TikTok Nerds

It wasn’t the end of our story. In the beginning, we arrived on a bus to Mybeya from the border of Tanzania. How we got onto the bus, something that modern is a story for another day.

We were five, all of us still alive, onto a journey from another world of suburban New York, of tick-tocks and the internet. And we planned to cross through the wild African landscape of Tanzania –on foot– that the few of us had never dreamed off. We were renegades to our sanity. We were young merchants, traders, tech workers and writers. We did not know anything of the Tanzanian jungle. So, we learned the nerd way.

We subscribed to streaming services on our phones. We watched YouTube videos. We bought magazines which illustrated the great migration. And that was our extent of knowing, “the survival guide and preparation before landing onto the Tanzanian wild”.

We were jungle dropped by Hongo service, the only air balloon Chinese operator in the area near Mybeya. So far, our phones worked. We thought were smart navigators. However, that notion took a nosedive soon after we found ourselves on land in the middle of a wild African forest.

We knew better from our Googling experience to find a camping zone. So, we assembled our thoughts to converge ourselves at a highland that was not far from where we landed. No guns with us. We queued to walk for another five miles that felt like twenty of the New York worlds. On the way, Jamie (when was still alive) on with her ‘bla bla and bla’ tone spewing what she had read about the big cats from the National geographic. We heard a few roars and soon her voice found silence. We picked up our pace.

Before arriving at a place, we called the base camp, a sight of Mount Kilimanjaro beheld our eyes, at distant horizon with puffs of clouds around it acting as veil to its volcanic snout. Up till now, we had only factored sprouts of insects and bugs with a perception of nuisance and not as life-threatening venomous injectors. But, with a constant purr of red ants and spiders, around us that perception changed too, quickly as the darkness started taking over the ground. Now, we needed light. So, we chopped a few branches of wood with the machete that I was carrying. We clipped the twigs and leaves, shaved the severed branches, assembling it into a pile. We had read that fire kept the wild predators away. Urgency gruelled our attention, we needed fire to see ourselves alive through the night.

With a lighter, we ignited the heave of our collection into a campfire. Soon our camping zone was setup in a middle of an African forest. But our anxiety acted upon us as we heard the jungle murmur becoming louder in the growls of the cheetah, hissing reptiles and occasional roars of the Lions. We wanted to find our coordinates and our phones were dumb electronics without signals.

So, we mirrored upon our collective google memories and couldn’t find and any answers to our strokes of anxious queries and internal voices. Location. Location. Location. We cried worried. The only sight that was keeping us coordinated was the reflection of moon light tossing off the gleaming snow on top snouts of the Mount Kilimanjaro, and our campfire. Suddenly we realized we were far from the nerdy neighborhoods of New York, into the wildlife of an African Jungle. Almost that nerdy spell was broken.

Now we knew better, that beyond the TikTok is the real life made in the wild, of real lives, spent in the span of time and thick talks.