1. The Search
2. The Sounds
3. Walk at Sunrise
4. Chamilandu Camp
5. Stalking
6. Chindeni Camp - The Senses
7. Snorting
8. Tastes
9. The Sighting and a Bush Breakfast

Walk at Sunrise

5:30 a.m. call. First light, pink and red over the Chindeni Hills. Hot water in a ceramic bowl delivered to a lashed-branch washstand at our hut door. The wasps, the birdsong, trumpets of elephant.

Coffee, some oatmeal porridge, toast and marmalade. Set out down a path through the sorghum grass, single file, led by Richard Chulu, the guide here at Kuyenda.

Richard has a broad face, smooth furrows and very dark skin from the beating sun. He is a native of Mfuwe and knows this land and its flora and fauna in many, many dimensions. Take the tamarind tree. Richard showed me its small round, pea-pod shaped fruit, and he told me its common name, and its Latin name, and he said it came from Asia. Later he told me you can chew the acid fruit to create saliva when you are thirsty, or you can grind it into a porridge when you are hungry. Another time he told me grandfather killed a lion with a spear to win his bride; and his father had left Luangwa Valley and walked for a month through the bush to reach Lusaka to find work to support his family and six children back in Mfuwe. He was gone for 10 years.

Richard was not telling me these stories from a textbook. He was telling of survival. Or the mopane tree. It is everywhere and has winged fruit. Its straight trunk and branches make it perfect for building huts. At this time of year, it is one of the few trees with leaves remaining. Driving back to Kuyenda Camp, Richard identified the tree and added: "You can boil the bark to expel evil spirits." Tired after hours of walking, I only half heard. Then Richard did not want to tell any more. "It is witchcraft," he said, as if that settled the matter.

This morning, we were walking with a scout from the wildlife park armed with a rifle who brought up the rear of our small party. Stepping at a slow pace Indian file, we walked mindful that this is territory where the rules are not man made. Along a small stream where the lime green of the Nile cabbage is so bright it hurts my eyes. Dry sands of the river bed. A bleached skull of a buffalo high on the dry banks beneath an ivory palm tree. The sky is deepening blue as the sun rises, and yellow flowers of a scrambled egg tree dash color over the browns and muted sage greens of the landscape. A red flame creeper heightens the palate. It is late in the dry season and some clouds bringing moisture for these trees make them blossom - spring amidst the browns. Richard takes a brown, plum-sized nut from the ivory tree and he scrapes its hard crust and reveals a hard white core. It is fake ivory, he says, sold to unknowing tourists.

We reach quicksand in the dry riverbed. Few animal tracks here. They must know it could swallow them. A small troupe of elephants in the distance and a long neck of a Thornicraft giraffe among the leadwood, acacia and sausage trees further up the riverbank where the floods stop and vegetation grows dense.
Wide swathes of woodland are laid waste by elephants, leaving stumps of trees behind like beavers when they flood a valley. Elephants are the largest animal in Africa and second only to man in their ability to destroy the environment, devouring up to 300 kilograms of branches, leaves and trees a day, and they can forage for 19 hours at a stretch. Only large parks like this one can sustain big herds.

We follow the river tributary to the broad meandering Luangwa River where mahogany stands shade the banks and here we drink lemonade and eat biscuits and rest as the sun rises. David Livingstone, when he first came upon the Luangwa Valley in the 1860s walking across northeast Africa searching for the source of the Nile, looked down upon this branch of the Great Rift Valley and wrote: "It is impossible to describe its luxuriance." Here along the banks of the river I can see how in the rainy season there will be a riot of green.

Now the profusion of wildlife is concentrated close to the shrinking water sources. A Nile crocodile slithers into the water. Baboons everywhere. A pod of 20 or so hippopotamuses floats upstream, like a brownish-red rocks breaking the surface of the muddy river. Some curious stragglers swim closer to inspect us, bulbous eyes periscope out of water. They snort, blow bubbles and sink, like huge diving ducks that submerge and you have no idea where they might surface -- except these are 1,000 to 2,000 kilograms colossuses.


[continued...Chamilandu Camp]