by Adeline Loh
However, when things get really dismal, they resort to something a little more efficient – good old witchcraft. As widespread as Christianity is, witchcraft remains deeply entrenched in traditional Zambian culture and influences many aspects of daily life. Because its significance is hard to describe, it’s easy for a non-African to dismiss this hoodoo business as just a steaming pile of mumbo-jumbo. But I think it probably isn’t unlike the Chinese superstitions or the practices of Malay shamans in Malaysia. In Africa, every evil and misfortune that has no rational explanation – a prolonged mysterious illness, demonic possession, impotency, sudden death, fishy body odour, or the loss of a match by the village football team – is attributed to sorcery and witchdoctor hexes.
‘Vincent and everyone in front there must be praying for a safe journey,’ I nudged Chan.
Soprano songs of praise continued to pummel our ears ad nauseam before they snapped out of it and the driver started the engine. With tyres squealing, we roared off with astounding urgency.
‘I think they prayed for something else,’ said Chan.
4. ROCK AND ROLL, BABY
With God’s express bus thundering east along a blameless road to the cochlea-bursting strains of a holy soundtrack, I barely noticed that we had got out of Lusaka. Before we knew it, we were in the stranglehold of the bush where heaps of semi-evergreen trees and random thickets were flickering past arid, surging landscapes. Punctuating the coarse empty expanses were mindlessly scattered small concrete towns and shambolic settlements whose bohemian-like pastel paintwork was cracking under the sun’s pressure. Inside the hollow, grit-encrusted shops, though, you would be hard-pressed to find any sign of life beyond a scurrying rodent.
A relatively undersized population of ten million occupy this large foetal-shaped country of 752,600 square kilometres, which is more than twice the size of Malaysia or nearly as big as the territory of New South Wales in Australia. Having said that, its population is as evenly distributed as the hairs on the head of an 80-year-old man; half of its inhabitants are concentrated around Lusaka and the Copperbelt mining region, leaving rural areas looking like desert wastelands. This became strikingly apparent to me as hours would fly by on the bus without us seeing more than a sprinkle of crumbling hovels (sleepy roadside towns, actually) after passing miles and miles of unpeopled bushveld.
And the only time these sleepy roadside towns would spring to life was whenever long-distance buses paid a visit. As ours came to a grinding halt in front of a row of derelict shacks, sellers armed with baskets of bananas, oranges, biscuits, bottled water and soft drinks immediately rose from beneath shady trees and zinc roofs, and rushed the bus. They thrust their colourful assortment of wares against our half-open windows in the hope that an eager passenger’s hand would reach out to grab something and toss back some kwacha.
The next chance we got to stretch our legs was at a sprawling two-street town that featured a wide open marketplace abuzz with vendors and flies. Most of the wooden stalls – matchstick-like kiosks covered with scrap metal or flattened cardboard boxes – sold smoke-dried fish stacked up in neat rows (with the complimentary protein topping of fly larvae, I reckoned). Indeed, sharing their meal with a million and one flies did not do anything to deter scores of passengers from buying one ghastly-looking fish each wrapped up in newspaper and tearing at it with gusto. I turned my attention away from the enthusiastic eaters and poked around at the interesting assortment of stalls. There were so many alien-looking veggies, peas and beans on display that I would have been pelted with anchovies if I had pestered the sellers to identify them one by one. So I kept my curiosity on a tight leash, forked over 500 kwacha to use the horror movie-quality pit latrine and boarded the bus again.
Speaking of toilets, while I was forever hoping and praying for the next town with hole-in-the-ground facilities, the locals were perfectly happy to relieve themselves by the roadside at any available stop. All the men had to do, naturally, was prop one hand up against a formidable tree and wee with their backs to us. What I did not expect was for the ladies to make prisses of their male counterparts. Absolutely impervious to the busload of probing eyes, the women nonchalantly ignored the modesty shrubs and opted to hike up their chitenje (African wraparound skirts) in full view of the ‘lucky’ ones among us with window seats. Hey, when you gotta go, you gotta go. I gaped at them, not pervertedly of course, but in sheer unadulterated admiration. If I hadn’t been irremediably corrupted by years of unnecessary social conditioning, my urinary bladder, too, would be a much happier camper.
