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On Safari

Michael Royce

     “We’ve got to go to Africa,” Francie said, “before it’s too late.”
    “Yeah,” I responded in a neutral voice. Painfully conscious of what she meant we might be too late for, I was wary to commit. This is the yin and yang of our marriage. Francie is always ready to go, everywhere, at any time. I have to be convinced.
     We discussed the cost of a safari and calculated it at three times what we’d ever spent before during well-travelled lives. I dragged my heels. “The big animals, the birds,” Francie said. “There’s nothing like it anywhere else on earth.”
    I was attracted to the adventure but also to the opportunity to escape the short and grey days of winter in Portland where we live. I weighed arguments for and against the trip for a day and then conceded. “I’m in. Let’s go.” We wired money and committed to a three-week trip to Zambia.
    We would arrive in January, the middle of the rainy season when monsoon rains fall in the afternoon, alternating with brilliant sunshine and cumulus clouds, which soar like huge white towers into the sky. The tropical heat is moderated by these rains and the great plateau on which Zambia is located. The land ripples with green grasses, trees are in flower and birds flaunt mating plumage. Although I longed for warmth and sun, I was happy to avoid the unrelenting heat of the dry season.
     Our flight from Portland to London, to Johannesburg, and on to Lusaka, Zambia, left us stunned. “How did it happen?” our eyes asked each other. We left the familiarity of home, entered a long metal tube, and hurtled through space. Thirty hours later, we arrived in an exotic land—in latitudes which are down where we are up, south while we are north. Yet it was the same world as our own, where people make reservations and honor them.
    As planned, Peter, who would be our guide while we stayed at Mfuwe Lodge, was at the airport to meet and transport us in a van to the lodge in the South Luangwa National Park where we would spend the first part of our stay. For several hours, we bounced east toward the Luangwa River on the Zambian national highway, more memorable for potholes than pavement. The sharp overripe smell of earth released by the rain and the soft caress of wind against my arm at rest on the window ledge lulled me into a half-dream. As we passed villages where people moved through the day in their diverse rhythms, I nodded with sleepiness but identified with the patterns of life I saw. Francie fought exhaustion to watch all we passed with intensity. Turning, she commented to me quietly, “One of every seven adults in Zambia has HIV and the country’s life expectancy at birth has fallen to 52.” My mind could not cope with such statistics.
    As we continued toward Mfuwe, we reached savannahs covered by the grasslands of the Luangwa floodplain, which stood as high as six feet. Through these jade seas, elephants floated like shadowy houses in the slanting light of late afternoon. Closer to the river, hippopotamuses burped. They waddled among the watery rushes and scoured worn paths as they hauled their sausage-like bodies up the banks to forage in the dense riverside growth. The ancient Greeks named them river horses. I thought they resembled massive bratwursts. A sacred ibis, legs pulled beneath in flight, pierced the air with its thick-curved bill. The white of its feathers contrasted with the blackness of its bald head and legs. I surrendered to the strange calls of animals new to me and the moist riverine smells.
    From the south, the village of Mfuwe huddled next to the road for miles as we approached the gate of the South Luangwa National Park. People walked and rode bicycles on both sides of the road; there were very few cars beside ours. The road was raised on a dike and loomed above the village, separated from the road by a trash-filled marsh. Small open air stores, constructed with timber and corrugated tin roofs, offered a handful of items. They sold what the poor can buy—home grown vegetables organized in neat pyramids, dusty inner tubes and bike rims hanging from rafters, pre-paid minutes for cell phones, coca cola, meager troves of packaged cookies and tins of cheap food. In open spaces between the clusters of stores, we saw struggling plots of corn.
    Further back from the road, we spotted homes arranged in compounds. Three or four thatched round huts clustered together, each no more than ten feet in diameter and enclosed by a fence of stripped tree limbs driven straight into the ground. The walls were made from mud, clay and the dirt of abandoned termite mounds for adhesion. In the main shelter, there was a single room with a dirt floor for the family. One or two smaller huts stood close by for extended family and generally a covered outdoor cooking area without walls.
