by Adeline Loh
As a result, he continued, roadside vending has become an essential means of making a living, especially selling trinkets and souvenirs to tourists. He pointed out the window as we passed wooden giraffe statuettes that ranged from five inches to five feet, trying to attract passing vehicles to stop and give them a home. I made a mental note to purchase a few when I got back to Lusaka; I could be feeding an entire family for days with one wooden giraffe.
On the undulating road hugging wooded hills and scenic valleys to Chirundu, we were constantly sandwiched by large lorries with open backs on which were mounted everything from live molting chickens to tightly packed cornmeal. Every once in a while I would be distracted from the magnificent views by broken lorries that lay forlorn on rocky outcrops, having crashed through the highway guardrail.
‘The apples in Zimbabwe are much sweeter than the ones grown in Zambia. The soil conditions over there are much more fertile,’ Everisto offered another snippet of information at the same time I was mulling how many lorry drivers had plummeted to their deaths.
Just before reaching Chirundu, to the north of Kariba Dam, we pulled up briefly at the entrance of the Chirundu Fossil Forest. A kindly ranger approached our car window and told us a bit about the fossilized trees that were as old as 150 million years. But now, all have turned to stone. Stoned trees from the Stone Age – hee hee. Just adjacent to our car was a solid petrified example, exposed as a result of erosion of the surrounding sandstone. At first glance, it looked like any ordinary two-metre high tree stump. On closer inspection though, its grainy appearance was more akin to marble than wood, and it had chiselled good looks and a rock hard body.
We moved on, heading closer to the border post to Zimbabwe. With increasing frequency we saw young men waving wads of paper at passing vehicles by the roadside. Curious, I asked Everisto what they were holding up.
‘Zimbabwean currency,’ he said. ‘Once they know you’re a tourist, they will cut your throats.’
I gulped. ‘Not literally, right?’
‘They are dirty cheats, I mean.’
Apparently, one notorious con was to reel unsuspecting tourists in with a ridiculously fantastic exchange rate. Trying to appear genuine, the thug first counts the Zimbabwean dollars in front of you. Then he pretends to be short, promises to be back with the remainder and runs off to get it. When he returns and exchanges the ‘correct amount’ for your lucre, he bolts. Only when you unwrap the top thousand-dollar note do you realize you’ve been duped – there’s nothing underneath but a fishy stack of cutout newspapers.
‘Chirundu? Chirundu? This is Chirundu already?’ I inquired like a repetitious retard after being told in no uncertain terms that this was Chirundu. Well, it was only because the border town looked like a huge junkyard where big trucks went to die. We parted ways with Everisto but not before he extracted a promise to call him for a good time when we were back in Lusaka.
We waited in the parked car until a pair of English siblings came: a 26-year-old bespectacled Nicole Kidman look-alike named Rebecca and her younger brother, Matt. Rebecca had been working as a volunteer up north in Kitwe – industrial and copper mines central – helping orphaned teens and street kids for a year.
Shifting our bags and tushies to a four-wheel drive, we headed towards our starting point at Gwabi Lodge. On the way, we picked up our last comrade, Margot, an excitable American with blond dreadlocks a la the evil Matrix twins. She’d come on a solo trip to Africa to celebrate her fortieth birthday, the brave woman.
11. THE PADDLE, THE BOX OF MATCHES AND THE TOILET ROLL
The lumpy dirt road transformed the marque of our vehicle from Pajero to Makita demolition jackhammer, and we anxiously held on to our backpacks to prevent them from getting bucked off. Having lost all feeling in our bottoms, we were promptly shooed out at the doorstep of picturesque Gwabi Lodge. The lodge blended effortlessly with its natural surroundings as it sat neatly on sprawling cool green lawns facing the great and mighty Zambezi River – ‘great’ and ‘mighty’ being frequent prefixes to any mention of the deep blue. Not without good reason – the awe-inspiring Zambezi is, after all, the fourth-longest river in Africa after the Nile, the Congo and the Niger. Being the lifeline of so many human settlements along its 2,700-metre length, it was hence a no-brainer in 1964 – when Northern Rhodesia gained independence from the British – to take a hint from the river’s moniker and rename the country ‘Zambia’.
