Africa Up Close
by Margo Pfeiff
The Gazette, Montreal 16 September 2000
permission has been requested from the publisher to reproduce this article
MARGO PFEIFF, GAZETTE / Bull elephant glares menacingly at human intruders in his domain.
MARGO PFEIFF, GAZETTE / Children welcome visitors to their village in the Zambian bush.
(South Luangwa area)
MARGO PFEIFF, GAZETTE / Visitors to South Luangwa National Park can spend time in a traditional village and participate in daily chores and activities.
MARGO PFEIFF, GAZETTE / Zebra watches trekkers warily while grazing in South Luangwa National Park.
MARGO PFEIFF, GAZETTE / At remote bush camps, trekkers eat well.
South Luangwa National Park, Zambia - "Right! Single file. No breaking rank," our lanky, red-haired safari guide ordered in a pompous colonial British accent as he inspected his scraggly, overheated crew.
"Splen-n-n-n-n-did!" was the verdict. Then, with a deep knee bend, a quick spin on the spot and a long-legged step forward he mockingly saluted us with an exaggerated snap to attention - a flawless snippet of physical comedy in the best tradition of Monty Python.
"We'd been warned about Huw," John Trowbridge threw wryly over his shoulder as we set off at a brisk pace into the Zambian bush.
I, however, had not been "warned" about Huw Jones, and was having some half-serious second thoughts about the whole idea of a walking safari. Just 18 hours earlier I'd been browsing through shelves of ostrich jerky and impala pate in Johannesburg's sleek modern airport; now I was out in the middle of the Zambian bush with a guide who was clearly mad; a rocket scientist from Iowa (Trowbridge) and his wife, Sandi; and a London estate agent named Sally who favoured designer khakis and had never ventured outside the world's major fashion centres.
But it was wildlife I'd come for, I told myself, and there was certainly plenty of that. Hundreds of storks were jostling with hornbills for front-row position at a bright-green waterhole. Families of warthogs, tails held high, minced importantly into the brush, ignoring the impala and giraffes.
Salami-shaped gourds dangled from sausage trees and a froth of yellow blossoms erupted from the crown of the scrambled-egg tree.
And while Jones had his madcap side, he certainly knew his wildlife. He squatted and pointed out how the talcum dust has captured every wrinkle of the platter-size elephant prints. A stroll with him was like walking through a National Geographic special on fast-forward.
And it was the walking that drew me to Zambia. Watching the wilderness and wildlife from the back of a vehicle seemed tame, but very few African countries allow safari companies to take their clients on foot into national parks. Zimbabwe and Zambia in south-central Africa are exceptions.
Zambia's South Luangwa National Park is one of the most prolific wildlife areas in southern Africa, and one of the least visited - always a good combination for true wilderness-lovers. To get here, I'd flown from Johannesburg to Lilongwe, just across the border in Malawi. From there a Cessna shuttled me to Mfuwe airport, where my pilot switched to a four-wheel drive for the last dust-eating hour to the safari camp.
It was a game warden named Norman Carr who persuaded South Luangwa's traditional leader, Chief Nsefu, to put aside a vast area of land in 1950 as a private game reserve. It would be open to the public with admission fees benefiting the local people. Carr also started the walking safaris in the early 1960s for those who wanted more freedom in the bush. Carr was a legend until his death a few years ago, and his protege, Robin Pope, is today one of Zambia's best-known guides. Although most other operators offer brief walking excursions from South Luangwa's lodges and permanent camps, Robin Pope Safaris specializes in three- and five-day walking trips from bases in remote bush camps.
We spent our first night at Pope's private camp beside the park. I shared a drink with Pope's wife, Jo, in the thatched-roof bar at the base of a giant ebony tree. As the sun melted into the Luangwa River, Jo told me about her own first trip to Africa in 1989 when she fell head over heels in love with Robin. "He insisted it was just a bad case of khaki fever," she said with a chuckle. "That's when you're smitten with the whole romantic mystique of the safari guide." Four times she proposed before he finally succumbed.
The next day we drove for five hot hours to the park's Chibembe area, and set off toward our first bush camp behind Jones and an armed scout.
It might seem foolhardy to walk through a landscape populated by lions, elephants, Cape buffalo and hippos, but it's actually quite safe. An experienced guide knows the animals' routines and can read their behaviour. No client has ever been injured by an animal on a walking safari in Zambia. Guides train for years before they're ready to undergo grueling exams by their peers.
