June 19 -30 2001 / Zambia: African Circle Part 2
Total Eclipse in Zimbabwe, and Walking in Zambia
Part 4 - The Last Camp in Zambia
6/29 Camp Three to Nsefu Camp
new animals seen today:
Waterbuck
Slender Mongoose
Bushy-Tailed Mongoose
Pearlspotted Owl
So we drive off from this camp to the last one, which will once again be luxurious. We have had tours of the kitchen area, with cleverly-constructed ovens built in holes in the dirt, and all manner of cooking utensils washed in big pans and laid out on cloths to dry, bags of onions and potatoes, heads of cabbages. I have eaten very little meat, though--when I do I am uncertain about the taste of it, and prefer to stay healthy rather than worry.
We stopped for baboons in the early sunlight, about 7 am. They sit facing the sun, scattered about, their backs to us, soaking up the morning warmth and starting their day just as we are. Impala are wandering among them. If it weren't for some strange accidents of evolution, we could be sitting there in our fur coats in the sunshine, and they could be sitting here in our vehicle, looking at us through binoculars, and then writing in their journals about the fascinating little troupe of humans they saw this morning, taking the morning sun. Jason says he thinks they look like the statues on Easter Island. I think he's right; I really love his agile mind. I leave some hair, there with the baboons.
We drive nearly smack into a big herd of buffalo, I counted one hundred of them, including a young one, which we have not seen before. Oxpeckers search their backs, plovers wander among them eating bugs they have stirred up. Jason says that if we sit here long enough, they will edge closer to us, then suddenly flee a short distance in alarm, and that is exactly what happens. I notice they have gradually come closer and closer, pretty much led by a male with an enormous pair of horns extending way past his ears. Once something causes a bit of alarm, for a small flock of brilliant turquoise blue starlings rises in slow motion upward, like a blue snowfall in reverse.
The buffs are nearer and nearer, then just as Jason said, suddenly for no apparent reason they wheel and lope off, not too far, and we hear their hoofs against the ground.
We see a beautiful dark waterbuck, with impressive stance and stature and fine arching horns. We battle the tsetse flies which are numerous and irritating. I am hot and very dirty and irritated at the constant, loud ways of this family that I am stuck with. I fervently wish for a bit of duct tape with which to tape the kid's mouth. But it will be over soon enough.
We make a tea stop at "Frank's Lakes," a fine open grassy plain. I step off a bit to pee, and the voices are attenuated amid the grass and sky.
We're approaching the camp, and there's some wet places. We see a mother elephant with two young ones, her mammae hanging, small, incongruous, from her chest. The smaller baby tries to nurse, but Mother isn't encouraging it. We start up, and there's a flat tire. So we all hang around and watch the elephants and watch Jason change the tire: the morning's entertainment.
We come to the river, and our bags are put into a small boat to cross, and two volunteers are sought to go first. I hastily volunteer us, for the few minutes' peace and quiet this will give. We are poled across in perfect silence by two black boatmen, and we are surrounded by hippos, about forty of them, and the high puffy clouds I remember from East Africa (though they are not confectious as in Florida).
Then it's onto one of the open, stair-step vehicles for our ride to the camp. We stop several times, the best being for a fine river-side panorama: there are crocodiles, hippopotamuses, baboons, zebra, puku, elephants, herons, plovers, storks, geese, butterflies--and us, all in one place.
Just before we get to the camp, there are lions, a couple of adults and a couple of babies, intelligently resting in the shade, while we humans have been out in it all day.
At this camp, we are told it's something like the story of that film Elephant Walk, that the house has been built in the midst of the elephants' trail, only in this case it's Carnivores' Walk, and that we are strictly forbidden to be out after bedtime, for there have been lions in the bar.
Wouldn't that make a great title for something, "Lions In the Bar"?
And so my time in Africa, my second, other side of the circle time, is coming to an end. Tomorrow, the last real day, I must try to give myself some time alone.
After quiet time we go out on our late afternoon-evening-night game run. It is hard to believe there is any other place in the world besides this one. A Slender Mongoose runs across the road, his black-tipped tail along behind him. There are little squirrels, kind of like little red chipmunks. I just saw one here in the dining area, as I write this, but they were also leaping around and up the trees we passed.
We go back to where the lions were this morning. Guinea Fowl giving alarm calls tell Jason the lions are still around, and sure enough, there they are, relaxing under their tree, their black-tipped tails twitching now and then, but otherwise quite motionless. We drive to within fifty feet of them and get a cursory lookover from two, otherwise nothing.