Like many other extraordinary natural wonders, the Zambezi has a mediocre and almost laughable beginning: the source of the drink is an infinitesimally small spring that bubbles from the roots of a diminutive tree up at Kaleni Hills in northwestern Zambia. I could not for the life of me correlate that earth drool with the meandering monster before me, knowing that it curves across a mind-blowing six countries and powers not one but three hydroelectric dams.
Decked out in the archetypal safari uniform of green shirt and light khaki shorts, a jovial Zimbabwean with a cheeky streak introduced himself as TK, our guide. Although river guides were usually rigorously trained for no less than two years before conducting their own trips, I couldn’t shake off the feeling that TK was the kind of person who might flip us over for a laugh. Scratching his bum, he began his hortatory speech: ‘Good afternoon, everybody! Welcome to your canoeing adventure on the lower Zambezi River. We have been in business since 1994 and to date, I am proud to say we have never had a canoeing mishap. Having said that, we don’t know what might happen in the next few days. Maybe that safety record will be blemished by you lot.’ He smiled wryly.
‘Okay, morbid much?’ heckled Rebecca.
‘Don’t worry! If you do go down, always listen to my advice. There are three main dangers to watch out for: hippo, hippo and ... hippo. When you see the “moving rocks”, tap the canoe with your paddle to let them know you’re approaching. Usually, they’ll move to avoid you. But sometimes we may accidentally get too close to a hippo and it may capsize your canoe. Remember to stay calm and swim to the shore. No matter what, don’t panic and splash around or the crocodiles will come and eat you.’
‘Er, not making it better,’ Margot quipped.
‘Lastly, please don’t dangle any of your body parts outside the canoe – unless you don’t mind losing them,’ he warned with an ominous cackle, wrapping up the dark foreboding disguised thinly as a water safety briefing.
Since this was a participatory budget safari (as opposed to the luxury ones where there’s a three-man crew to cook, carry your gear and fashion the finest four-poster bed out of thin air), everybody would share in the camp chores, set up their own tents and paddle their own two-man fibreglass Canadian canoes. To restore our journey-battered bodies for the perilous voyage ahead, TK unfolded a table to prepare sandwiches for lunch. It could well be our last. Rebecca took to the onions and tomatoes eagerly, and Matt cut the soggy loaf of bread. Margot attempted to do something with the plates while Chan looked quite happy being useless. I fiddled with the handles of the plastic bags and looked on intently as if I could’ve been of help if everyone else hadn’t already covered all bases. To redeem myself, I plotted to do the washing-up. But they had other ideas: they would instead wash their own plates and utensils.
Chan spoke to me in Cantonese, our cryptic code whenever she wanted to bitch about something in the presence of foreigners: ‘Are they washing the plates in a bucket of river water?’
‘Yeah.’
She scrunched up her face. ‘Eew, so unhygienic!’
‘We’re going camping! What did you expect? Evian for washing your hair?’ I asked incredulously.
‘I’m not going to wash my anything with dirty river water,’ she said and folded her arms like a spoilt brat. ‘What with all the hippo shit in it.’
After a quick change into light clothes and sandals, we crammed the food and gear that would last us four days onto the three narrow canoes, each measuring a little over five metres and capable of carrying 320 kilos (or a quarter of a hippo). One tr
unk held the steel knives, forks and spoons as well as melamine mugs, bowls and plates. Another trunk held the portable gas stove, cooking pots and a wine bottle. Sleeping bags and aircraft pillows were chucked into a big cloth sack while folding foam mattresses doubled as canoe seat cushions. Not forgetting the two-man dome tents, canvas stools, cooler boxes, a large drinking water container and a camp table. All the equipment were evenly distributed and stowed in the middle of each canoe, between the two paddlers, and covered with a tarpaulin. Another waterproof sheet was layered over the hump and kept in place by taut rope netting.