Away from the busy capital, cars were few and far between on the wide roads. Instead, the locals moved around on old creaking bicycles whilst precariously balancing bulky 50-kilo goods of everything from water drums, chopped firewood and maize meal to hay bales and cooking pots and pans. Weaving along the sides of the road (and sometimes right in the middle) with their unstable loads, the only way cyclists avoided being roadkill was through frequent loud honks by motorists warning them to get the hell out of the way or else. Our driver was no shining exception, putting pedal to the metal and happily terrorizing everyone on two wheels.
Observing the refreshing minimalism of daily existence in Zambia, modern city life back home suddenly seemed overly, if not obscenely, self-indulgent and profligate in comparison. BMWs, Gucci dresses, gargantuan shopping malls, 12-ringgit cups of franchised coffee, iPods, laptops and the overwhelming desire to get ahead in the rat race at all cost – all these materialistic pursuits so essential to our personal happiness could mean absolutely diddlysquat to them.
I contemplated – not something I liked to do often as it hurt my head – more and more about the staggering polarity of our lifestyles. Zambians contort into overloaded buses and endure great walking distances back to their straw-and-mud habitats carting big head-loads of goods without being less than contented. We sit in our air-conditioned cars and fume madly in traffic jams. They hand-pump from a well or hike a few kilometres to the nearest river several painful times a day just to get their daily supply of suspect drinking water. We turn on a filtered tap. They are never certain when their next meal will come. We can never decide which restaurant to go to. They cannot stop being thankful for the little things they possess. We cannot stop whining about everything we don’t.
I was lost in these thoughts when Chan gave a strangled yelp all of a sudden. She was frantically trying to save her bag from being soaked in a puddle of wee, courtesy of the baby directly behind us. I lifted up my legs swiftly, sat in the lotus position and thought some more. It dawned on me that, pungent urine aside, there was something awkward about this bus: it was way too quiet. Apart from the constant engine roar and rapid-fire horning by the hell-bent driver, the people inside the bus barely made any sound. Some passengers napped, others read and yet others who were bored out of their trees stared blankly into space. Mothers were kept busy constantly by offspring oozing fluids from different orifices each time. It was quite a change from the rowdy public transportation I was used to back home where passengers regularly engaged in ‘Who Has the Most Ear-Splitting and Irritating Hyena Laugh’ contests.
Of course, I wasn’t objecting in the least. The unexpected calmness gave me much-needed peace of mind to mull over my game-viewing adventures in this country that is cosily cradled by eight nations: namely Angola, Democratic Republic Of Congo, Tanzania, Mozambique, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Namibia. Wedged between Central, East and Southern Africa, Zambia’s flora and fauna in its 19 national parks provide a rare and welcome taste of all three regions. As a result of such spectacular diversity, Zambia is widely viewed as a prize destination for the seasoned safari connoisseur who has seen her fair share of hackneyed wildlife scenes of the Serengeti ilk and would prefer to seek out more unusual, specialized species. I was aware that Chan and me were bush virgins, but we would soon be popping our cherries and sneaking up the ranks of the safari elite.
Unfortunately, 605 kilometres later with my mussy hair, rumpled c
lothes and lopsided backpack, I was closer to safari pariah than safari elite. We’d finally arrived in Chipata, a lively frontier town surrounded by broad hills near Zambia’s eastern border with Malawi. To get to South Luangwa National Park, we would have to make the jaw-juddering five-hour road journey to Mfuwe, where we had planned to spend five days at Flatdogs Camp (‘flat dog’ is the affectionate South African nickname for the rather unaffectionate crocodile). According to my trusty guidebook, even the hardiest backpackers shied away from this hellish Chipata-Mfuwe road and preferred to take a flight out. Nonetheless Chan and I voted to go the cheap and nasty route as we didn’t want to resort to coughing up our credit cards. As luck would have it, two clean-cut English guys sporting brick-solid Brylcreemed hair were going our way too, so we promptly shared an antiquated taxi with them.
Stuffing the taxi’s boot with our luggage until it couldn’t shut properly, Geoffrey the driver had to run off to get a strong rope. He needed to secure the boot so that our bags wouldn’t bounce off the 140-kilometre long unsealed road. We soon began our vibrating journey on the punishing surface, and I felt my internal organs play musical chairs as they flopped around and exchanged places with each other to the rhythm of the ride. It was like I was sitting in an OSIM massage chair set to 8.2 on the Richter scale. The road – if one could call it that – looked like it had been struck by a meteor shower that left a devastating network of jagged craters. Although Geoffrey had driven on this torturous terrain many times, he still struggled to circumnavigate the ever-increasing potholes. Most of the time, however, the best path was merely a choice between that giant washboard rut to the left or the deep cavernous abyss to the right.
