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from: Richard Bangs

Chasing Waterfalls

Updated Thursday, Sept. 26, 2002, at 6:52 PM ET

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CHIPOPOMA FALLS, UPPER MWALESHI RIVER, NORTH LUANGWA PARK, ZAMBIA—We hear a rumor that there is another couple in the park. They're up from South Africa and are staying at one of the other two camps in this 2,400-square-mile track of raw wilderness. This news causes mild discontent. Because this land appears so empty, it is easy to imagine that whatever we see belongs to us. And simply by traveling so far, it seems natural to believe we have some special claim to this wilderness. So, we head upriver to a little-known place to escape the crowds.

Along the way, we are reminded how arrogant a concept seclusion is. We pass a herd of some 400 buffalo, trailed by a pride of lions. We skirt by yellow baboon, impala, greater kudu, banded mongoose, Moloney's monkey, puku, warthog, Cookson's wildebeest, zebra, bushbuck, waterbuck, spotted hyena, and two rarely seen antelope, Sharpe's grysbok and Lichtenstein's hartebeest, which bounce along the savannah as though on a trampoline. Sometimes a bit too close for comfort, we pass elephants, several score in all, and it seems incredible that during the late 1970s and '80s gangs of commercial poachers, using high-powered rifles and automatic and semiautomatic weapons, killed an estimated 1,000 elephants a year for ivory in this park alone. The park warden dealt in ivory, skins, and meat. Foreign diplomats smuggled out contraband. North Luangwa Park became known as "the second Ivory Coast."

A major turnaround began in 1986 with the establishment of the Convention on Trade in Endangered Species, which dialed down international demand. It was also around this time that wildlife conservationists Mark and Delia Owens, best known for their book Cry of the Kalahari, arrived in North Luangwa to continue research on carnivores, having been booted from Botswana in a dispute over fencing polices (they were against the wire barriers they saw blocking antelope migrations). Appalled to find the North Luangwa landscape bloodied and littered with elephant skulls, they set up the North Luangwa Conservation Project and, with funds raised from abroad (they were gifted on the lecture circuit), began equipping local game scouts. NLCP also targeted villages around the park where poachers, like bush Robin Hoods, shared booty with the locals. NLCP, like many of these schemes, gave economic and technical assistance to the surrounding villages; in theory an alternative to the poacher's largess. To a degree it worked, and within seven years poaching in North Luangwa had been appreciably reduced and elephant and other populations began to rise.

Despite some good work, the Owens didn't last here either. After a time they were accused of running North Luangwa as their own private kingdom, and they pissed off a lot of people, including our host Chriss, who once needed to use their airstrip but was denied access. In 1997 they retreated to the United States, and management of the NLCP was taken over by the Frankfurt Zoological Society, which oversees the project today.

Michael pays homage to Chief Mukungule

After stepping past this pageant of game, Dorian leads us up into the Chichenda Hills, to the upper waters of the clear-flowing Mwaleshi River. We stop in the shade of a sausage tree, hanging with a hundred strips of faded fabric from knurled branches. Dorian gathers us around like a priest assembling his flock. This is, he intones with the ersatz reverence guides around the world have mastered, the burial place of Chief Mukungule, legendary head of the Bisa tribe, a tribe romanticized by some as having coexisted in idyllic balance with the wildlife for millenniums before colonial days. The chief died a century ago, and each year in the fall, the village elders come and pay homage by hanging a new piece of cloth. The nearby falls we hope to reach were once a favorite sanctuary for the chief, and now for us to pass we need to make an offering. At 57, Michael Kallay is the oldest in our group, and as such he is appointed the profferer. A mixture of ground maize and tobacco is poured into his palm, and we are led to the back of the thick tree, where a yardlong, boot-wide vertical slit darkens the trunk, inside of which, we are told, is the wrapped skeleton of the chief. "Now, follow the ritual exactly, or the spirit of Chief Mukungule will ensure that something terrible happens. First, take off your hats. Now, kneel down and clap three times as Michael pours the offering into the crypt." We all do as we're told, but after the clap, I put my hat on so I can take some notes. "Now clap three times more," Dorian instructs, and I follow suit, but forget to take my hat back off, an egregious violation of the ritual.

"Now you've done it," Sel Leyser, a nature photographer, notices. "We may have angered the chief."

Minutes later we are lolling in a secluded paradise, a section of the Mwaleshi that squabbles over a series of small, sparkling waterfalls. As we compare notes about secret paradises of our youths now overrun with resorts and touro-dollars, there is a keen appreciation that we are part of a rare trice in an overcharted world.

All eyes on guard

Below the falls is green pool, chocked by a bloat of 40 hippos and several large crocodiles. Dorian tosses several stout croc rocks into the upper swimming holes to check for errant reptiles, and finding it croc-free, we all shed and plunge. A couple of hours into our bath, I decide to slide over a small waterfall that spills into a deep pool. It's a fun little slide, and I tell the others, who follow suit. Sel has a sweet glide through, and is laughing in the wake, until he realizes he has let himself drift too close to the next waterfall, and is now caught in the current. "Grab the rock," those of us watching Sel yell, but it's too late, and I see a look of pure horror in his eyes as the water breaks around his head like glass, and he is swept over the falls and out of sight.

For a second, the world seems to balance on a point of silence, broken then by the sound of stridulating insects. Fearing the worst—if the falls don't get him, the hippos and crocs below will—a couple of us scramble to the foot of the falls, and there we find Sel with a grin that looks dipped in a bowl of crystal. He's dogpaddling in a quiet pool still one pitch above the hippos and crocodiles, unscathed and exhilarated from the run. "I told you to keep your hat off," Sel scolds me. "You upset Chief Mukungule." On the way back, as a freak storm pelts us with cold rain and high winds, my hat is torn from my head and dispatched into the night—a final offering to the spirits of this place numinous and in many ways beyond belief.

well-traveled
entries
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from: Richard Bangs

Chasing Waterfalls

Updated Thursday, Sept. 26, 2002, at 6:52 PM ET
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Richard Bangs led the first descent of the Zambezi River from the base of Victoria Falls in 1981. His 1999 book The Lost River describes some of his African adventures.
Traditional Zambian music heard in the map feature performed by Amayenge. Courtesy of Andy Frankel. All rights reserved.
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