by Adeline Loh
Leaving the falls, Chan developed sun phobia and sought shelter at the ticketing booth. Meanwhile, I ambled a short distance away to the curio stalls which sold a mad menagerie of African gifts, art and memorabilia. Whenever any of the vendors and I failed to agree on a price while bargaining, they would funnily opt to barter and point vigorously at the two sweaters I’d fastened around my waist. I mulled it over for a bit but decided that it would be unwise to freeze to death over a wall hanging, no matter how masterfully dyed. One seller sold wooden carvings of Nyaminyami, the amphibious god-spirit with the head of a fish and the torso of a snake, believed to control the destinies of all lives on the Zambezi River. He took a liking to my Adidas watch but I shook my head vehemently. Trade my watch for 20 river gods? That just wasn’t right.
When I got back, Chan was still cemented to the bench in the shade, harbouring no desire to move lest the blistering sun razed her delicate porcelain skin. Her predilection for applying generous amounts of Vaseline in place of proper sunblock was making the skin on her face resemble that of an albino snake.
‘You know, your face is getting horribly blotchy. It looks like you have a fungal disease,’ I said. ‘How many times have I told you to use my sunblock?’
‘I don’t care,’ she blurted adamantly. ‘The scarf will cover my face. Appearances don’t matter to me.’
‘Okay, what about food? That matters to you, right? Here, have a meat pie.’ I brandished it in front of her lips and threatened to feed her.
‘Eeek! Get that away from me!’ she said with a grimace.
‘Don’t tell me ... still a cow?’
I tried to ignore the smoke coming out of Chan’s ears and popped the last hunk of meat pie in my mouth. Then a bright idea came to me. ‘Hey, let’s walk across the Victoria Falls Bridge to Zimbabwe and check out the view from that side!’
‘But I’m tired,’ she whimpered. ‘And we’ve spent the entire day walking already.’
‘So what’s a few more minutes of it, huh?’
She sighed and got up. In quiet protest, she walked with the gait of an elephant and trailed ten metres behind me. Even so, her whining did not wane in proportion to the speed she was walking.
The debate over which country provided the best views of Victoria Falls has always been heated in many an Internet forum. It was like choosing between a leopard and a cheetah. Both sides had their ardent supporters so I was itching to find out for myself. Even though three-quarters of the falls plunged over Zambian soil, Zimbabwe’s vantage point would apparently give us a more expansive and grandiose view at rim level. Put simply, the view from Zimbabwe would be like looking at Victoria Falls through a wide lens as opposed to through a zoom lens from the Zambian side.
Up until recent times, Victoria Falls Town in Zimbabwe was the main tourist centre for a vast majority of visitors to the falls. It stole the crown from Livingstone when Zambia’s economy took a turn for the worse in the 1970s as a result of falling copper prices. With Livingstone’s 60-year status as an illustrious tourism hub stripped, no tourist gave Zambia a second thought again until the situation changed seven years ago. Now the handful, like Chan and me, who cross over to Zimbabwe would be greeted by nothing more than a ghost town, parched petrol stations and a collapsed currency. The exchange rate was so overvalued that 60 US dollars could get you 15,000 Zimbabwean dollars, with inflation as astronomical as 1,000 per cent – the highest in the world. As of September 2008, the annual inflation rate managed to soar to an utterly ludicrous 531 billion per cent.
Zimbabwe has been in a topsy-turvy state since President Robert Mugabe launched a violent and chaotic land redistribution programme in 2001 to seize white-owned land and give it back to the blacks. Approximately 4,000 white farmers had their commercial farmland expropriated and themselves kicked out of the country – and those were the lucky ones. The unlucky ones got exterminated. The land was then given back to Mugabe’s cronies and war veterans to buy votes, but with no money for seeds or expertise to work the land, agricultural food production plummeted to a devastating level. Since then impoverished Zimbabweans have been living on food handouts from international donors. If nothing changes soon, an estimated six million people will starve.
