No Stopping for Lions

by Joanne Glynn

  The next day we arrive in the sleepy little town of Mbala, known as Abercorn in colonial days. Now there’s not a white face in sight and we draw a blank in our search for the missionary even after a very helpful bank manager ‘puts his brain on a rack’. Neil explains our mission to him during the long wait for a traveller’s cheque to be cashed. He is very interested and regrets sincerely that he does not know where the farm could be. As an alternative, he asks whether Neil would be interested in buying some fine farming land?

  We’ve just one name left, Paul Nielsen, so it’s down into the heat of the rift valley to Mpulungu, 40 kilometres away. This town, on the southern tip of Lake Tanganyika, is Zambia’s largest port and the place is bustling with locals, refugees and visitors from other ports in other countries around the lake. We see baskets of fish for sale all along the road and also carried around on the heads of brightly dressed ladies. Accompanying the oppressive heat is the oppressive smell of drying fish, the kapenta that are harvested from Africa’s inland lakes.

  We easily locate the Nielsen’s service station but there’s bad news: the African staff inform us that Paul has just left and his wife won’t be in until the following day at ten o’clock. The Nielsens live on a farm back up the escarpment an hour or so away, and there’s no way of contacting them.

  We find a decent but neglected ‘resort’ on the shores of the lake. It’s built on a beach made up entirely of smooth rocks and small boulders, and it looks deserted until a couple of pretty sisters appear and rent us a chalet. There are no other guests and there is no food in the restaurant, but in the morning we are woken by a rooster crowing and chooks clucking, and two freshly boiled eggs appear shortly afterwards.

  We return to the service station after ten to find that Mrs Nielsen has not turned up, so on the off chance we go down to the lakeside to track down the name on the business card Neil had been given. This man, who owns a kapenta-processing factory, is also a Muslim and he appears annoyingly fresh and cool in his long white tunic. He’s friendly, interested in our story, but ultimately unable to assist.

  Back at the service station, still no Mrs Nielsen. We sit in the car park in the Troopy, with the windows up and the air-con blasting to keep out the heat, petrol fumes and kapenta funk while we reassess the situation. The only way forward I can see is if one of the Nielsens turns up in the next couple of days and has some information. Neil has been losing heart with each visit to the service station, and now he voices his concerns. He’s frustrated with all the dead ends, he’s worried that I am getting bored with the process, it isn’t fair to me to be interrupting our journey with this thing that was all about him. But I know him better than that. He’s itching to be doing something, going somewhere, anywhere; it’s just not in his nature to be hanging around. Every dead end has been bringing us one step closer to the inevitable: we decide to call the search off, with some relief on both sides.

  We’re on the road back up the escarpment to Mbala when we pass a slightly worn, very old Mercedes coming in the opposite direction, driven by a white woman. This has to be Mrs Nielsen, so we turn around and arrive back at the service station just as she’s putting the kettle on. Greetings all round and over a biscuit and a cup of coffee Neil tells Mrs Nielsen, Beryl, of his plight. She is eager to be of assistance and her response to the photos is a positive one. She thinks that her husband might know the whereabouts of Itembwe, so why don’t we go up to their farm and ask him? When we express doubts about finding their place she volunteers a staff member to show the way. So it’s back up the escarpment, turn right onto the main road, left at the second dirt road and drop off the employee at the corner to catch a bus back down. We drive along a deeply channelled road until we get to the Nielsens’ track. Ten minutes later we see the farm and there’s a man working on machinery in the barn: Paul Nielsen. Neil produces the photos and Paul, still with a hint of Danish heritage in his speech, says, ‘Yes, I know where that place is.’

  And he knows this because some years ago he helped a neighbour to salvage the verandah columns from the falling-down Itembwe farmhouse and they used them to build a rather grand carport at the neighbour’s homestead. Paul downs tools, produces coffee and maps, then declares that he will show us the way. But there’s no hurry, he says. ‘Come and look around my farm first.’ The tour ends at a chicken coop in which a couple of surprisingly calm chickens share space with a beautifully marked, very fat Gaboon viper. Paul gazes at him proudly and it’s pretty obvious that this was all Paul wanted us to see in the first place.

