I know I talk about this a lot (like HERE AND HERE), but when you are in a foreign country and dealing with multiple language barriers, conversations can frequently spiral out of control and into an abyss of confusion. You must constantly be aware of the possibility that your understanding of a certain thing or concept is hinged on dubious information, miscommunication, or misunderstandings. Or, sometimes, it is a woeful combination of all three.

Such is the case with the drunk elephant you see here in my photo.

A lot of times when explanations from wilderness guides (or SHERPAS or pilots or VAQUEROS) go off the rails, you are in a foreign land and miles away from any internet or cell phone service. Otherwise, you could just Google your way towards a plausible explanation and pull yourself up out of the confusion hole. But then, of course, you’d never get to have conservations like this:

Me: What is the elephant doing? Does he think he can reach those tree branches?

Guide: He is probably drunk. They get drunk.

Me: Hold on, elephants get drunk? How?

Guide: They love to eat the tree sausages.

Me: Now you sound drunk. It sounds like you said "tree sausages."

Guide: Yes! They get drunk on the sausage fruit!

Let me pause for a second to submit an important part of this puzzle, Exhibit A, the Sausage Tree (and no we don’t sell these at COVINGTON’S NURSERY, I already checked):

Regardless of whether it makes you drunk, this is undeniably a badass tree, but as both a recovering alcoholic and a nurseryman myself, suddenly I had an overwhelming number of questions.

Me: So they’re certainly the largest tree fruit I’ve ever seen, but still. How many would an enormous elephant have to eat to become drunk? And wouldn’t they have to be rotting or fermented first? But if the elephants are eating them right off the tree and acting funny, then maybe they’re more of a psychedelic like psilocybin or mescaline? And if they make an elephant act silly, then I can’t imagine what would they do to a human?!

Guide: What?

Me: People. Ugandans. Do they eat the sausages? Do they make people drunk too?

Guide: No no no! I said elephants! People cannot eat them.

This is where I need to stop and introduce Mimi, Exhibit B, the awful and irritating woman who was with us (and who I talk about in greater detail HERE and HERE). She had a snide and condescending way of speaking that made you want to beat her with a tree sausage.

Mimi: Ryan, don’t be so idiotic. Stop asking him stupid questions. Look how high up in the tree they are. Obviously, people can’t reach those!

She said this as if I was really, really stupid.

Me: You’re right Mimi. There are all these magical trees made of giant psychedelic sausages. They’re potent enough to f*ck up an elephant, but the people of Uganda don’t eat or sell them, because getting the sausages down from the tree would require a small ladder.

Guide: No. I’m telling you, they are only for elephants! They don’t get people high, they make you sick. They are poisonous!

Me: Okay, now we’re getting somewhere. They’re poisonous to people.

But I still wasn’t convinced. Anything that an elephant could eat, right off the vine, and that would make them inebriated, would also lend itself to being synthesized somehow into something useful (or fun) for humans as well.

The second I got back into cell service range, before even calling my family or partner, I was determined to get to the bottom of this.

And I did. I am now going to break it all down for you, but first, I want everyone to stop what they are doing and go and donate that small amount of money to Wikipedia that they keep begging us for. Man, it’s a useful service, and I don’t realize how much I use it until it’s unavailable, and someone is telling me about tree sausages and drunk elephants.

Here is what I have since learned, and yes, there’s a reason the world isn’t brimming over with sausage fruit junkies:

1. Our guide was confused about many things.

2. The sausage fruits are turned into alcohol, and it is served mostly on special occasions in Uganda. Served on special occasions to people, to be clear; not to the elephants.

3. Although they have occasionally been known to eat the fruit, what elephants really enjoy eating is the foliage of the tree, not the sausages.

4. Right off the vine, without being dried or fermented, the sausage fruits are extremely poisonous to people. This fact our guide was totally right about.

5. There is another very prevalent myth in Africa about elephants getting drunk off of rotting and fermented fruits they find on the ground. But not only did our guide get the fruit wrong —the myth is about the marula fruit, not the sausage fruit— most scientists have since debunked this idea, asserting that an elephant would have to sit and eat about 1,500 perfectly-fermented marula fruits in order to get drunk, which seems unlikely.

6. Mimi was only getting warmed up, and as irritating people are wont to do, she would gradually become more and more condescending, difficult, and irritating as the days went on. (I didn’t need Wikipedia to tell me this, I learned this THE HARD WAY).

So. To make a short story long, I shared all of this with you only to eventually admit, we still have no idea what that elephant was doing. My guess is that it gets extremely boring out here on the savanna, and he was just playing around with all those birds to pass the time.

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You can read HERE about a bird that passes the time by watching antelopes have sex.

Or, even though we now know that elephants don’t get really drunk, I can personally attest that they do love to bartend, and you can read about that HERE!