CNN highlighted Zimbabwe’s plight in 2006 by showing a family of villagers eating rats to survive. In the city, there was disturbing footage of people’s homes and businesses getting bulldozed in a governmental campaign called ‘Operation Drive Out Rubbish’. As a result, more than 700,000 people in the capital of Harare – allegedly targeted for their political views – were left homeless. ‘Zimbabwe was once dubbed Southern Africa’s bread basket,’ the broadcast journalist reported, ‘but in six short years, it has become a basket case.’
Owing to the country’s economic and diplomatic descent into the dreary pits, many foreign visitors boycotted the more developed Victoria Falls Town in favour of long-neglected Livingstone. And where tourists flocked, tour operators followed. According to John Reed of the Los Angeles Times, several new hotels – such as the multimillion-dollar Sun International Hotel built just a few metres away from Victoria Falls – and agencies offering river cruises or game drives have sprung up in Livingstone in less than five years, transforming it from a provincial backwater back into a growing ecotourism hub. In fact, five years ago, one could stand on Mosi-Oa-Tunya Road and see only one car every half hour; now it’s difficult to cross it. Livingstone International Airport had even extended its runway to cater for long-haul planes carrying passengers who would rather give Lusaka a miss. All this means that the government of Zambia is wallowing like a happy warthog in the profits generated by the influx of new jobs and foreign exchange, many thanks to its troubled neighbour. The tables have truly turned.
We strode across all 152 metres of the Victoria Falls Bridge, past the bungee jumping-off point for certifiable nut jobs and proceeded towards Zimbabwean customs. We reached a police checkpoint where a friendly policeman raved and ranted about Zimbabwe’s supposedly more beautiful side of the falls and suggested that we made haste before the Victoria Falls National Park gate closed at 6.30 p.m. We had just a little over half an hour left.
Pressing on around a road bend, I chuckled at a signboard that had the lawful inscription ‘One Heavy Vehicle at a Time Even When Robot is Green. When I eventually figured out that robot meant traffic lights in these parts, we bumped into a pair of English guys coming on foot from the opposite direction. They had the same idea as us but decided to turn back because the national park was closing soon and they didn’t want to pay US$20 for a rushed visit. That made a lot of sense and after conferring with Chan, who insisted she wasn’t going in because she’d had enough of dripping water, we did an about-turn ourselves. It did not matter much to me as I would be getting a kick-butt aerial view later anyway when I go on my microlight flight.
Back on the Victoria Falls Bridge, the magical sunset colours forced me to stop in my tracks. Even Chan was so enthralled that she quit protesting. So we hung around, finished her emergency sustenance of vegetarian crackers and allowed ourselves to become spellbound by the mystical panorama that was the rapid melting of the sun across the sky. I tipped my head over the steel railing and gazed, bewildered, at the yawning ravine which could barely contain the Zambezi gushing downstream between its tight cliffs. Scarecrow-like tree silhouettes threw their branches against the fading pastel sky over Batoka Gorge, and when I glanced across my shoulder towards the other side of the bridge, an intermittent rainbow suspended in billows of steam hovered cheekily above the green contours of extraordinary Victoria Falls.
Having lost all track of time, we hustled back to the guesthouse as darkness was threatening to swallow us up. Pretending to be deaf to the calls of taxi touts, we clip-clopped towards a giant can of sardines masquerading as a minibus lying by the wayside. Actually, the slanting minibus was more like a wrecked van someone salvaged from a junkyard. Scores of people were trying to cram themselves in every available slot as we app
roached. There was no way in hell we were going to get past the innumerable flailing arms and thrashing legs poking out of the bus door. Mashed against the windows were faces with pained eyes beseeching us not to enter.
‘It’s way too full,’ I said, fending off a wiry hand that was pushing my head away.
‘Rubbish!’ Chan retorted and shoved me aside. ‘We can’t wait till the next one comes, it’s getting dark and scary!’ With the lightning reflexes of a cheetah, she pounced butt first into the fray and reverse-parked into the one inch of space left on a collapsing cushioned bench, determinedly pushing and widening the narrow slit. Once she was solidly embedded between two locals, she patted her lap. ‘Come on, Adeline, get on me!’