  We drive along overgrown tracks for an hour, then two, past abandoned broad-acre fields and through mopane woodlands brilliant in russet and bronze. The elephant grass gets higher and bare rock faces loom on both sides, overshadowing the Troopy’s path. Neil is sceptical; he can’t get his bearings until we come to a natural spring feeding a ribbon of dense green undergrowth, and a large cave up in the cliffs to our right. We are now very close, as this is the spring that supplied Itembwe with water, and Neil is fingering a blurred photo of the family sitting in the mouth of the cave. Now we get out of the Troopy and proceed on foot, and Paul is as excited as Neil is when we eventually elbow through tall grasses to stand on the overgrown remains of a house. Brick buttresses stand like sentries guarding the gaping cellar where sunflower seeds were once stored, but apart from them everything else has been swallowed by vines and bush. All that is left of the garage is the grease pit; the maize fields have long ago reverted to bushland; and someone since has planted an avenue of tall eucalypts along the original driveway — but this is undoubtedly Itembwe. Neil wanders about, kicking through rubble, trying to trace the outline of foundations and looking for anything recognisable wrapped in the undergrowth. I can see that he isn’t sad but very pleased, and content too. The excitement of finally finding the place, this phantom from his childhood, is proving far greater than any nostalgia for a lost past. We wander down to the old orchard where apple and almond trees are even now flowering white and pink, and look back up the quiet African valley. It got the better of the Glynn family and has proved to be too much for everyone ever since.

  On the way out Paul fills Neil in on the more recent history of the area and the irony of the tale makes Neil laugh. After Independence all the farmland up here was progressively taken over by blacks. The whites had proved that cattle ranching wasn’t viable so the government hatched a bold plan to clear thousands of acres for broad-acre agriculture which would supply the whole central African region with wheat. One fellow in particular, a government minister, had knowledge of this, so through manipulation and trickery he acquired huge tracts of land, Itembwe included. Unfortunately for him he was assassinated by someone even more corrupt. His wife inherited the land and it had lain forgotten and neglected ever since, slowly reverting to the original bush. She’s had it on the market for some years, and it is this that the bank manager in Mbala had innocently offered to sell to Neil.

  Paul takes us on a detour to an abandoned homestead where the only construction to survive the ravages of neglect and pilfering is a stone carport, handsomely supported by six white columns standing straight and true — and they look just as smart as they did in the photos of the old Itembwe house. When we return Paul to his Gaboon viper and say our goodbyes it’s like leaving an old friend. His generosity has made the mission possible, but most of all he has shared in the dream. Neil will be forever grateful to him and feel a little guilty as well, because Paul had smashed a new pair of reading glasses in his eagerness to unfold maps for our search.

  I’m not surprised when Neil suggests that we head for Tanzania the next day. He has put his memories to rest, achieved his intent, and as usual he’s greedy for new places, new horizons. He drives back to Mbala full of tales from Itembwe days, but by the time we get there he is making plans for the weeks to come.

  The accommodation options in Mbala are limited and it is getting very late, so we decide to return to Mpulungu for the night. By now the road down is fami
liar, and the entertaining conversation of an old medula who hitches a lift makes the ride seem shorter than it is. When we’d been speaking to him, the kapenta factory owner had recommended a hotel by the lake and now we drive in with high expectations. The black manager and her young son look after us well, but the executive banda we’re allotted, not quite completed, is more like a prison cell, with bare cement walls and bars on the windows. Just as well we’re still in good spirits after the success of our day. We’re told that there is a little cottage made out of beer bottles we can move to, but apparently that is hotter and darker, the builders not yet having figured out how to construct decent windows without the bottles crashing down. In the evening the kitchen ladies cook us a good dinner but the next morning, after a troublesome night’s sleep in the cell, Neil is grumpy and takes exception to the leather-hard fried eggs Evangelica serves up. He says they are terrible. She says they are well cooked. He says that even he could do better. She says that she’d like to see him try. They are both having a wonderful time, then Evangelica challenges Neil to a competition, a fry-off with me as judge as long as I don’t let my faithfulness to my husband cause the clouds to fall on my choice. To this end Evangelica stipulates that they will send out the eggs anonymously, and soon after Neil and she have disappeared into the kitchen two plates of fried eggs arrive in front of me. One looks like a greasy car crash, no different to Evangelica’s first offering, while the second has two perfectly fried soft yolks smiling up from just-set whites. I declare it a tie.

