Adventures in fauna/Timbaktu nights

The thing I want to spill my guts on first is quite unrelated to what I went to Timbaktu for, and not altogether fun either. This is to do with the experience of dealing with all the kinds of insects and animals at Timbaktu. This visit seemed to be marked by all kinds of animal stuff. To begin with the day I landed there, a cobra was encountered in the middle of the place and caused some commotion. It was finally shooed away without any issue. I slept through that incident :-). However later someone told me that I might want to sleep outside due to the heat, and my fervent feeling was: not after hearing about this cobra !

I was put up at a small 1 bdrm house (hut!) that was used for visitors. The place had not been used for sometime and was deeply cobwebbed and stuff. Although some cleaning was done before I moved it, the spiders etc. were too entrenched. I was initially hugely horrified by the size of the spiders there. They were absolutely huge, upto 2 inches in diameter from one end of the leg to another.


Slowly I got used to them and we co-existed reasonbly amicably. I don't know if they were poisonous. Another time I woke up in the middle of the night and on the wall above my head was this even huger insect which I took then to be a spider but it must have been something else. It had 10 legs for one thing and spiders have 8 and the body structure is different. It must have been 2.5 or 3 inches long. Anyway I was thoroughly shaken by that for a moment, and it didn't help when the thing lost its grip and fell onto the bed. It scrambled around for a little while and while I was trying to drive it away, it vanished, but much to my discomfiture somewhere in the vicinity of the bed.



A dilemma ensued, but I finally gave up and trusting my safety to the benevolence of nature, went back to bed. Nothing further ensued. I encountered that creepy crawly several times again during the trip and was quite comfortable with it by the end. But later that night I was woken up in the early hours by an animal jumping onto my window ledge from outside and then jumping off again. Again, I was thoroughly shocked, but later figured out that it must have been a cat. Basically this kinda represented how the nights were for me. It was a new experience to have entering the house or going to bed be a mildly risky activity. On the last day there, I left the door open for a little while and a small bat got in ! It circled around inside the house for a little while not able to find a way out, while I stood to a corner shielding my face with a book and contemplating spending the night that way. Luckily the guy managed to get out and relative peace returned. On another night I woke up to feel a roach crawling up my hand. Not cool.

On the nicer side, I would wake up in the morning to a cacaphony of bird chirping. A couple of birds would invariable come into the house and hang out on the rafters. Pretty cool.

The idea of personal space had to be regretfully given up. There were always these tiny black flies circling round ones face and after some time one basically agreed to more or less co-exist with them with an occasional half-hearted brushoff. Besides this, if you sat anywhere in the evening for any length of time, all sorts of insects would drop in on you (as in -- drop onto your body) from out of nowhere. Once I found an exquisite tiny, tiny baby scorpion on my hand. It was shaped exactly like a real scorpion, but only about a couple of mm in length. Horrifyingly fascinating.


Due to the heat of the day, at night, the walls of the houses apparently radiated back the heat. It was absolutely still for a large part of the night and even when it started blowing (a deliciously cool breeze) the windows were small and didn't catch enough. So it was really really hard to sleep. (Most people slept outside, but I didn't want to do that). That combined with the insects made the nights quite bad. I typically would wake up atleast 2 or 3 times a night and have a hard time going back to sleep. It was definitely problematic. There is another guesthouse there, that is better in multiple ways, and I intend to stay there instead, the next time I visit. I expect it will be a lot better.

There was also this animal somewhere between a lizard and iguana, something like a chameleon. I'm sure most people have seen this if they grew up India. There were several of these around, and again they grew to nauseating sizes. I got a photograph of one of them (click on the photo to get a better view). Unfortunately it doesn't give a sense of the size of the thing. The photo is just a step away being a really good photograph, if there was a little more light it would have made it.



There was one other amusing vignette. At the office (like pretty much everywhere in rural India) there are a couple of street dogs that are informally part of the office. They play some kind of useful guard role and are otherwise well-behaved so its a useful co-existence. Due to the heat, one of the dogs had come into the building and was sprawled across the reception area. So somebody came by and whacked it quite hard a few times to get it out. The dog completely ignored the person. It was like the dog was saying: "Dude, are you out of your mind, its *hot* out there !".

To round out the animal populace there were a couple of adorable kittens in the mess where I ate.