Zambia a walk on Africa's wild side

Zambia, in southern Africa, is the real deal, frequent visitors say. It's one of the last African nations where exotic animals roam without fences and tourists are relatively scarce.

By Amanda Jones, Special to The Los Angeles Times
10:54 AM PST, December 06, 2007

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Sindabezi, Zambia

I first met Horace as I sat by a campfire watching the sun set fire to the Zambezi River. I heard a thrashing noise from the bushes and out he shambled, walking gingerly for his bulk, stepping as though his feet were tender.

He stopped when he noticed me, swinging around to stare with small-eyed intensity. I returned his stare, perhaps as horrified by his presence as he was nonchalant about mine. He minced off, leaving me with a gin and tonic frozen halfway to my lips. I would find him later, snoring like a bum outside my hut.

It so happened that Sindabezi, an island in the middle of the mighty Zambezi River and location of the safari camp where I was staying, was Horace the hippo's home. Apparently, I was the only guest unaware that we were sharing the 3-acre island with a fully grown male hippo.

It would be foolish to say Horace was a pet hippo -- hippos are responsible for more human deaths in Africa than any other wild animal -- but there was something, well, different about Horace. For starters, he is a lily-livered chicken. Orphaned when he was a mere slip of a 600-pound baby (at 5 months old), Horace was the target of local bullies. The island, he discovered, was the only place they dared not tread, because they were wary of humans. And so Horace, now 15, had grown up around the people who staff and stay in the island's five thatched cottages, part of the small guest camp belonging to Tongabezi, a luxury safari lodge on the Zambezi's Zambian shores.

Despite knowing that Horace could cut me in half with one bite, sleeping with a hippo snoring outside my open-sided bedroom was one of those enchanting, surreal experiences to be had only in Africa.

NO FENCES

I was in Zambia with 22 friends -- 13 adults and nine children ages 8 to 20 -- on a fundraising trip for Direct Relief International, a Californian nonprofit medical aid organization. After several days of visiting remote health clinics, we headed for the more romantic side of Africa, the domain of the wildlife. The plan was to spend 10 days on safari, the first few at Sindabezi, and then the rest farther northeast in North and South Luangwa, two of Zambia's 11 national parks.

Zambia, in southern Africa, is the real deal, frequent visitors say. It's one of the last African nations where exotic animals roam without fences, where walking rather than driving safaris are the norm and where tourists are scarcer than in Tanzania, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Malawi and Namibia.

I chose to stay on Sindabezi, less luxurious but certainly more adventurous than its parent, Tongabezi. The island, accessible by boat, with nothing else around for several miles, was basic but delightful. My room was open to metallic dusks and mist-clad dawns, with only a mosquito-net-shrouded bed under a thatched roof. Most memorable, though, was Horace.

STARING BABOONS

Leaving Sindabezi, our group flew to Mfuwe (Em-FOO-ee), the jumping off spot for North and South Luangwa national parks. From the tiny, one-room Mfuwe airport, we drove 40 minutes to the Mfuwe Lodge through dusty, thatched villages and exhausted crop fields.

Women walked the roads dressed in brilliant, mismatched fabrics, their babies tied to their backs, firewood or immense jugs balanced on their heads. In the narrow road, small boys pushed toys made from old telephone wire or scrimmaged over an improvised soccer ball, crafted from paper balled up with string. Small girls carried their even smaller siblings on their hips. Men sat under mango trees and old women spread maize in the sun to dry, preparing it to pound into mealy-meal, the staple village diet.

Barefoot children waved and danced as we passed, yelling "Muzungu!" (White people!), and "Sweet, sweet!" as if they expected us, like some passing parade float, to scatter candy from above.

Checking in at Mfuwe Lodge, I saw a photo of an enormous male elephant standing at the desk, staring at the reception staff as if he were trying to obtain a room key.

"Ha! How'd you get him to do that?" I asked naively.

The woman glanced at me wearily. "We have a mango tree," she said patiently. "The elephants walk through the lobby to get to the mangoes. Therefore you must never go to, or leave, your room without being accompanied by a guard. We have hippo here too." (I learned later of some incidents involving hippos and tourists being medically airlifted to England.)

The sun was in the scarlet throes of setting when I reached my room, a two-storied, wooden tree house on stilts above a lagoon. I drew a bath, got in and watched through the screened window as hippo mothers and their diminutive calves walked out of the water, snorting obscenely.

Statuesque egrets picked their way through the gilded water, and a herd of elephants stood stock-still, as if they too were admiring the sunset. Directly outside my screen, eight baboons sat on the deck railing gawking at my pale body in the water. I could have sworn I saw a tittering mother hold her baby up for a better look.

The Luangwa Valley is in east Zambia, near the border with Malawi. An ecological masterpiece, it is the tail end of the Great Rift Valley, although much greener than the Africa we associate with Disney movies and Hemingway novels.

Instead of flaxen savanna and flat-topped acacia trees, Luangwa has comical sausage trees with elongated calabashes and elephantine baobabs with pumped-up trunks and curling branches.

Water is abundant here, and so too are crocodiles and hippos, making rivers a dangerous, but lovely, feature.

Both North and South Luangwa are known for their remote, basic-chic bush camps. In the remaining 10 days, I would transfer to three bush camps, two in South Luangwa and one in North.