  NGORONGORO WiTHOUT THE CRATER

  The border crossing into Tanzania at Kasesya presents a problem. This is not really a town at all, more an outpost where chickens scratch around a few simple dwellings and the inhabitants are all immigration or customs officials. They would only see ten to twelve tourists a week, and in the wet season none at all because the through-road becomes impassable. When we arrive the immigration officer who should have been manning his post has headed off to Mbala, many kilometres away, and has taken his entry and exit stamps with him. He could be back tomorrow. Or Sunday. Why don’t we go to Mbala, find him and bring him and his stamp back in our LandCruiser, the customs official asks. Even he can see the pitfalls in that idea, so very agreeably takes us through the big gate to the Tanzanian side, where he explains our situation to the officials manning the post there. On his way back through the gate the Zambian asks us shyly if we could spare a book or a magazine. He has a hunger for reading and in this remote part of the world the only book available to him has been a Bible, which he’s read over and over again. I give him some novels and a map, and he’s over the moon. At least he’ll be able to find his way out of there should the isolation become too much to bear.

  Now on the Tanzanian side, we respectfully listen to a little lecture from the immigration officer on the problems of leaving a country unofficially, as opposed to illegally. The subtlety is beyond me but we thank him profusely when he at last stamps our passports.

  I feel buoyant, raring to go, and Neil is whistling a little tune as he recalibrates the GPS with one hand and tries to keep the Troopy on the road with the other. Itembwe has been found and left behind and now we have before us new adventures in unfamiliar places. Neil had only been north of Zambia once, and that was the time 30 years ago when the two of us travelled south from Nairobi. Already the potholed roads, the denuded landscape, even the dwellings in the villages are different to anything we’ve come across so far on this trip, and soon we’ll be meeting Africans of different ethnicity to those encountered already. We’re anticipating a language problem too, as Swahili is the official and also most widely spoken language in Tanzania and Kenya, and although we remember that it was easy to learn, general conversation in the places we will be passing through could well be reduced to monosyllables. Now we can’t wait to be a part of it, and head northward with that old sense of excitement bubbling around us and making us impatient to reach Sumbawanga, a regional centre where we hope to find accommodation for the night.

  Well the road, a major route linking the south and north of western Tanzania, is one of the worst we’ve travelled on. It’s so washed away in parts and the corrugations so deep that we progress in fits and starts. The only other vehicles we come across are the occasional local mini buses, with people hanging out the windows and bikes and chickens and relatives tied on the top. They wave and give the Troopy the thumbs-up, and we wave and smile proudly. The road passes through small, neat villages but mostly we are alone in this forgotten corner of the world.

  At the reception desk of the Moravian Conference Centre in Sumbawanga we’re told that all hotel rooms are taken, something that we should have worked out for ourselves when we saw the large number of new white church-insigniaed Land Rovers crammed into the car park. The only other choice in town is the Mbizi Forest Hotel, a hotel for locals located in a back street, and said to be quiet by African standards. Having two whites turn up in a big expensive vehicle sends the staff into a dither and we’re treated with great respect. This must be how Stanley felt when he landed at Ujiji. Our incredibly cheap spotless room has an en-suite and a TV, and the bright face of a giant panda smiling up at us from a garish red and yellow blanket. There is also a sign behind the door saying that two adult males are not permitted to sleep in one single bed, which creates some disquiet in Neil.