    Electricity lines passed the village beside the road apparently for some richer destination because we noticed very few of the local stores or homes were connected. Children trudged to and from communal water pumps, carrying five-gallon buckets. There was no plumbing or water in the houses. People had only the bushes in which to defecate or urinate. I thought of our Portland home—2600 square feet, four bedrooms, and two and a half bathrooms.
    Finally, we passed from the village through the gate to the Park. In another half-hour, we arrived at Mfuwe Lodge where the staff greeted us with fruit drinks and chilled cloths to lower our temperature and dab at the dust of the trip. The coolness against my neck revived me.
    The reception hall of the lodge was designed in open style without walls, protected from the rain but not necessarily the animals. The roof of the dining room rested on massive pillars and light from candles danced on the surface of the swimming pool. Freshly cut bird of paradise flowers adorned the tables.
     Staff guided us to our bungalows with walls of white-washed clay and thatch sweeping down to within feet of the ground on both sides. Inside a king-size bed was enshrined in a canopy of mosquito netting. A bank of louvered doors faced the river. Outside on a deck above the Luangwa, we relaxed and watched as rafts of hippos floated 20 feet from us. Their ridiculously small ears twitched on bony foreheads while bulbous eyes peered about like periscopes.
    The deep rumble of a drum called us back to the main hall for the sundowner, a pre-dinner ritual of hors d’oeuvres washed down with a wide range of drinks. I sipped my gin and tonic in that gentle hour after the sun sets when the animals of the day are quieting toward sleep and the predators of the dark have not yet started to hunt. Andy, the lodge manager, came over and introduced himself. He showed us pictures of an elephant striding purposefully past the reception desk and lions sleeping in cool corners beside the guest houses. No guest, he stressed, should walk outside at night without an armed guard from the staff. The pictures convinced me although I realized Andy had a larger motive for his warning than our safety alone. The maiming or death of a guest by a large predator would hardly promote ecotourism.
    The dinner tables were set with linen and lit by candles. After our long journey, I was more tired than hungry but diligently worked my way through an entrée of mixed cheeses and olives rolled in anchovies, a main dish of chicken couscous, a salad course and dessert, all matched with appropriate wines. I confess to a personal weakness that compels me to eat what is put in front of me, especially when I have already paid for it. After dinner, Francie and I were totally done in and asked to be escorted to our bungalow.
     On the way, I selected an old book from the library because I was intrigued by its title, “The White Impala,” and even when tired I like to read before sleep. The author Norman Carr was a legend in the South Luangwa Reserve. When we arrived at our bungalow, I thumbed through the book reading the flyleaf, the introduction and captions on the pictures, a habit of mine to warm to a story before diving into it. Here and there, I scanned a page or part of a chapter to capture a fuller sense of the book.
    Carr killed 200 elephants one year. He had been a professional hunter, who became a ranger in the Park at its founding. At the start, I learned, the main duty of a ranger was similar to those of a hunter. After listening to the complaints of local tribesmen about elephants trampling their crops or occasionally killing a villager, Carr entered the bush to track and kill the rogue elephant in obedience to an apparent codicil to the Law of the Wild. If animals forget what they are and where they must stay, they must be exterminated by that most ferocious of predators—small, unassuming man, who has command over the machineries of death.
    The book contained pictures from the late 1890s in Chinde, Mozambique, at the mouth of the Zambesi River. On safari, Carr’s father, maybe in his late twenties, looked sleek and cool in his machila, a litter carried on a stout bamboo pole. He reclined on a padded seat three and a half feet long and two feet wide. Carried by four black Africans, he exhaled a tight cone of cigar smoke. At each end, two bearers hoisted the pole, which rested on the right shoulder of one and the left shoulder of the other. Attached to the pole was a woven carpet, which could be tilted back and forth on the fulcrum of the bamboo to provide shade. The father’s face, partially in shade, was smooth as he looked on a scene outside of our vision, but seemingly of his possession.