TK then doled out orange-coloured life vests. While the rest coolly chucked theirs aside, I wore mine immediately. Not because I’d learnt how to swim only two weeks prior to Zambia and needed help staying afloat, but to pad myself against the gnashing jaws of a crocodile and delay the onset of death. This was to allow enough time to see my entire life flash before my eyes. I liked being thorough.
Since much of the inland water had dried up in the current climate, it was almost a guarantee that plenty of thirsty wildlife would be heading to the river for a couple of sips. I got terribly keyed up imagining the animal parties we’d be furtively sneaking up to. Trust TK to comfort us in the fact that the largest population of murderous hippos – 75 per kilometre – resided on the particular stretch we were tackling. If that wasn’t enough to scare the snot out of us, there was at least one lurking crocodile for every 20 feet of water along the riverbank waiting to bite our faces off.
With those stressful thoughts of terror, it was time to head out. We walked cautiously to the water’s edge and stared at the canoes blankly. ‘Whoever chooses to sit at the back of the canoe is the captain. The captain has 80 per cent steerage over the canoe,’ TK explained. ‘The front only contributes 20 per cent. So if the front person wanted to go left and the back person wanted to go right, guess which way the canoe will go?’
‘Riiight!’ we chorused.
‘Good. Now let’s head to the water!’ he said cheerfully.
Matt designated himself captain and shared the canoe with Rebecca while Margot conveniently let TK call the shots. I decided to let Chan have the honour of leading us for once. Since she and I were the lightweights, we tottered into our canoe first. I held my single-bladed paddle overhead, sucked my gut in and squashed my butt into the bucket seat up front. As the gang counted down and pushed us off the bank, our canoe staggered before slithering down the water with a gentle splash. This was it! Fumbling with my paddle, I suddenly forgot all of TK’s canoe handling instructions that I had nodded in agreement to and we went around in circles.
When the other two canoes were launched, we lined up behind TK. On the river, TK was god and we were to treat his every word as gospel. He was going to watch out for hippos at the front and shout orders on where to go in an emergency. Unless given the all-clear, it was unwise for us to veer away from him. For any non-suicidal person, the reason was obvious – hippos are as unpredictable as your menopausal auntie’s mood swings. A rogue hippo could rear its noggin while our canoe was right on top or it could misconstrue our presence to be a threat to its territory. Sure, the herbivores won’t eat you but that doesn’t mean they won’t kill you.
It didn’t take long for us to make the sonorous acquaintance of these dopey creatures. Snort, snort, snort. Grunt. Roar ... wheeze. Like that arcade game machine where you had to beat down popping little heads, hippo heads surfaced in the deeper part of the river before sinking back serenely. For corpulent animals that spend nearly all their waking hours sunbaking like old, overweight Caucasian tourists with luxuriant back hair, they were uncharacteristically agile. To protect themselves from both the sun and predators, the hippos pushed themselves off their ground-skimming potbellies, jounced on their squat legs and group-plunged into the river with a thunderous splatter to join the melee of other resident river horses already blissfully underwater.
Honk! The pink goggle eyes and twitchy ears of a male hippo emerged before expelling air explosively from its nostrils like it was trying to dislodge a giant booger. Then it yawned. To see a close-up of a hippo’s wide jaws which can stretch to almost 180 degrees and fit a four-foot midget inside was stupefying, to say the least. It’s a message as true as anything: don’t mess with the enormous muzzle of death. With a record of 200 human deaths a year, hippos are the deadliest creatures in the world, killing more people than any other animal. But that’s not entirely true though – the mosquito, responsible for one million malaria deaths per year, deserves that tiara and tasselled sash more. Plus there are the conniving Nile crocodiles – possessing a bite force of 2,500 pounds (higher than sharks, lions and hyenas) – that don’t make it a habit to leave corpses behind for statisticians.
Our calm and leisurely paddling routine would at times be punctuated by TK shouting, ‘Hippo!! Paddle faster! Turn! Big C! Big C!’ ‘Big C was a paddling motion that looked like a large arc, allowing us to turn without losing momentum. Since Chan was controlling the canoe, I was at her mercy. It got embarrassing after a while because the two of us always wandered off in every direction except the one we were supposed to head.