My first camp was Crocodile, in the isolated northern reaches of South Luangwa. It had three huts crafted out of grass tied together with reeds, a comfortable bed, a camp chair, a flush toilet in a roofless bathroom and a shower made from a 40-gallon drum that was filled with hot water nightly by the camp staff.

Pattson, the Zambian chef at Crocodile, had a reputation stretching the length of the valley. His food, which came out of pit ovens in an open-air kitchen, deserved several Michelin stars. Out of a wood-burning hole in the ground, Pattson delivered coconut-chicken curries, steak with béarnaise sauce, French onion soup and chocolate mousse flan. Twice daily he baked cakes that could have been served at the Ritz in London. It was, without doubt, the best food I have ever had in Africa.

Like most Zambians, the camp staff was infinitely tolerant and polite. Their country, surrounded by nations ravaged repeatedly by tribal warfare and political uprisings, has remained peaceful. This makes it an ideal location to walk around in the bush safely.

The routine on walking safaris goes like this: An attendant delivering a basin of hot water wakes you in the shivering dawn. You have a quick coffee and breakfast by a fire, then head off, accompanied by an English-speaking guide, a rifle-bearing Zambian ranger and a tea bearer.

By 9 a.m., the sun has burned off all memory of cold. Under the impression that white people cannot go a few hours without a beverage and a snack, the tea bearer makes a fire in the shade of a tree and boils the kettle for tea and cake.

You return to camp around 11 a.m., just as the sun gets mind-bendingly hot, eat a wholesome lunch and retire for a nap. After you rise, you relax, paint with watercolors, write in your journal or read, then strike out again at 4 p.m. as the animals reappear from their afternoon stupor.

On foot, you don't get as close to animals as you would in a Jeep, but there is an exquisite sensuality in moving your body through the landscape, placing yourself at risk, and in allowing time to shrink to only the moment. Given the option, I would always choose to walk rather than drive in the African bush.

RUN-IN WITH LIONS

After two days of eating Pattson's food every few hours and tracking lion, elephant, kudu, gazelle, giraffe and buffalo at dawn and dusk, I transferred to Mchenja (Ma-chen-ja) Camp, on the banks of the Luangwa River. Mchenja is a permanent camp, containing five large, concrete-floor tents and a swimming pool. It runs walking and driving safaris, and does night drives, which is the best time to see animals hunt.

At 5 p.m. one evening, we struck out on foot, following the throaty grunting of a lioness. We found her feeding on a buffalo kill. Excited, we traced the retreating tracks of the rest of the pride down to the shore of the river.

Comically doubled over in stealth mode, we silently followed Simon, our African guide, to a sandy slope that dropped to the water. There the tracks suddenly stopped. Disappointed, we all stood upright and began to talk in normal voices. There, within spitting distance, were nine lions drinking on the riverbank below us.

Realizing his folly, Simon hissed, "Drop and crawl upwind!"

Although lions generally stay clear of humans on foot, they tend to react badly when surprised. It was dumb luck that the wind blew in the right direction and that the lions neither saw nor heard us.

Not three minutes later, a crocodile took a swipe at a lioness, and the pride bolted up the bank. Shocked at our proximity, they whirled around confused, the females running while two males stared us down, ensuring we made no move to follow.

"That," said Simon, still breathing hard, "has never happened before."

SAFE WATERS

North Luangwa National Park is one of the continent's jewels. Imagine a wilderness 1 1/2 times the size of Delaware with one road, no permanent buildings and about 20 dry-season residents. It is reserved for walking safaris only, and no children under 10 years old are permitted. (Smaller humans are at greater danger of being picked off by animals.)

Mwaleshi (Mwa-lesh-i), a camp with four huts, is one of only three bush camps in all of North Luangwa's 2,900 square miles. My hut sat by the gleaming Mwaleshi River, with water flowing crystal and cool from northern mountains. It had bare earthen floors, waist-high elephant-grass walls, a bathroom open to the spangled night sky and the same drum shower filled nightly by the camp attendants. It was the highlight of my trip.

One of the extraordinary features of North Luangwa is water you can swim in. For anyone who knows southern and eastern Africa, where there is water, there are typically perils. The Mwaleshi River, however, is so shallow in parts that hippos rarely use it and crocodiles cannot hide. This meant that when the sun raged overhead, we were able to get into the nearest body of water. Bliss.

One morning, Ernst Jacobs, our knowledgeable and amusing South African guide, told us to prepare for a long hike and a picnic and to bring our bathing suits. We drove north for 40 minutes along the one dirt road, left the vehicle in the middle of nowhere and began to cut through the bush. We hiked for three hot hours, finally breaking through the trees to gaze down on our destination: the Mwaleshi Falls, a series of cascades and natural pools set into a lush green jungle.

It was the sort of scene you'd expect in Costa Rica, not Africa.

We spent the entire afternoon there, picnicking, leaping off boulders into the pools and listening to Ernst tell strange and wonderful stories of life in Africa, including a sobering one about the time he was paddling his mother downriver and their canoe was cut in two by a hippo. They were unhurt, but had to swim through dangerous hippo-mined waters to make it to safety.

My mind cast back to the gentlemanly Horace and the moment we'd shared, our eyes locking, his gentle snoring.

Naw, I thought, my Horace would never do something as uncouth as that.