a story from "It Ate My Sister"

by Mark Binder 

Episode 4 - "Out to Africa"

Our Story So Far...
When my class's garter snake, King Henry the Eighth, gave birth, my sister, Ellen nearly lost her mind. It didn't help that we were going to another continent for our Christmas vacation....
 ----------------

     When Dad dropped me off at school after Thanksgiving with a whole box full of snakes, the principal went crazy. Her name was Mrs. Dernaski, and she was three years from retirement. She called the health department and they confiscated the whole box. Prof Sink had to go down to the city pound to retrieve it. Everybody was mad at me, and when the kids voted, instead of re-naming King Henry after one of his decapitated wives, they named her "Scooter." The Prof told us to "Say a good so-long to these here rustlers." Then he sold Scooter and the little snakes to a pet store. We had a pizza party with the proceeds, which was nice but not as cool as snakes.

     In the meantime, our family was in a tizzy about getting ready for our Africa Experience, as my Dad took to calling it.

     They say that travel is supposed to be broadening, but they don't tell you that preparing for travel is a horrible nightmare. Maybe in the old days all you had to do was sneak on a ship with your rucksack and sail away. Today you need passports, visas and shots. Lots of shots. I needed to get vaccines for Yellow Fever, Hepatitis A and B, Typhoid and Rabies, which was kind of cool because even if my arm was sore, at least I knew that if I got bit by a mad dog I wouldn't go insane. At the same time, we had to start taking anti malarial drugs, which tasted awful.

     I did some reading, and found out that there were tons of diseases in Africa that you couldn't do anything about like, dengue fever, river blindness, sleeping sickness and even the plague!

     When I told my family about my research at dinner, Mom looked almost as unhappy as Ellen. She went out the next day and bought a gallon of military-strength bug repellant to keep away the tsetse flies.

     They also say that getting there is half the fun. Ha! Whoever made that up never had to fly through Chicago at Christmastime. We got stuck for a day, missed two connections, ended up running full-speed through Heathrow, just in time to miss another connection. Then we sat  in Cairo's airport for another sixteen hours before getting the last four seats for an overnight flight through a thunderstorm on an antique prop-plane to Kilimanjaro International Airport.

     We arrived in Tanzania at six in the morning completely shattered. My parents and my sister had been nauseas for hours. Nobody had slept a wink on the airplane, because there were no shades on the windows, the crashes of thunder shook the plane, lightning kept flashing by, and the engines looked like they were going to fall off.

     Dad wanted to go straight on to our safari, but because we were nearly two days late, the guide didn't show up to meet us.

     Mom made Dad check us into a hotel near the airport, which only had one room available with two twin beds. Ellen and I had to share, but somehow we managed to get to sleep without arguing.

     I woke up first, jumped out of bed to get away from my sister, and went into the bathroom to read some of my book on Killer Snakes.

     So far, I thought, this trip was a bad idea.

     Then I opened the shade to our hotel balcony, and saw the far-off peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. There was a sliver of snow on its summit. A bird that I had never seen before flew by. It looked like a vulture! There were coconut trees, and I saw a monkey climbing in them.

     My face broke into a wide grin.

     "We're in Africa!" I shouted.

     Mom and Dad groaned. Ellen threw a pillow at me. I didn't care.

     I slid the window open and stepped outside. It was sweltering hot. Without air conditioning, my clothes got wet and sticky almost immediately. I didn't care. I waved at the monkey and it waved back.

     It took us another couple of hours to get breakfast. I ordered eggs and toast with a sliced pineapple on the side. Americans aren't supposed to drink the water in Africa, because our digestive systems can't take the bacteria, so I had a tall glass of iced cold grapefruit soda called Ting. Mom and Dad had coffee. Ellen was a spoilsport and ordered bottled water. When we were done, we went back to the room to repack our bags, and left them at the front desk. Then we made our way down to the marketplace. That was where our guide's office was located.

     Tanzania is in East Africa, on the Indian Ocean, south of Kenya and north of Mozambique. It was formed in 1964 out of two British colonies, Zanzibar and Tanganyika. It has some of the most amazing nature preserves in the world, where herds of wild animals roam free and protected from hunters.

     It's also one of the poorest countries. As soon as we left our hotel, we were surrounded by beggars.

     I felt horrible and over privileged. There were all these little kids, my age and even younger. They'd stick out their hands and ask for money. Sometimes they'd try to sell us gum and things like that. I emptied my pockets of change in about two minutes. Mom said she understood, but that giving them my money would only encourage them. Dad said I needed to keep my wallet in my pocket so nobody would steal it. Ellen tried to ignore them.

     We found our way to the guide's office, which was nothing more than a little shack leaning against an old building. The sign above the door read, "Tip Top Safari Tours - low budget, high quality. Nyoka G. Smith, proprietor"

     "Hey, cool!" I said. "You know what Nyoka means in Swahili?"

     Ellen rolled her eyes. "Now you're a linguist?"

     I glared at my sister. "It means 'Snake.'"

     Ellen sighed. "You are really beginning to get on my nerves!"

     Mom said that maybe we ought to go and hire somebody more reputable, but Dad argued that he'd already wired a deposit, and at least we should try to get a refund.

     "You're all being silly," Dad said, opening the door.

Copyright 2008 by Mark Binder 
 All Rights Reserved

Next Episode: Some Ting is Wrong