Eventually we arrived at our first overnight island half an hour before the sun was due to set. It was a small comely island that welcomed us with an endless carpet of golden yellow sand. We paused in admiration before TK got us hauling our canoes up the shore and unloading the gear. ‘All right, set up your dome tents quickly before it gets dark,’ TK hollered. ‘I’ll start on dinner.’
Chan and I were stumped – we’d never gone camping before, let alone erect a tent. So we watched the others surreptitiously and pretended we knew what we were doing. When Margot saw us pitching our tent with the entrance as the base, she kindly lent us a hand.
‘Okay, everybody!’ TK clapped his hands together. ‘If you need to go to the toilet, use the nearby bushes. Stay within the vicinity of the campsite as there are lots of dangerous animals about. Use your flashlight to check that the surroundings are clear before walking off.’ He picked up an assortment of items from the canoe. ‘Take this paddle, the toilet roll and the box of matches. Dig a small hole with the paddle and do your business. When you’re done, burn the used toilet paper and cover your tracks back with sand.’
Wow, peeing in the bush. I had heard it could be quite therapeutic, that there’s nothing more liberating in the world than feeling the cool wind caress your naked behind while you gaze out at the river horizon in wistful contemplation.
Too bad the only thing I could contemplate was impending doom. In the dark of night, I constantly suspected that I was being watched by a ferocious creature with glowing red eyes, waiting to pounce on me right when I was most vulnerable – squatting with my pants around my ankles. I couldn’t urinate in peace, anxiously shining my torch in every conceivable direction. My only thoughts were to make it as quick as possible so that insects didn’t bite me in the bum. Because there was always something biting me in the bum.
With the sun retiring, a bright full moon punched in for duty and blessed our private island with a silvery sheen. The winter chill was setting in our bones now so we dipped back into our tents to swaddle ourselves with jackets and jumpers. By the light of Matt’s headlamp, we piled chicken casserole onto our plates, exchanged spirited stories and whooped like crazed hyenas. TK told us the most hilarious anecdote: ‘Two elderly ladies with extremely poor eyesight once went canoeing with me. In the middle of the night, one of them walked out alone to pee behind a bush. While she was at it, the bush began to move! She cried, “TK! TK! The bush is moving!” When I rushed out of my tent, I saw that the bush was not really a bush at all. It was a big buffalo! I shouted at her to get out of there but she was so shocked that she froze in the squatting position.’
We nearly busted our guts guffawing. ‘Speaking of which, what animals come on the island?’ Margot asked as she dug into her stuffed gem squash.
‘Buffaloes, elephants and lions are the most common. They occ
asionally cross over from the main reserve,’ TK answered.
Margot fidgeted in her seat and gripped a snatch of her sweater in trepidation. ‘Should we start a campfire so that the wildlife don’t attack us?’
TK grinned and picked his teeth with a fork. ‘Campfires only scare wild animals on the hunt in Hollywood films. In real life, they may even be attracted to the fire.’
‘All right then, no way I’m coming out of the tent at night. I am not drinking anything after 5 o’clock.’
‘You’re gonna be dehydrated,’ I mumbled with my mouth full.
‘Better dehydrated than dead,’ she replied solemnly.
When I looked up, the sky was so crowded with glittering stars that the dark areas stood out. It was the first time I’d ever seen the splendiferous Milky Way.
‘That’s the Southern Cross,’ Rebecca uttered, pointing to an abstract constellation in the pulsating sky.
‘Oh, are we romantic star-gazing? Where?’ I asked curiously and pulled my stool closer to her so she could point it out to me again.
‘You see the cluster of bright stars up there?’ she said as she fingered the sky. ‘If you join the four stars over that side, they form a cross. The other two farther away are “The Pointers”. Now draw a line from the top of the cross to The Pointers ...’
I regretted I asked – she lost me at ‘bright stars’. She then went on and on about alpha and beta doing something nasty with the centaur, telling me I had to extend a mid-point perpendicular to some gobbledygook star, before advancing to grab some axes, and drawing more lines to cross some other hallucinatory line.