    Carr’s mother, sat regally in her machila, attired in a full length dress with a high collar to her chin. Her bearers wore sarongs and were bare-chested. Unlike her husband, she sat facing backward and wagged an imperious finger at the two men lifting her machila. Perhaps, a woman’s role was to review the past and a man to look into the future for chance or danger. She wore a broad-brimmed hat, almost 20 inches in diameter, decorated with fluffy white plumes of some expired and exotic bird. Her black and white terrier sat comfortably in the shade at her feet.
     The picture was a tableau of colonialism and its wretched morality. I had trouble shaking the images before sinking into sleep.
    The next morning before the first dim light, we woke to the gentle call of the guards, who had protected us through the night. Reluctantly, I disentangled myself from the crisp white cotton sheets of the plump bed and stumbled into a bathroom divided into two parts by a serpentine five-foot clay wall. One section contained two sinks topped by mirrors for shaving or primping and, on the other side, the toilet was snuggled next to a bookcase filled with magazines extolling various African adventures. The shower, a walk-in unit attached to the bathroom complex, boasted two separate nozzles on opposite sides of a circular wall the height of our noses and separated by three feet from the overhang of the thatched roof. As I revived slowly under a hot stream of water, birds rustled the butterfly leaves of the nearby mopane tree and animals roared greeting to the day.
    Before our first safari, we were served tea. It was a meal significantly larger than my customary breakfasts—tea or coffee, rolls and jams, juices, cereals and home-made bread toasted over an open fire.
    After tea, while the sunlight still streamed obliquely across the land and it was not yet hot, six of us piled into a specially-designed stretch Land Rover, open to the air on the sides. The driver and Peter, our guide, rode in front. Three bench seats for guests rose like bleachers behind the driver so that each row had an unimpeded view as we drove through the grasslands searching for animals. Our first sighting of the morning was a Lilac-Breasted Roller, perched on a bush near the road. Motionless, its rich pastels lived up to its name.
    Peter was from the local village. Through determination and luck, he had advanced through the ranks from assistant driver, gun bearer, to the apex as guide, a highly desired position where it was possible in season to average $25 to $40 per day, over twenty times the average daily income of Zambia. To become a guide, we learned over several outings, required several years of school, covering the natural sciences for birds and animals, the classification of trees, bushes and flowers, but also auto mechanics because the guides were often our drivers, emergency medical training, and basic linguistic and other social graces to meet needs of guests from varied lands.
    Peter shared the knowledge which can be gleaned from examining scat and faint hoof marks in the dust. He taught us how to differentiate the antelope family—impalas flashing a delicate black “M” on their backsides as they scattered; kudos with parallel striping; waterbucks with white circles on their rears leading inevitably to the unfortunate nickname, “Toilet Butt;” and the sharp-horned and spotted bushbucks. Along with antelope, we saw elephants, hippos, lions, leopards, warthogs, hyenas, and over 200 different birds during our stay.
    By mid-morning, we returned to the Lodge for breakfast to confront hot sausages, scrambled eggs, pancakes, juices, cinnamon rolls, steaming fresh-brewed coffee and espresso if we wished. A good night’s sleep, rich aromas from the buffet table and several hours outdoors, even if mainly seated, combined to generate a strong appetite. After two heaping plates, I drifted off to read, write postcards and nap suffused with what I had seen and gorged with food.
    As I drooped toward a nap, I reflected that Mfuwe Lodge at $350 per day, inclusive of lodging, food and drink, guides and transport, was a life-time experience well worth the cost. Yet partially formed questions lingered in the shadows of my consciousness. Wasn’t such an amount a year’s salary for a villager? What would it have meant to the average Zambian family?
    At one, the drum summoned us to lunch. Lunch was also a serious matter with aubergine salad, marinated beef, curried chicken, green salad and beans. Anything one wanted to drink was available, although mostly we attempted to avoid alcohol at lunch so not to slump in the afternoon heat. To further ensure that guests were not underfed, there was another British-style tea in mid-afternoon of savory tarts, either spinach or mushroom, and sweet cakes. I accepted, with only slight reluctance, that I would return from this trip with some added pounds to supplement memories.