"Intelligent animals like lions and elephants have an inherent fear of humans and will move away," Jones said. In 10 years, guides have never had to kill an animal and only twice have they had to fire weapons to scare one off.
After an hour's easy walk over flat, open terrain, we arrived at Mumbulu, where we were to spend two nights in a cluster of brush huts perched above a bend in the Chibembe River. Our luggage had already arrived by four-wheel-drive, and we were each assigned a rustic but comfortable thatched hut with twin beds and a sink.
There was no electricity or running water - staff members brought jugs of warm water for washing - and the neatly raked sand floor was covered with mats. It was from here we would do our walking safaris twice a day, just after dawn and in late afternoon.
That evening, we dined by candlelight on fresh bream from Lake Malawi with South African wine and bread still warm from the pit oven in the outdoor "kitchen." I drifted off to sleep beneath a cocoon of mosquito netting softly lit by the reddish light of a hurricane lamp.
I've never been a morning person, but in Africa I can't stay in bed once the sky begins to brighten and the birds begin to tune up. By 6 a.m. we'd eaten our bacon and eggs and were on our way in the relative cool of morning.
Most people come to Africa to see the Big 5 - lions, leopards, elephants, rhinos and buffalo - but my most memorable moment of the trip was an encounter that morning with the Tiny 5,000. We came across a silver-trunked baobab, one of those bulbous African trees that appear to be planted upside down with roots reaching for the clouds. The tree was hollow, the opening a black yawn into which Huw stepped with me on his heels.
Inside, he switched on a flashlight and illuminated a wriggling carpet of brown, furry, mouse-size creatures huddled up the walls as far as I could see, their muffled shrieks echoing into the far reaches of the arboreal cathedral. The sight left me speechless. "So sweet," Huw mused; "Mauritian tomb bats."
The Trowbridges, both in their mid-60s, turned out to be fit walkers, and quickly adapted to being on foot after an initial bout of nervousness. Elegant Sally kept us amused with her designer interpretations of the local wildlife. Giraffes, she suggested, walked just like Naomi Campbell, and the extravagantly plumed lilac-breasted rollers had "been dressed by Versace.''
A string of elephants lumbered across our path. A single lion peered from the shrubbery, but even with Jones's help it took me a few moments to see him. We followed the lion's leisurely pace for an hour as he rested, drank and shook up the local wildlife. "Puku whistle, impala grunt and baboons shout," Jones said, "all early-warning signals."
Walking slows you down to the natural pace of Africa and fine-tunes your senses. On foot I could relish the details of the landscape and gain a more intimate sense of how animals interact with each other and their environment.
After 10 years in Africa, Jones speaks with that peculiar safari-guide staccato and interrupts himself to point out things of passing interest.
"I've worked as an anti-poaching ranger and when I've returned to London I've done everything - steriospernum cunthianum, pink jacaranda pink in full bloom - from gravedigging to assembling wooden Christmas elves in a factory."
A bottomless pit of bush trivia, Jones pointed out giant thorns used to fashion stretched elephant ears into native drums and bright red berries sprouting from the trunk of a thin tree that locals claim are an aphrodisiac. Stopping over a sizeable pile of straw-like elephant dung, he dug around with a stick and uncovered a shiny brown pod, which he broke open with a pocket-knife to reveal three nuts.
"Scleriacaria caffra,'' he said. ''The marula nut." They taste rather like Brazil nuts and are used in Amarula, a creamy South African Bailey's-like liqueur. Now I've done it all, I think, eaten nuts from elephant turds!
Our scout, Faxon, armed with his Czech rifle, led our little column, and Amon, the trainee guide, brought up the rear. Amon was also the ''tea bearer" who used the fixings in his backpack to prepare our mid-morning cuppas under the shade of a tamarind tree. He told me he had learned about Canada at school. "We have been taught about the Canadian Shield and about chinooks," he tells me proudly. Two subjects many Canadians would have trouble defining, I assured him.
By 11, we were back in camp. After lunch, we dispersed for a siesta. It was late September, well into the dry season and by now most of the tourists had left this part of Africa. But in some ways it was the best time to visit; the waterholes had shrunk and the game was concentrated around the few remaining pools of water. I slaked my own dusty thirst with a frosty Zambian lager, and stretched out in a canvas lounger in the shade to watch pied kingfishers dive for lunch in the lazy river.