  The next morning we drive on into Katavi National Park with no bookings and no clear directions. The rangers at the park gate tell us we’ll find a couple of lodges if we drive past the river full of hippos, turn next right then next right again, and ‘Oh yes, keep your windows up — tsetse flies.’ We’d passed many dark blue and black flags strung out beside the road on the way in and the rangers inform us that these are tsetse fly traps. Sprayed with something fatally attractive to the flies they’re very successful as long as they remain seductively open and the rangers remember to keep up the spraying.

  We brazenly drive right into Foxes Katavi Wilderness Camp and ask for a bed. They just happen to have four of their five tents unoccupied so we’re in, and by the time Manie, the manager, returns from a game drive Neil and I have unpacked, had lunch and are sitting in big comfy armchairs with a glass of chilled white wine. We’ve also become acquainted with Freddy, a lone adolescent elephant with an identity crisis who wanders into camp at the same time every afternoon and hides motionless behind the tents if anyone inadvertently comes too close.

  The camp is positioned on the edge of the woodland, looking out over a broad yellow grass plain. Just a kilometre or so away is a dry riverbed with five springs spread along its course, and it’s here that the animals come in the dry season to drink. In the mornings we set off in the safari vehicle with Manie, drive by long migrating herds of buffalo and zebra on the plain, then along the riverbed past loping families of giraffe, hippos by the hundreds, topi with babies, crocodiles in caves and lions on heat. It is the Serengeti without the crowds, Ngorongoro without the crater. This is what people were talking about when they spoke in hushed awe of Katavi. Because of its isolation no one we’d spoken to had actually visited the park themselves, but everyone seemed to know its reputation and what it was capable of delivering to anyone determined enough to get there.

  I love staying in national parks and in tented camps in particular. You can lie in bed with all the sounds of the bush around you, and go on game drives where you never know what’s around the corner. Like on the first morning out with Manie, we did just drive around a corner and there was a hippo walking towards us on the track, almost totally covered with oxpeckers. He looked like one of those little porcupine cakes from childhood birthday parties.

  So much is different here in Africa; sometimes I can’t believe what we accept as normal now compared with life back home. Bad instant coffee, mozzie bites all over us, and Nivea cream instead of Dior. We’re still living in the same changes of clothes that we’ve been carrying in a tote bag since Botswana, and we’ve been brushing our teeth without toothpaste for more than a week.
Neil says the real test will be when I can go for a week without washing my hair — little does he know.

  We find the road north from Katavi even worse than the one out of Sumbawanga and it takes us more than eight hours to travel the 300 kilometres or so to Kigoma. This is a prosperous-looking town with an interesting history. For centuries it was the main port for shipping salt from the nearby salt mines to the Congo and further inland. Then, during the slave trade, it was a stopping-off centre on the route eastward to the coast. In the early 1990s the immediate area was inundated by 500 000 Rwandan refugees, and following that, populated by almost as many United Nations officials, personnel from NGOs and associated agencies, and various hangers-on.

  The Troopy is lost on the streets amid a convention of white Toyota LandCruisers bearing aid insignia and driven by earnest Europeans. It’s surprising that more English isn’t spoken. As it is we’re struggling to be understood. Earlier when English failed, Neil could get by with the little Bemba he could remember from his youth, but here we are both often at a loss. There’s an elaborately courteous procedure when you first greet someone, even if it’s just asking directions or sitting down in a restaurant.

  ’Good morning.’

  ’Good morning.’

  ’How are you?’

  ’Thank you. I’m well. And you?’

  ’I’m well thank you.’

  ’How was your journey?’

  ’Good. Thank you.’

  ’Karibu. Welcome.’

  ’Thank you. Karibu.’

  Neil can never quite master the pace or the formality. ‘Hey, is this the road to Kigoma?’