Africa: Watching wildlife in remote Zambia
Source: Seattle Times
Date: 4 November 2005
Author: Carey Quan Gelernter
Zambia— We count maybe 40 hippos to our left, 50 hippos to our right and four crocodiles lurking behind them, as we cross the Luangwa River in a canoe.
In the open-air, thatched-roof dining room, tables laid with china and linen, we feel as if we've time-warped to British colonial times: We tuck into English trifle with mostly British tourists, along with staff that all tie somehow to the former British Empire.
Cooking and serving are villagers from nearby, who most of the year live a traditional, subsistence agricultural life, fending off marauding wildlife that tourists travel thousands of miles to see. When we visit the village, schoolchildren sing welcoming songs and tell us their lessons about AIDS.
Spending four days at Tafika, a remote Zambian bush camp, turned out to be an experience in microcosm of many themes of African life. The scenery fulfilled my Hollywood-fed, Western image of Africa, alluring in its beautiful dangers: a brown winding river, teeming with hundreds of hippos and crocodiles; heat; tsetse flies.
The mix of people we met, their wildly divergent lives intersecting in this one safari camp, provided a glimpse of how life here is a mix of isolation and global reach, vestiges of colonialism and the forces of change.
"Africa's best-kept secret"
My husband, 12-year-old son and I visited the family-run Tafika Camp last year. Tafika is one of a string of safari camps and lodges near South Luangwa National Park — a two-hour flight from the Zambian capital of Lusaka to a provincial town, Mfuwe, followed by a nearly two-hour drive in a 4x4 over hard, rutted roads.
Zambia
Getting there
Seattle travelers bound for Zambia can connect in London with a nonstop flight to Lusaka, or if visiting South Africa as well, might do better to fly into Johannesburg instead, then connect to Lusaka. Prices vary by season and airline. From Lusaka you can also fly to Livingstone, Zambia, to see Victoria Falls, then go on to Mfuwe.
Lodging
Tafika rates, included all meals, drinks and activities except microlight flights($80 extra), start at $425 U.S. per person in high season. More info: www.remoteafrica.com
Health
Travelers should take malaria pills and make sure they're up-to-date on such inoculations as tetanus-diphtheria, polio and hepatitis A. More info: www.cdc.gov/travel/cafrica.htm
The University of Washington Travel Medicine Service, 206-598-4888;
Public Health Seattle/King County (206) 296-4960.
More information
www.zambiatourism.com
The Zambian tourism board's Web site, which includes info on many bush-safari camps.
Mills Tourism Consulting/Renee Mills
(425) 885-3548 or mamaafrica27@cs.com
"Luangwa, Zambia's Treasure," by Mike Coppinger and Jumbo Williams, Inyathi Publishing, 1998. E-mail: info@inyathi.com; www.inyathi.com/luangwa
"Lonely Planet Zambia," by David Else, Lonely Planet Publications, 2002.
The sojourn followed a 10-day safari in Botswana, a country more on the usual safari-tourist track. We'd added it on the advice of our travel consultant, Renee Mills, a friend of Tafika owners John and Carol Coppinger. It would be that ever-elusive, "unspoiled" tourist destination — a place to go before it gets discovered, she said.
No regular public transportation plies the road to Mfuwe from Mkasanga, the 1,000-strong village near the camp, so local people mostly travel by bicycle; everywhere we smell charring from fires set to clear brush alongside the road, the better to look out for dangerous animals. Tafika pays for four of the village's six schoolteachers. Carol Coppinger dispenses medicine, as the village awaits a government clinic.
The tourism push (slogan: "Africa's best-kept secret") is just beginning for Zambia, which has largely controlled the massive poaching of the 1970s and '80s so that big game such as lion, leopard and elephant is abundant. In addition, the country is now drawing British tourists who are forsaking Zimbabwe, due to that country's political troubles.
The Luangwa River is the unique draw: Few if any have as many hippos and crocs, we read. And this is the only river, a National Geographic researcher tells us, that from source to end is undammed and undeveloped.
What has made life so difficult for people has, ironically, preserved the ecosystem: The tsetse fly makes cattle-raising untenable, and a long rainy season of November-May, which leaves roads impassable, allows nature a chance to repair signs of human activity.