I jumped on her. Envious of our ingenuity, some brawny dumb jock with a vexing safari hat and big-ass camera followed us and hopped on his skanky girlfriend’s lap directly facing me. The overstuffed minibus whined wearyingly and sank a few inches. If it were an elevator, it would be beeping ‘OVERLOAD’ and refuse to move. But it wasn’t, and so the minibus creaked down the road like an old, decrepit man coming down the stairs.
Balanced unsteadily on our respective partners’ laps, Dumb Jock and I came revoltingly close to sucking faces many times during the bumpy ride. But it only became excruciatingly annoying when the bean-brain started to take pictures with his telephoto lens. It didn’t matter to him that I had to move my head to avoid his protruding camera lens or that there was nothing outside but the humdrum scenery of disturbed soil. He held the camera clumsily and every time we jerked over the pimply road, the damned zoom near carved a new nostril on my face.
*
Having ticked off ‘lion’, ‘leopard’, ‘buffalo’ and ‘elephant’ on our Africa’s Big Five check list, we were feeling rather ecstatic the following morning at the prospect of going to Mosi-Oa-Tunya Game Park to goggle the last well-endowed member of the group: the rhinoceros. While tiny Mosi-Oa-Tunya is nowhere in the giant national park leagues of South Luangwa and Kafue, it is the only place in Zambia where the endangered white rhino (also known as the square-lipped rhino) can be found. Our walking safari guide, Henry, was what Bob Marley would have been had he given up his career in music and opted to live in the African bush. By far our youngest and most entertaining guide, he relayed his vast knowledge of animal behaviour with a stoned, lazy drawl that kept me oddly riveted and made me want to roll up a spliff to share with all of Mother Nature’s beautiful creatures.
So off we went, peering inside termite mounds and pinching plants. We learnt that giraffes and elephants, being the incorrigible party animals that they are, liked to get high on the marula tree’s intoxicating fruit (from which the famous Amarula cream liqueur is made). We learnt which dead-looking trees blossomed during the rains, which ones gave out healing sap, and which ones you could use in place of a toothbrush and toothpaste. Henry even made chloroform-like subjects such as birds’ nests fascinating when we came across a victimized acacia tree, where bulky weaver nests dangled from the tip of each branch like ill-hung Christmas tree trinkets. ‘Weaver birds are the feathered fraternity’s greatest architects,’ Henry explained poetically.
According to him, cohabitation in the avian world was an awfully humbling prospect. When mating season begins, a male weaver’s luck with the ladies depends on how good his house looks. With just his tiny feet and beak, the eager young male skilfully knits a love nest starting with a forked twig followed by grass, vines and leaves. The exhausting process takes about a week and when he has finished, the onion-shaped multi-chamber masterpiece would have a roof, walls, a porch and even a threshold to keep the chicks from rolling out of the tunnel entrance that opens downwards.
After the house is built comes the even more arduous mission of wooing a passing female. To do this, the male bird hangs upside down from the nest, flutters his wings and shows off his bright manly colours. An adequate display attracts a female who will promptly invite herself inside his freshly built palace to inspect his craftsmanship. If she is convinced that the interior and foundation are sturdy enough to hold her eggs, then it’s congratulations and confetti all around. On the other hand, if she is none too pleased with his handiwork, she will fly into a fit of Martha Stewart rage and tear the nest apart, leaving the hapless male to start from scratch again. Even in the wild, materialism knows no bounds.
And yet our main mission remained clear and unwavering in this open wooded grassland: to seek out the second largest land mammal by any means necessary. Once upon a time Zambia had an abundant rhino population until they were all wiped out by poaching in the 1980s and 1990s. To help them restock, South Africa’s Kruger National Park translocated five white rhinos to Mosi-Oa-Tunya in 1994. Alas, even with round-the-clock protection by park rangers of the semi-autonomous Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA) – tasked to improve the management of the country’s parks and implement a complete ban on hunting – three of the rare white rhinos died. The first drowned in the Zambezi River in 2003 (rhinos can’t swim to save their hides). A month after, the second rhino was accidentally bumped off by a lethal dart when fumbling ZAWA rangers tried to tranquillize it for treatment. The most recent rhino death was not made clear to me but I’m hazarding a guess that it was either drought-related famine or poaching most foul.
