional as we are about keeping the door closed? Possibly the skitters sneak through the same cracks in the roof that permit the odd rogue bat to enter the house? We do our best to spray Peaceful Sleep, or some other branded version of DEET, on to our accessible skin. But our skitters are wily (not Wyllie – that’s a whole different kettle of fish) and they know that we let our guard down in the bathroom. Our bed net does not seem to be impregnable either. On Tuesday morning we found 2 skitters inside our net and were distressed when we executed them to discover our blood in their remains. To add insult to injury Keith left the car door open on Tuesday night. Twenty-plus skitters took advantage of free boarding that night and we had to work hard to avoid providing breakfast for the little buggers. A tin of Doom sprayed inside the car seemed to have little impact, so we resorted to old fashioned swatting to manage our unwanted guest problem.
One of my former colleagues once called me an annoying little mosquito. Big mistake. Former colleague I emphasise. But I can certainly identify with the intensity of the annoyance that the high-pitched buzzing of a mosquito generates. The whine triggers a killing spree in Kapani. We can’t help running amok. The offending insect has a short life expectancy after announcing its presence.
Enter stage left another candidate for the title of bane of our lives. The humble Tsetse fly. Game drives are thus named for the game that tsetse flies play with us. Let’s suspend the believe that they are capable of transmitting deadly sleeping sickness for now. The main issues are the pain, and the blood loss, that a simple bite can inflict on elephants, buffalos or mortal humans. I emphasise that humans are mortal to distinguish us more fully from tsetse flies. Clearly a separate species from us, but Sean Connery is the only one of us who shares immortality with these heinous creatures. Swat them and they come back stronger. Crawling up inside your trouser leg to inflict their savage wounds. Tsetses are attracted to moving prey. Programmed* to seek out buffalo and elephant we are unfortunate incidental targets. Our car windows offer some apparent protection. But they are usually dusty at the least. Often, they are smeared with baboon footprints or worse. This precludes National Geographic quality photography. If a photographic subject worth its salt happens along we are presented with an impossible dilemma. Lions and leopards trigger the windows to wind down and the tsetses inevitably get in. With luck we have an opportunity to launch shock and awe tactics against them before we suffer their ire. They can bite through elephant skin so clothes are futile. If your swatting impact is full force it is possible to disembowel them. Anything less results in a further, stronger incarnation.
No one likes an itchy insect bite of any sort. We might sound a little precious at times, wanting to keep our skin unblemished. But our quest to avoid insect bites has potential medical importance too. The books tell us that tsetse fly bites can transmit African Trypanosomiasis, sleeping sickness. Fortunately, we are yet to see any sleeping sickness in the Valley. Malaria is our main fear from any of these vicious vectors. We live in an old safari camp called Kapani. None of our Kapani neighbours have been affected by malaria recently and the malaria rates in the villages are also low. We have suspended our own use of antimalarials for now, but we will need to restart them in December when malaria makes a comeback at our clinic.
Our humble abode has layers of defence against invasion by wildlife and critters of all sorts. Fine mesh window covers keep out some of the small things. Solid walls mostly defend us against elephants, hippos, buffalo and lion. Our final line of defence is our unreliable bed net. As mentioned earlier. This blog focuses on critters that might bite or sting. It has proved vital for me to undergo flooding therapy to overcome my phobia of spiders. So, I can now cope with the ubiquitous flat spiders. Flat spiders get under our door and through our narrow ceiling spaces but at least they are probably harmless. The baboon spider, however, is a worthy adversary, and my fear of these hairy beasts is not illogical. Fortunately, baboon spiders are generally too big to get into our house. But size is not always a reliable guide to gauge our fear by. Scorpions buck the size trend.
The mythology of coping with stings and bites here in the Valley has been stoked by our doctor protocols. Scorpion stings are worse than childbirth. No analgesic is even worth trying. One briefing document reported. We won’t even mention what the bumph said about snake bites, for fear of spoiling a future blog. Our doctor house in Kapani is plagued by scorpions. Keith kills one almost every week. We are scrupulous about checking our footwear before slipping them on. We are on high alert for this ever-present danger. And the danger is real not irrational. Two of our emergency calls this week have featured our phobic friends.
Thursday morning 03.20. WhatsApp message sent to the batphone: Doc, before you go to clinic could you swing by? I think my husband has a spider in his ear. The message unfortunately was missed, because the audio alerts had accidentally been turned off on the doctor’s phone. A further WhatsApp at 05.50 relegated the spider missive off screen: Pride of lion in the oxbow. 20 yards from our house! Thursday was going to be an exciting day. We eventually realised the omission after clinic and went to hunt the spider at 13:00. The spider had gone by then. I’m sorry if this tale sounds at all prosaic without any mention of curds and whey.
Thursday afternoon 15.10. Doctor can you help? A client has been stung by a scorpion. He’s in absolute agony. Please come and see him as soon as you can. The client was staying in a magical camp (his own words) deep in the bush outside our normal range of responsibility. We compromised and agreed to meet the guide and client as soon as possible, at a lodge just inside the Park. We met 90 minutes later. Bob quickly confirmed the legend of the scorpion. Ten out of ten pain. He had been reaching for a towel as he finished his after-nap shower. His thumb was instantly in searing agony. When he reached our care, his pain had just started to recede to a seven out of ten. We wasted no time. Ten millilitres of lignocaine in a syringe with an orange needle. Infiltrating directly around the site of the sting brought instant and complete relief, No pain whatsoever within 2 seconds. Bob’s sweating stopped. Colour returned to his face and he started smiling. We are now his best friends. We injected more lignocaine as a ring block to the digit, in a belt and braces approach. Joking, we offered to accompany our new best friend to the magical camp deep in the bush, to re-inject the thumb when needed that evening. Bob insisted that he would be fine with a concoction of drugs and whisky back at camp.
So, it is not perfect here! It’s not far off. If only the 6 and 8 legged critters would go away the place would be almost idyllic. But if the place was critter free perhaps South Luangwa, Zambia and Africa would become too popular and overrun with the hoi polloi. As much as we moan about the weather and the midges in Scotland, they do serve a purpose!
* Tsetse fly programming can be flummoxed. Stop your car for 5 mins and they generally lose interest. But often your photographic prey has made a sharp exit within 5 minutes. The decision is yours.
Some spider bites can be really nasty, creating a mini volcano - indurated, red, swollen patch upto 10cm across, with a small yellow pustule that doesn't heal for ages. Antibiotics don't work, unfortunately.
Tsetse advice. Driving with the windows closed when you are going through an ebony grove (Elephant Loop, Norman Carr Drive, for example) would be wise. In open ground, waMilombe for example, keep the windows open all the time, so they fly in and out. Insect repellents don't work. If you are bitten, try not to scratch. If you leave the bites alone, they will settle quicker. Scratching them seems to create a recurrent, relapsing itchy spot. Dettol is reputed to work but not in my experience.
Brilliant story from Marianne, a previous valley doc. She treated a scorpion sting on a patient's finger with a local anaesthetic ring block, but the patient had also called in a sangoma (witch doctor) with special expertise in massaging away the pain. When she reviewed the patient the following day he said where he had been stung was painless, but the ring block was agony!
The ‘big’ scary black spider in my bathroom at 3.30 am this morning seems like a tiddler now. Repeat crops of the very spindly ones, which fill every ceiling corner, as soon as you Hoover up the last ones, are no longer such an irritation - thank you!
impressed you have overcome your spider phobia - its the bugs that would worry me too!!