A bend in the river
Tafika camp sits under the shade of leadwood trees, overlooking an oxbow of the Luangwa River, surrounded on three sides by national parkland. From lounge chairs set on grass kept clipped by evening hippo munching, you can watch the hippo action below — sometimes fierce, and even deadly, fights for the deeper pools of water in the dry season.
Guests, up to 10 at a time, sleep in five partly open-roofed chalets made of reeds, grasses and other native materials. Our bathroom's built onto a so-called sausage tree (they cut the sausage-shaped fruit off so they won't fall on your head), giving a kind of upscale Swiss Family Robinson feel. Despite plush bedding and mosquito nets, though, there's a limit to how upscale you can get when you share digs with tiny frogs and unknown creatures scratching and rustling above you in the rafters.
Most of the South Luangwa camps are similar to Tafika's, we're told by an English travel agent who'd just visited them all, though some fancier lodges offer less rustic accommodations.
A stay at Tafika, we soon find, is a nearly nonstop eating and game-viewing experience — between campfire breakfast, ultralight ride, morning game drive or walking safari (with mid-road tea break), long lunch, afternoon tea at camp, late-afternoon game drive that segues into night game drive (with a stop for sundowners), arrive-back-at-camp drinks, and late dinner.
If you are late to a meal, thinking you're still pretty full from the last one and on sensory overload, a staff member will knock on your reed door. They want to make sure you get your money's worth (and that you haven't been eaten by hippos, I suppose, too).
On foot in the bush
We leave on our five-hour walking safari at 7, before the day heats up too much; July is winter here and evenings require a sweater, but by noon, we'll be sweating in what I guess to be 80-degree heat. An armed guard leads, our naturalist guide Isaac follows next, then our family and bringing up the rear a staff member carrying a backpack of tea things.
I'm nervous during the short canoe crossing we make, but Isaac assures us hippos and crocs have learned to avoid this busy crossing spot.
On the other side of the river, he begins pointing out all the smaller things you don't notice on a game drive: hippo paths — long dual tracks in the sand made by hippos following each other out of the river at night; a lion's last droppings from a digested meal: a clump of soft hair and clean, white bone.
He shows us sweet berries of the ebony tree that local people dry and use like sugar in porridge; buffalo dung used to polish mud floors; natural "glue" from mopane trees used to repair pottery.
At Big Lagoon camp, we look over ruins of a camp abandoned by the government in economic hard times. After that, the camp became a shelter for poachers, who killed some 100,000 elephants and exterminated the black rhino population. The remains of a dining hall are covered in poachers' graffiti ("Animals should be for the people"). Some poachers were locals trying for feed families, but more, Isaac says, were outsiders.
We have tea at Crocodile Camp, one of the two walk-in bush camps within several hours reach of Tafika. Its four thatched cabins and dining room, much like a more modest, scaled-down Tafika except for dirt floors, are taken down at the end of each season.
A herd of 400 to 500 buffalo, along with three warthogs, is drinking at a river. Isaac kicks up sand to see which way the wind blows and tell whether the buffalo will smell us. We quietly climb down from the tree line, and it's a thrill to get as near as 75 feet before a few spot us and set off a stampede, charging up a narrow trail out of the valley in a cloud of dust.
Isaac's knowledge and 30-years experience in these parks assure us we are in good hands. With a background in agriculture, he's been doing ecology work since the 1970s; he worked for the area's most influential conservationist, the late Norman Carr, who arrived in the 1930s and in the '50s pioneered walking safaris, after persuading an at-first-dubious local chief that people would actually pay money to see the animals.
The government wanted to give him a desk job, but Isaac prefers the bush. English colleagues from the early days, bankrolled by family money, all have their own safari companies by now, he says. He was the first of his family to be formally educated, he says, so he's burdened by traditional responsibilities of caring for extended family.
We've just come from 10 days in Botswana, so we'd already seen a lot of big game, but it is always exciting to see more. We see lions, including a male with a buffalo he'd killed, and several by a road (with Isaac frantically trying to warn away an approaching bicyclist).
On our night drives, the tracker flashing a red light across the terrain so as not to blind the animals, we see a leopard walking the road; a hyena with its kill; and the nocturnal cats, civet and genet.