Jones had promised to take us to Hippo Corner this afternoon and we were off at 3:30 after a dousing under sun-heated water in the reed shower stall and a leisurely afternoon tea.
Not far from camp, Jones suddenly held up his hand to stop us. Barely concealed behind a thin wall of high grass, a herd of Cape buffalo were nervously milling up a cloud of dust as they paused before crossing an open field to a waterhole. Their long, curved horns shimmered in the sweltering heat. We waited safely out of range amid the trees. Suddenly, as if on cue, the mob flinched and backed off about 10 metres.
Jones scuffed his boot in the dirt, sending a puff of dust into the nearly still air. "Wind direction change," he said. Burdened with poor eyesight and hearing, these potentially dangerous creatures have an extraordinary sense of smell. Finally, after several false starts they slowly emerged, a dusty stampede bound for the waterhole.
Hippo Corner is a wide bend in the river with a pod of hundreds of hippopotami - a veritable stew of river horses. Their broad backs glistened in the sun, candy-pink ears twitching nervously. They grunted their disapproval at our presence then yawned in unison, but I wasn't fooled. They didn't look a bit sleepy. I suspected they were just displaying those fearsome chisel-shaped incisors that look like the mauls used to crack open chunks of logs. The sandy bank behind the hippos was riddled with the burrows of nesting carmine bee-eaters, red-winged birds who chased lunch in the late-afternoon light.
As we neared camp, a troupe of baboons bounced down from a tree and sauntered saucily toward us. Jones dropped onto his haunches facing them and swayed side to side; the lead baboon did the same. When Jones pumped his elbows up and down, the baboon followed suit. Minutes ticked by in a display of pure play. Our guide was completely absorbed, and it was only when I laughed as the baboon copied an off-colour arm motion that he snapped back. "I love baboons," he said with a sheepish grin.
That evening, after the others had retired, I found myself wide awake and headed down to the river's edge to watch a full moon rise over the river. Jones joined me just as the roar of a lion far up the river echoed down toward us. A hippo appeared on the opposite bank, its back floodlit by the moon. As they often do on land, the hippo rested its heavy nose on the ground and we could hear his huffing breath in the sand.
With the coming rains in November, the safari season would soon end and Jones is excited to head off to Lusaka, Zambia's capital, for a spot of civilization. "To hear loud music and watch people in a bar for a while," he said wistfully. Trading wild animals for party animals, tsetse flies for bar flies. Myself, I can't think of anything better than staying right here in this lap of simple wilderness luxury with my toes curled in sand still warm from the day's sun.
The next morning we spent walking to Kasansanya for our last night in the remote bush. The following day, we were picked up by Jeep and taken to the Popes' lavish permanent camp, Nsefu, deep in South Luangwa National Park. Nsefu was Norman Carr's original camp in the 1960s and Zambia's first. The Popes have recently refurbished its six whitewashed rondavels - round adobe structures with high thatched roofs - into deluxe en-suite accommodation set beneath mahogany and winterthorn trees overlooking the Luangwa River.
Zambia is one of the few countries that permits game drives at night. These are especially popular in the South Luangwa because of its healthy population of elusive leopards, usually glimpsed only after dark. That evening we set off after sunset in a vehicle equipped with a powerful spotlight. Giraffes appeared out of the black, folded down for the night, aardvarks and honey badgers scuttled off and bush babies leapt from limb to limb. Just before we turned back around 8:30, we glimpsed a spotted tail dangling from a branch. Five leopards were lazily draped in the tree.
On my final morning in the Zambia, Jones took me through a local village where the Popes have supported a school for the last 10 years. In response to guests' overwhelming requests to spend time in a traditional village, they helped villagers set up a comfortable visitor's hut.
This is not a "staged" village experience, but a chance to spend time with an African family and community and where accommodation and food is totally African. You can meet the chief and a local traditional healer, or spend a morning with the women collecting water and cooking, or helping the men with construction or brewing a kind of beer.
By noon I was at Mfuwe airport to board my flight to Zimbabwe. I reach out to shake Jones's hand, and he filled it with fragrant flowers
"Wild gardenia and jasmine," came the automatic safari-guide ID. Just before I stepped on the plane I glanced one last time and was treated to the full Monty - Python that is, a last madcap salute. OK, maybe that light-headedness is a slight touch of khaki fever.
If You Go
Season:Although the South Luangwa area is officially open for safari from June 1 to Oct. 31, Nkwali Camp is open during the rainy "green season" for boat trips on the flooded river.
