Today’s audio update
LUANGWA GORGE, ZAMBIA—Several hours into the hike, I hear him struggling, panting behind me with every footfall. Dov Harel, who in repose looks like a twinkling Talmudic scholar, now has a swollen red face so sopped in sweat it looks coated in Mylar. His heart rate is up to 150 beats a minute. I offer to take his pack, but between rasps he declines. He refuses two other offers of help as well, so we do the right thing and stop for a swim … in the cool crocodiled waters of the Luangwa River.
The ancient Greeks called the beast kroko-drilo, “pebble worm”—a scaly thing that shuffled and lurked in low places. Here it’s called “flatdog” or “mobile handbag.” The most deadly existing reptile, the man-eating Nile crocodile has always been on man’s worst enemies list. It evolved 170 million years ago from the primordial soup as an efficient killing machine. More people are killed in Africa each year by crocodiles than by all other animals combined. Their instinct is predation, to kill any meat that floats their way, be it fish, hippo, antelope, or human. And just upstream we had seen a 12-footer slip into the currents.
Crocs like to sneak up on their prey in water deep enough for them to hide in, so we find a spot in a rapid shallow enough to see approaching jaws or claws. Even then, Justin Seymour-Smith, who runs a private game park in Zimbabwe and with recent events has time on his hands to join our adventure, stands ready on shore with a Rigby .416, a rifle big enough to drop an elephant at 300 yards.
The dip cools and cleanses—a few of us even swim the rapids in the nude, our usually protected skin pale as crocodile bellies—and Dov is back to normal as we continue our trek, passing bushbuck, baboons, impala, and bloats of hippos. About 5 feet tall, weighing in at about 5 tons—about that same as two of our four-wheel-drive vehicles—hippos are proportionally the fattest animals on earth, but for short sprints they can run as fast as a horse. Though vegetarians, they are quite dangerous; they’ll attack if they feel threatened, easily snapping a human body in two with their carrot-sized molars and steam-shovel jaws. And with an average of about 60 hippos per mile, the Luangwa is the most hippo-infested river in the world.
As we approach our goal, a twisting hot springs that spills into the river, another type of predator makes its appearance: the blood-hungry tsetse fly. It looks like a horsefly but stings like a bee—its rapierlike proboscis can penetrate khakis, jeans, even tennis shoes. And, like Michael Myers in a Halloween movie, whenever you think you’ve killed one of these buggers, it just keeps coming back. Chriss likes to tear off their wings and tell them to walk home. These tsetses, harmless to humans, carry nagana—bovine trypanosomiasis, a parasite that kills 3 million cattle, goats, and pigs a year in sub-Saharan Africa. For us they are merely a nuisance to be tolerated knowing they serve a larger purpose. The wildlife we see wouldn’t exist without them. Without such an effective guardian, wilderness areas such as Mandevu would long ago have been tamed, the wild animals cleared for domesticated ones. When Norman Carr, Zambia’s conservation pioneer, was given the MBE for his life’s work, he suggested the award should really have gone to the tsetse fly. Where the tsetse flourishes, so does the great wildlife of body Africana.
Nicolas Kalembelembe, a 32-year-old former game-lodge waiter, is our local guide, interpreting the bush through which we pass. We learn that trees communicate here: When a beast is gnawing at the bark of the mopane tree, it emits a pheromone that telegraphs to surrounding trees to stimulate an increased level of tannin, making the bark unappetizing. We learn that virtually every abandoned termite mound hosts a tamarind tree, as baboons like to sit atop the mud castles and chew on the pods of the tree, dropping the seeds, which take root and sprout the tropical evergreen. The forest is a pharmacy here, and it seems half the plants are used for either back pain or erectile dysfunction, such as the bark of the balanite bush, a local Viagra. But the sausage tree, Nicolas informs, is for the women: They like to mix the seeds from the sausage into a lusty porridge and eat it just before a tryst, as it makes them “warm.”
We walk down the canyon single file, African-style, and every now and then the front man, usually Justin, cries fowl, and the bush telephone sends word back one by one. But it never works right, and once when I was in the rear, a sighting up front of a white-crowned plover ended up a leopard sighting by the time it reached me.
At the end of our 6-mile hike we’re picked up by Chriss, who has been literally fighting fires on the property all day. We climb into the Toyota Land Cruiser and head back to camp, Chriss wrestling the wheel like a captain in a typhoon. Along the way, a sinister bouquet of tsetses finds its way into the cab, and we all start swatting. Chriss winces as he plucks one off his cheek. Robert Bismuth picks up a roll of toilet paper and slams it mightily at one on the window, but all he does is affect some tissue damage, and the little buzzer flies away.
Check back tomorrow for the next dispatch from Zambia.