What I like most is just watching the river. Crocodiles slithering in and out of the water, and hippos, their sensitive skin oozing a red substance that protects it, opening huge, large-toothed mouths wide and bellowing, trying to muscle each other off territory.
One evening, with John Coppinger as our guide, we hear an elephant trumpeting, disturbed apparently by another vehicle. As we approach, the elephant trumpets and charges us. Our tracker — a villager who'd once ended up climbing a tree as an elephant crushed his bicycle — nervously tells John he sees a baby; maybe this is its protective mother. But the mother emerges with the baby; John says the charging elephant is an aunt.
"We can't have these badly behaving elephants," John declares. If we run, he explains, they'll learn they can scare people off the roads. So, hearts thumping, we stand our ground.
And she turns away. We sit for maybe 20 minutes and watch as the elephants eat and lock tusks. An awkward baby tries to wield its floppy trunk.
I recall our travel consultant Mills' words: "If you're not really scared at least once on your Africa trip, you're not getting your money's worth."
Lest elephant and buffalo encounters aren't enough of a adrenaline rush, John also takes tourists up in his microlight ($80 for 15 or 20 minutes). It's kind of like flying through the air on a bicycle with a motor and wings.
Here's what our son, Tao, records about his flight:
"Twenty-five crocodiles at 20 feet; buzzed (fishermen) poachers; tawny eagle nest with 2-week-old chicks; tons of hippos; impala herds; puku herds; river from overhead; "Luangwa that has died" (dried up remains of the river that changed course); fish eagles; great white egret; spoon-billed cranes; hippo paths; elephants with babies; smooth landing and ride."
The people
Eating three meals a day together, we get to know something about the lives of the people who have come together at this camp. Most are English, English "expatriates" or Africans connected in some way with English colonies or former colonies.
An English schoolteacher and accountant once worked in the Zambian copper belt and now have brought their school-age kids to revisit old haunts. A white-haired man had a dairy farm nearby for 40 years before reluctantly returning to England a few years ago. He says, sorrowfully, that he misses his old life.
One of his daughters and her family live in Lilongwe, Malawi. She dislikes England, she says, with its crowds and queuing in cafeterias instead of being waited upon properly. "I can't breathe." They hope to send their children to boarding school in South Africa.
Three of the guides are black; Isaac and Stephen, a local Zambian of the Ngoni tribe, are old enough to have lived through colonial times to independence and the subsequent socialist experiment years of Kenneth Kaunda, which Isaac recalls as disastrous — because "everybody got lazy." Tuwele, from Mfuwe, born post-independence, has worked his way up from porter to guide.
Guides Ernst and Cameron, white South Africans, are adventurers who've trekked across Africa. Ernst is in his 20s, and though he went to school with no blacks and writes to his mother in Afrikaans, he says he welcomed the end of apartheid.
He recalls one night before apartheid's end when, hitchhiking, he took up a driver's offer to spend the night in Soweto, where no whites ever stayed (and even today few venture). In the morning he rose to see the whole city smoky with coal fires and join the blacks who streamed out to their jobs in Johannesburg. "It was a very special memory."
John, who is white, was born and raised in Zambia, educated in Zimbabwe, and lived around the world before returning and eventually leasing the land from the government and starting the camp in 1995 with Carol, who grew up in South Africa.
We hear workers call John "bwana," which makes me think of old Tarzan movies; "doesn't that mean 'white man?' I ask him. No, it has nothing to do with color, he says; it means "boss."
One afternoon we go with the English family to visit Mkasanga. A few of the women show us the granaries and invite us to dance. From their threadbare clothes we see how poor this village is.
At the school, we stand in front of the children to hear their welcoming song, their lesson about AIDS and to answer questions. They want to know about our children's ages and school grades; they seem agog at our racially mixed family, not grasping the teacher's explanations that we are a family until she explains it several times.
The teachers show us a room with the books a Tafika guest sent them and the sewing machine Tafika provided. They explain how they are trying hard to persuade parents to send children to school.
It took a day, with the long drive and two flights, to get back to Johannesburg — itself a day's journey from Seattle. It's a long way to go.
But back home, as we told friends and family what we'd seen, I reflected on how rich an experience it had been. There was so much we'd been able to sample — wildlife, people, culture, history — in one small place deep in the African wilderness.