Because of said bad corrugations and sudden pits that could swallow whole buffaloes, the taxi was forced to squeak along at snail kilometres per hour throughout to avoid getting a flat or shaking anything loose. That was till we reached, to our delight, two short sections of freshly graded and flawless bitumen, which lasted for, oh, about ten heavenly minutes up and over two hills before our teeth jiggled in their gum sockets again. The temporary relief seemed like nothing more than a sick joke played on naive foreigners for the government’s amusement.
Still, we couldn’t complain. Sure, the whole car convulsed vigorously like it was epileptic and by the end of the journey I was going to be plucking my vertebra from my sinuses – but at least we were moving. Which was more than I could say for the eight stalled vehicles we clunked past: two minibuses, three Canter pickup trucks, two sedan cars and one van – all unfortunate casualties of the cruel suspension-damaging, pipe-tearing, hubcap-tossing, tyre-blowing and engine-decimating gravel track. The only time we stopped moving was when we helped a cotton-laden lorry load back the cargo bundles it had unwittingly jettisoned all over the road.
Midway through, the overcast sky spattered our taxi’s windscreen with the first drops of rain we had seen on this trip.
The English guys were puzzled. ‘I thought it doesn’t rain in July,’ one of them said.
‘Yes, it’s the dry season. It’s not supposed to rain,’ Geoffrey replied, activating the windshield wipers. ‘Must be ‘cause you people are here,’ he added half-seriously.
By the time we arrived at Flatdogs Camp in the dark, I and everyone else were encrusted in red muck thanks to the half-open windows that sucked the gravel dust in like a vacuum cleaner. At the reception counter, we were briefed on some quick and hard rules by the lodge manager – the most important being not to walk around Flatdogs at night without being accompanied by one of the watchmen. This was to prevent us from getting ambushed by wild animals roaming freely in the natural open bush surrounding the lodge. I was pretty psyched to hear that; heck, even if we were to get mauled, at least we could not complain about being denied an authentic safari experience.
Decked out in crisp cream-coloured overalls, our watchman Kewie escorted us to our chalet armed with a heavy-duty flashlight. He darted it idly around the clumps of trees on the riverbank to our right and shot beams into the bushes a few steps ahead of us. Never knew what we might accidentally step on or get in the way of – snakes, scorpions, crocodiles, hippos, elephants – the mind boggled with concealed possibilities in the unseen dark.
‘The hippos come over to graze near the chalets at night so we have to watch out,’ Kewie said.
Curious, I asked him how much of a disaster it would be if we got charged by one.
‘Very disastrous!’ he replied. ‘If a hippo charges, run. And do not stop a hippo from going to the river. That guarantees instant death,’ he replied with a chuckle.
Okay, firstly, how was I going to stop a hippo, which is the size of a truck, from going anywhere? And secondly, why would I?
‘What about elephants?’ Chan asked.
‘Same story. Flee for your life or say goodbye!’ he said and laughed.
We failed to see the humour in being treaded on like ants but pretended to laugh along anyway. Walking past the campgrounds to the thatched chalets facing the Luangwa River, our accommodation looked welcoming and fantastic. On ground level was our very own ablution block and a spit’s distance away, the door to our room one floor up. We thanked Kewie and climbed up the short flight of steps, but my admiration of the superb room decor quickly turned to horror when I noticed something very wrong with the wall next to me.
‘AAAAAH! S-SP-SPIDER!’ I screamed at the top of my lungs, turning my leisurely amble to a three-step leap.
In hindsight, I know I could have handled that better. My wimpy side was thenceforth unleashed on my first encounter with an African creepy-crawly: a palm-sized hairy spider clinging to the seasick-green wall like an unsightly mottled-grey mole. With its white-banded legs spread widely, it zipped around like a frenetic UFO before pausing to taunt us. Chan tried to shoo it away.
‘Don’t do that! Kill it, KILL IT!’ I yelled like a lunatic.