     After this tea, we mobilized for our afternoon safari, which lasted from four until seven. The light stretched longest in the hours before sunset, attaching a mystery to five giraffes as they loped across the plains through scattered trees and a dazzle of zebras which disappeared at a gallop when the Land Rover took an unexpected turn. Promptly at six, our vehicle pulled to a stop. The guides lowered a specially designed grill on the front of the vehicle to serve as table for our sundowner. I stuck with gin and tonic.
     “A slice of lime for you?” one guide asked me.
    “Ice?” the other offered.
    As I drank, I watched the sun drip behind the horizon. Everything was done for us; our only task to enjoy.
    While returning to the Lodge, we were able to view the nocturnal activity of the larger animals. We gazed into the deepening darkness with contented smiles while the guides searched for signs. The roars of the local lion pride rumbled for miles through the darkness. Stopping the vehicle abruptly, our guide focused his flashlight at the crotch of a tree ten feet above the ground. I could barely discern a half-eaten impala, dragged up into the tree in the powerful jaws of a leopard to protect his prize from scavengers during the several days it took him to consume the meat down to the bone.
    For our morning trip the third day, the Lodge organized a visit to a school for older students in Mfuwe. We visited a dormitory and asked a knot of amused boys if we could look inside. “Yes, come in,” they said. We asked many questions. “The government provides free education through the seventh grade,” they responded, “but for secondary school, families must pay for everything.” For all but local kids, this price included room and board. “Because we walk long distances from our homes in the rural areas to reach school, we must live in dormitories and can return home only on vacation,” one lanky teenager told us.
    The 30 by 30 foot barracks for the boy students was clean, smelling musty but not intolerable. Of course, it was not yet the hot season. Four boys slept to a bunk—two on a narrow cot below, head to toe, and two above. A hundred boys lived in this room with space only to slide between the bunks on entering or leaving. All their meager personal possessions hung in netting from the rafters. The crowded conditions reminded us of pictures we had seen of the Middle Passage during the era of slave trading. The dorm, I feared, was a tubercular epidemic waiting to flower. But the students were stoic and determined to learn; however they could.
    On the afternoon safari, we watched while lions lolled in the dirt ten feet from our Land Rover as they rested from a night of hunting. For an hour, we studied a male, his pride of three lionesses and four cubs, without apparent notice on their part. Returning to the lodge after sundown, we passed the same place where our guides had spotted the leopard kill the night before. The cat-gleam of two eyes reflecting from Peter’s flashlight burnt back at us from the tree. After several minutes, the leopard stretched, stood, stalked down the branch and leapt silently to the ground. I watched as it turned and stole toward us on silent pads, slinking past the side of our vehicle close enough for me to have leaned out to touch him, if I had been gripped by a death wish. In situations like this, Francie and I have learned to rely on the assumption, which we have cultivated over the years, to guide us in our off-the-beaten-track traveling. Surely, the local people we are with don’t want to die either.
    Later, I came to appreciate that the vehicle was part of a neutral landscape to the lions, leopards, giraffes, elephants and other mammals like wallpaper of a room at home. I was neither predator nor prey; my scent did not warn of danger or opportunity. The guides warned, however, that if we placed our arms outside the vehicle, or moved abruptly, our invisibility would vanish.
    Another day, we observed a male elephant, standing 13 feet tall and weighing over 12,000 pounds, graze within fifty feet of our car. A substantial sneeze escaped Peter. The elephant’s ears flapped and it rocked back in forth in mock challenge.
    “Freeze,” Peter whispered. “Wait for him to finish his business.” Unsure what this business might be, I did not move. Eventually, the elephant wandered away in harmony with a schedule and agenda of its own.
    We arrived back at the Lodge with enough time for a hot shower before heading to the main dining area. While waiting for dinner, I ordered Johnnie Walker whiskey. The meal was braised pork chops, chutneys, and curried rice. There was a full and free-flowing supply of red and white South African wines. A waiter hovered behind me and asked, “May I top up your glass?”
    As we had hoped, our stay in the Luangwa valley was an once-in-a-lifetime experience; but, at some point, I realized we were pampered and privileged not utterly unlike Carr’s parents over a century before. While the local men physically had carried the Carrs on their shoulders, we were carried figuratively in a world where rich nations have risen up on the backs of the poor.

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