And then there were two. A mother and her child, now a sexually mature, dashing bull. Out of desperation, ZAWA had the sick hope that the son would develop an Oedipus complex and hump his mum. Too bad the incestuous union did not happen before she got too old; perhaps even they were afraid of giving birth to strange-looking malformed calves.
Along the way Henry retrieved a snare lying surreptitiously on the wildlife trail. Now that there was rapid response to gunshots (vigilant safari guides were in constant radio contact with park authorities), poachers had dumped firearms in favour of silent but equally deadly wire snares. If Henry had not picked it up, any unsuspecting animal that poked its head through the snare’s prickly noose would be entangled in the death trap. When it struggles in panic to dislodge the barbs impaling its skin, the snare would tighten around its neck before its misery is ended by an agonizing blood-drenched death.
Poaching is lucrative business in Africa because of the high commercial demand for bushmeat. That alone accounts for a shocking 90 per cent of the poaching that takes place. Trophy poaching for ivory, skin, horns and genitals also reels in big bucks. All this just so rich people with bad taste can hang a stuffed animal head on top of their beds and misled Far Easterners can boil rhino horn soup to strengthen their penises.
But not all shooting of animals is illegal in Zambia. Trigger-happy hunters are given space to play for a fee in the 31 designated Game Management Areas (GMAs), essentially buffer zones around the national parks. But who respects boundaries nowadays? Certainly not illegal poachers and sustenance farmers who face no moral dilemmas carrying out the wishes of wealthy businessmen. From their point of view, a wild animal is not a fantastic creature to be appreciated like we foreigners think, but an itinerant nuisance that threatens their livelihood by destroying food crops, ruining gardening efforts and killing farm animals. If you were to ask the locals to admire the interesting mammals in their country’s national parks, they’d knock you upside the head with a shovel and tell you to get a life. Some people have families to feed, you know.
We remained on course, tracing rhino field signs like wildlife forensic scientists in an imaginary episode of BSI: Bush Scene Investigation. The bull had studiously marked his territory, clueless to the fact that there were no other males around to pilfer his females or invade his domain. His handiwork was inspected thoroughly; he had pawed the soft ground with his powerful three-toed feet to make dung latrines (known as ‘middens’ in hip safari speak).
‘For those with an iron constitution, go smell a tree or bush near the midden,’ Henry suggested. ‘It’s probably been sprayed backwards with a high-pressure jet of urine. This tells other rhinos to get lost, the area is occupied.�
� The other walkers, a family of three, trudged around the midden to catch a whiff of Eau De Rhino from the gently blowing breeze.
‘These people are nuts!’ Chan said, once out of earshot from the others.
‘No harm in expanding your olfactory horizons,’ I reasoned.
‘I know, but it’s ... rhino wee!’ Chan cried incredulously.
‘Too true,’ I replied with a nod.
We then bumped into two gun-toting rhino rangers whose jobs were to keep a close eye on the ungulates. We rejoiced, thinking that they were going to point us to where the rhinos were. But the rangers just shrugged their shoulders – they too had lost them. You could just feel the overwhelming aura of efficiency around here. Now all of us – including a confused-looking Chinese family in a car – were hot on the rhino’s trail. We hunted in every direction, following and sniffing spoors, poop, soil gouges and mud smears on trees.
Finally, after telling Henry to screw the muffin break until we found what we were desperately looking for, Expedition Rhino Stalk paid off. The targets were acquired under a winterthorn tree, grazing contentedly with their elongated heads stooped low. If we had been under the purview of a swish safari outfit, we would be bundled safely up on a ‘hide’ (concealed elevated platform) and given the chance to ogle dangerous animals with big horns at close range with nary a worry. Out here, however, the closest we got to a hide was some scanty vegetation peppered with holes. We had the added excitement of being upwind of the rhinos, which meant they could smell our presence. If they got upset, we had to be ready to un-hide ourselves and run for our lives.