‘I can’t!’ she cried. ‘I’m Buddhist!’
‘Okay then, grab it and let it go outside!’
Even Chan, who was scared of everything except invertebrates, looked doubtful. The spider was way too icky to touch and looked extremely venomous. In fact, this looked like the kind that puny spiders in Malaysia had nightmares about.
If you chase it off the wall, it’ll only go hide in some dark corner,’ I continued hysterically. ‘Then when you’re fast asleep, it’ll seize the opportunity to jump on you and scare you shitless!’
Chan was disturbed by this prophecy and ran out to call Kewie. (Entomologists, please skip the next two paragraphs.) He came in, took a look at our problem, removed one of his rubber flip-flops and, with a mighty resonant whack, the spider fell dead.
While relieved, a pang of guilt shot through my veins. Just my second day in Zambia and already I was responsible for one murdered arachnid. I would later find out in the imaginatively titled book Spiders of Zambia at the crafts shop that it was merely a regular wall crab spider or ‘flattie’, considered quite useful for ridding mankind of mosquitoes, moths and cockroaches. Nevertheless, I still think spiders invented fear. And the saying ‘sleep with one eye open’? I’m pretty sure that was with reference to spiders.
With the overwrought drama over, we ditched our bags on a tall standing bamboo shelf and plopped ourselves on our respective foam mattress beds. After mumbling a prayer for my recently departed eight-legged friend and hoping its pals don’t wreak revenge on us, we headed to the large airy restaurant that served some of the best food I’d tasted in Zambia – a brilliant mishmash of European and bush cooking. Above our chunky dinner table hung a psychedelic spiral chandelier made of light bulbs enclosed in liquor bottles with their bottoms sawn off. Chan and I ate in appreciative silence by the dancing flames of the hanging candelabras affixed to the surrounding pillars.
Each night we would be lulled to sleep by a cacophonous lullaby from the Hippo Symphonic Orchestra tumbling through the wide netted windows – low rumbles creatively interspersed with staccato snorts, lilting croaks, melo
dious screams and some inspired whining.
*
At breakfast the next morning, we eyeballed the perplexing array of daily specials on the restaurant’s chalkboard and eavesdropped on the conversations of the campers nearby.
‘Dude, did you hear the hippos last night? I can’t believe they were so close to our tent!’
“That’s nothing compared to the six elephants near the outdoor sinks! I couldn’t go to the bathroom and was holding my wee so long I almost passed out.’
‘That’s it, I’m so sleeping in the truck tonight, man.’
Ah, to have shelled out extra for the relative safety of a brick chalet. Seemed a small price to pay to go on living.
5. PLEASE DON’T EAT US
At the Luangwa riverbank in front of our chalet, I whipped out my binoculars, adjusted the lens and gazed through them for the first time. And there in cold flesh were the largest reptiles on earth – half-submerged Nile crocodiles floating stealthily like logs, patiently waiting for the next meal to arrive. ‘La la la, I’m just drinking by the river with not a care in the world,’ the prey would sing, until the crocodile comes and then it’s, ‘Aaaah, I’m being bitten by a thousand sharp teeth!’ Yes, the ruthless handbag skins are perfectly capable of staying underwater for up to six hours before pouncing on a poor antelope or foolish human. Every year hundreds of people in Africa become snacks for crocodiles, and the Luangwa Valley especially is prime flatdog habitat here in Zambia, aside from the Zambezi River.
In the nearby trees, a rumpus of yellow baboons were thrashing and swinging around like trapeze artistes. Some noisily combed crispy brown weeds for dropped seed pods and bulbs while others foraged for fruit and insects. A scrawny baby baboon was clinging under its mother’s tummy for dear life when it did a double take at me, forgot to hold on and fell onto the ground. But just as quickly as it fell, it bounded back up its mother’s back. I had a grand time enjoying these antics up close when I suddenly caught sight of a large dog-like alpha male baboon with a mug only a parent could love. He was leading his harem across the habitat next to the chalet’s open kitchen where I was. Then he stopped and burnt holes right through me with his nefarious eyes. I shuddered under his gaze full of malice, and as if sensing my fear, the fiendish mammal changed its direction and headed towards me. I was instantly reminded of something told to me by one of the staff earlier: baboons are not afraid of women and love chasing them for shits and giggles.
