Zambezi River canoe trip: Up close and personal
On a canoe safari along the Zambezi River, Graham Boynton was simply awestruck by an eyeball-to-eyeball encounter with the biggest of the big five.
You know you are on a serious African safari when, on your first morning – before you have actually set out – your fellow travellers sit around sipping beer and telling tales of wild animal attacks that have taken place in the recent past.
So it is that one of our party explains how a large male hyena attacked him in his tent and, before he was able to wrestle it off him, ripped off most of his right ear. Another describes a horrific elephant attack in nearby Hwange National Park , when a mother and her 12-year-old daughter were killed by a rampaging elephant.
Finally (and most chillingly for us, as we are about to jump into canoes and paddle down the Zambezi River), one of our guides describes how, this time last year and on this very stretch of river, an enormous crocodile leapt out of the water and took a 16-year-old American girl from her canoe as she and her father were paddling along – just as we are about to do now.
By the time we climb into our canoes to commence our journey, we are a little quieter and more reflective about the four-day safari we are taking along this wild crocodile- and hippo-infested stretch of the mighty Zambezi.
Beginning in Zambia, the 1,600-mile-long river flows through Angola and along the borders of Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe (where we are now) before emptying into the Indian Ocean off Mozambique. One of the great things about a proper wild adventure in the bush is that you submit yourself to the forces of nature. If you are well guided and you obey the basic laws of the bush, it is unlikely you will find yourself in harm’s way; however, the sense of real danger is never too far away.
This particular canoe safari – my fifth along the Zambezi – has come out of the blue. I’d received a telephone call from an old friend on a Monday: “Someone has dropped out of our trip. If you can get to Johannesburg by Sunday morning, you can come.”
It would be five old friends doing what white Africans love to do – travel into the bush, commune with nature and then, around a campfire at night under the African stars, solve the problems of this troubled and magnificent continent over bottles of fine wine. How could I refuse?
The Zambezi is a river of legends. In Batonka mythology, it is protected by Nyaminyami, a serpent-like god who disapproves of man’s interference in the natural movement of the river. The Batonka say the river god has yet to wreak his most terrible revenge – bringing down the Kariba Dam, built in the 1950s at the height of British colonial rule to form one of the largest man-made lakes in the world and provide hydro-electric power in abundance for the region.
The Victorian missionaries called the Zambezi “God’s Highway” and, between 1853 and 1856, David Livingstone completed an epic journey from its source to its mouth. A few years later, the Victorian explorer and conservationist Frederick Courteney Selous also explored this wilderness – in conditions, it has to be said, far harsher than ours.
While Selous and his companions were plagued with blackwater fever and malaria, then suffered along the way from random attacks by buffalos and hippos, our party was cossetted by a 21st-century pharmaceutical cordon sanitaire and protected from animal attack by guides armed with .358 rifles – not to mention a superb knowledge of the terrain and its occupants.
Each night, after a hard day’s canoeing, we would flop into a tented camp prepared by a wonderful staff of Zimbabweans, then sip G&Ts and the finest whisky around the campfire before taking dinner at a table laid with starched white linen and overlooking the river.
In the mornings, we would take to our canoes again and the contents of the camp – kitbags, food, booze, camp beds, cutlery, linen – would be packed up by the staff and moved downriver to our next night’s stop.
It is safari with butler service – and, tough as it is each day on the river, the comforts of the night make this a very luxurious trip indeed. The fact that we are delivered here and taken back to what we laughingly call civilisation in a Pilatus PC-1, the turbo-propped Concorde of the bushveld, confirms the luxurious nature of this high adventure.
The presence of the wonderful Zimbabweans brings me to a major issue: the moral dilemma of being a foreign tourist in Zimbabwe. The world is painfully aware that this once-wonderful country – and I should know, as I grew up here – has been all but ruined by the despot Robert Mugabe.
Should we therefore boycott Zimbabwe, lest we afford the dreadful regime any kind of credibility? Or should we visit, thus giving the innocent victims of the madman some kind of support? After years of vacillation, I have decided that, if you are judicious, your visit will benefit an important handful of people on the ground and bring little benefit to the ghastly regime.
The handful is important, since those few people are protecting the country’s wildlife by their very presence in these remote wilderness areas; it is they who, by their sheer devotion, oil the wheels of conservation here. In a Zimbabwe that is falling apart at the seams, it is the private-sector tour guides and conservationists who are preventing the spread of anarchy into these wild areas.
So, along the river we canoed, this motley crew – a South African banker and his wife, a top safari operator and his partner, an ornithologist with an encyclopaedic knowledge of his subject (it was he who had his ear chewed by the hyena), an American millionaire whose first love is the African bushveld, and your humble narrator.
We start at Rukomechi Camp and end five days later at Ilala Camp. On the way we come across an array of mammals and birds the likes of which you seldom see outside David Attenborough documentaries. Apart from the 17ft-long crocs and the enormous pods of hippos, the waterways are full of birdlife.
A flock of trumpeter hornbills flies past; blacksmith plovers dive-bomb open-billed storks that have had the audacity to venture near their nests; flocks of yellow-billed storks, goliath herons, hadedas, white-crowned plovers and, of course, one of nature’s most exquisite creations, the lilac-breasted roller, all come and go in a display that is almost beyond belief.
Above us, bateleurs float on the thermals and fish eagles eye their prey before diving like laser-guided missiles to spear a large bream in the waters beside us.
In between canoeing stretches on the river, we take walks through the Natal mahogany and kigelia trees, at one point tracking a magnificent black-maned male lion through the adrenalin grass – at a respectful distance, I hasten to add.
There are baboons, warthogs, impalas and that rarest of sightings, a family of wild dogs, and elephants everywhere. Nowhere else in Africa have I seen elephants raise themselves on their hind legs and pull the leaves from the highest branches, but here you see them stretching and ripping up the foliage from the Faidherbia albida (Ana tree) canopy all the time. Perfect adaptation.
I travel through the African bush often and yet, every time I take this Zambezi trip, I find I am in awe at what I see, hear and experience. Nowhere else on the continent have I felt so close to nature in the raw, from the huge bull elephants that come within touching distance, to the giant crocodiles one canoes past.
Soon after our trip, I learned from local conservationists that they had shot the 17ft monster that killed the American girl.
For centuries, this place has survived because human traffic has been kept to a minimum. Until the 1960s, the tsetse fly kept homo sapiens at bay; in the 1970s and 1980s, a bush war raged – and that, too, kept visitors away. Now, Robert Mugabe’s status as an international pariah is having the same effect on tourist numbers. Apart from small groups of enthusiasts like us, who genuinely love the country and its wildlife, few come to this wonderful place – preserving its status as an empty, enduring paradise. Perhaps it is the last such place in Africa.