The young daughter and I are fond of Guinea Fowl, and make jokes about how they don't get no respect, being the bottom of the food chain. A dark line of them trundles across the grass, well clear of the resting lions, at least fifty birds. They are like a stain of darkness across the ground.
We return to the road and have our "sundowners," this odd Brit thing, Brit out-to-the-colonies thing. While we are drinking gin and tonic, our scout tells Jason that the lions have started to move. Quickly we look at them in the spotlight, a line of four lions, widely separated, walking purposefully off to the left. Jason says, let's follow them, just take your drinks with you. We lurch along the awful rutted track, my drink sloshing around till I manage to finish it. Jason stops every once in a while to listen for alarm calls. We go back and forth in a kind of scissors pattern, hoping to hear from the other animals where the lions have gone. But they are nowhere to be found. We sit in silence in the vehicle, washed by the light of the half moon and stars. It is radiant with cool light, and we spend a while there. Even the kid is quiet.
Whoops! As I sit here in the dining area, I hear ta-tumpatumpatumpa around my feet on the concrete floor. It's two little squirrels doing some squirrel behavior across the floor and up into the trees.
So we move along from the moonlight, our scout spotlighting back and forth across the landscape as Jason drives, and our heads swing back and forth following the light.
Presently elephants are apparent. They do not like the light, so it is turned off, and we sit in the middle of the road while the elephants appear at a short distance. There are six of them, two babies, one middle-sized one, and two adults, with big tusks. We watch the elephants by moonlight, listening to soft munching and movement, and baboons calling in the background. One of the big elephants is very curious about us, and keeps coming closer, facing us directly, his ears forward, his body a picture of concentration and readiness. Jason is ready too, in case we should need to leave suddenly. I watch the elephants in the moonlight, and I am not afraid, for it seems to me they know it is us and that we mean no harm to them. After a little while, the biggest elephant decides in favor of caution, and leads her little family away, and they vanish against the deeper shadows.
Six Elephants By Moonlight. More magic.
We drive and spotlight some more. Here is a Bushy-Tailed Mongoose, with green eyeshine, and some pink spider eyes in the grass in the foreground. The mongoose has a nice bushy tail; I just see it as he disappears under a bush.
Our scout spots a darling Pearlspotted owl, with big fierce implacable yellow eyes in front, glaring at us, and wonderful false dark eyes, made of feathers, which he uncovers on the back of his head. His little body is only about seven inches high. He sits up on his branch, glaring angrily down at us, turning his head this way and that and showing us both pairs of eyes in turn.
And then we find my Genet Cat! At first I think it is a mongoose (which actually it is, not a cat at all) hurrying across in front of us, with a big fat long tail. But then I see the lovely alternating bands of brown and cream on his tail, and as we maneuver to get a better look at him, he sits down, nicely framed in an opening between two bushes, and shows us his thick plush coat of spots, and his pointy mongoose muzzle. I'm so pleased with him. And there also seem to be leaf-cutter ants on the ground in front of where he sits? or what are those, moving? At first I thought it was a breeze moving some little leaves, but then I saw nothing else was moving. Jason hops down to look, and invites us to come over. Turns out they are Harvester Termites, gathering some narrow dry yellow leaves and pulling them down their hole one by one.
We drive back in the moonlight, and I am full up, and really don't want to wait around for dinner, which is later anyway, so I go off to bed. I feel grumpy, though, and don't sleep well. There are bats in our little room; they don't bother me though because we are under the netting, but the presence of other people bothers me. There are more people here than we have been used to, and I don't like it. I am also sick and tired of being waited on by deferential, murmuring black men calling me Madam and thanking me every time I do anything, such as taking a spoonful of food from the platter they hold. In short, Americans are not British!
June 30 a day out of Nsefu Camp
new animals seen today:
Crowned Cranes
Cookeson’s Wildebeest
Our last full day in Africa, maybe my last forever, but if it is, that is acceptable, for I have taken from Africa what she had to give me. Coming back has shown me that. Africa offered me a gift, twenty-one years ago, which I accepted and have used every day of my life since then. I have nothing to give in return, except my love and the living of my life.
We go out this morning, Jason eager to get under way and me too. I am having a fine time with him, he is superb and thinks so much like me that I am completely comfortable with him. Funny how someone of another generation can be so like one.
When we first go out, there is a field of baboons in the field about fifty of them, warming up, socializing, greeting and eating and re-establishing their social standing.
There are at least fifteen crocodiles in the shallow water of the river, near the banks where we sit in the vehicle to watch, amid the howling and growling of hippos. There are big crocos and little ones, some with their mouths open and some with them shut. There is a discussion of what function the open mouths might serve, but no conclusions are reached.
Jason decides from some alarm calls that something important is in the vicinity. Monkeys and pukus are alarming, and pukus are standing stock still, facing one direction and staring fixedly. Jason triangulates the direction and drives hastily here and there in great excitement and focus. We get just a dark tail-flick behind a bush, we drive a few more yards forward then we hear a leopard call, a strange kind of growling sound, and then out She walks across the field, a fine handsome leopard, glorious coat of spots, fine thick black-tipped tail, great head and beautiful powerful eyes. She passes into some brush across the way, and pauses to greet briefly another leopard in there, I think a young one.
The leopards seem to have nothing whatever to do with us or any of our affairs.
We pass by three handsome giraffe with a backdrop of an enormous stork colony, most of them--hundreds and hundreds--silhouetted in trees and in the field behind. Jason says we'll come back there to have our picnic lunch today.
We drive and drive as the heat rises. We begin to see people, on this rutted road, people walking and a few on bicycles, all of them carrying loads of things--clothes, cans of something, a bamboo cage of chickens. It seems this is not a part of the park. These people have to walk wherever they need to go. they will not have the luxury of going where they WANT to go, but only where they NEED to go.
There are Crowned Cranes here! from back around the circle, a long time ago, in Kenya, from our guide Bill Baker's photograph that we bought. I don't think we ever actually saw living Crowned Cranes there, but here they are, a quite improbable bird with a lovely delicate crest of golden feathers.
On a salt pan Jason shows us a small herd of about fifteen Cookeson's Wildebeest, rather different from the usual kind. These are that odd violet-pinkish brown, with handsome faint dark striping on their flanks, long dark tails and muzzles, and a body that is nice and robust in proportion to their legs, which the others don't have--their bodies are too small for their long legs, and so they look silly. These look fine, dignified and handsome.
The landscape of the salt pan fills me with quite and peace, with its dead standing silvery snags, short grass so that all can be seen, distant horizon, and huge sky. Even though it is very hot now, and there are tsetse flies, I feel peaceful and happy.
We stop for tea under a tree and I wander off just a bit, for the last chance I will have. I walk away until the voices are attenuated in the vastness, and I am alone with buzzing insects, yellow butterflies, a Lilac Breasted Roller, three guinea fowl and some impala at a short distance, and just through there, a few baboons. I rise my binoculars to look at one, and see he is looking at me. Politely I avert the direction of my gaze, wait a moment, then swing back. He turns away. I study him for a few seconds, then look away as he looks back to me. We play this mannerly game for a bit. Just this baboon, and me, in Africa.
A little marsh is filled with a hundred crowned cranes feeding amid grazing waterbuck, all under a burning sky. This improbably green place, with water, in this deadly heat. The rest of our group are getting horribly sunburned. They don't cover themselves at all. John and I are swathed in garments and hats. We may look ridiculous, but at least we are not ruining our skin.
We return to the stork nesting marsh, with its thousands wheeling high above in great kettles in the sky, and nesting and squawking noisily in the trees. Julie, the woman, is beginning to get separation pains. I feel for her. I tell her what it was like for me. Her husband tries to comfort her, but I know it is no use. She will just have to, as they say, and as I increasingly like the sound of, she'll just have to suck it up. Make it a part of her.
On our way back, now, back to the lodge for rest time. We come to a big nasty deep and messy stream crossing, we start across and just then from our right, just around the bend, erupts an enormous hippopotamus! He comes crashing into the water just near me, full tilt (which is very full in the case of a two or three ton hippo), hurries with great splashing across the water and up the embankment, not looking back at all. We are all astonished, not least of us Jason. The hippo watches us balefully from a distance as we cross and heave up the embankment ourselves, then he trots off to a safe distance. That is one big animal, vaguely piglike in its pinkish color and tiny eyes and broad cheeks.
Just outside camp, here are a lovely bushbuck with white mane and spots and stripes, and a dark bib, and some waterbuck with white target rumps, amid some vervet monkeys swarming up a tree.
I really don't want this to be a catalog of We did this, We saw that. I shall have to see what it is all about when I get it home and read it.
So tonight we have one more drive out into the dusk and dark. When we don't have to worry about heat or sunburn, and can savor the mysteries of the night. I love you, dear Africa. The framing ring of my life.