Commend me to the merry midnight frogs

Meaning aside, that’s a quote, attributed to David Livingstone, that stands emblazoned high across the wall of the wonderful bar at the Royal Livingstone Hotel where I’ve been spending some afternoons of late. It’s the stateliest bar I’ve seen in my life, and it’s in central Africa. The furnishings are in the high colonial style: Marble bartop, panels and moldings and shelves done in teak and ebony; horns of impala, kudu, sable antelope and eland mounted proudly on the walls, multiple portraits of Dr. Livingstone himself, ample Victorian period piece furniture, some of it Africanized because clad in the skins of zebra, eland and leopard; fans hanging from long sections of conduit off heavy ceiling timbers, turning lazily in the obscure air high up by the rafters; the occasional monkey darting in clandestine bursts across the polished wooden floor—and everything awash in the deep lingering light of the late afternoon. The bar itself stocks many years of Dom Perignon, all sorts of recondite ports and scotches and digestifs, $300 cuban cigars, and the finest wines of France.

The staff—black Zambians—are all liveried in either a safari suit of green and white, topped by the pith helmet of lore, or else in slacks, tuxedo shirts and vests (which vests are done in leopardprint), and let’s not forget the requisite cufflinks and spitshined shoes. With their misplaced chuckles and a service level vacillating between the cloying and the absent, for all the pomp of the environment, the staff at the Royal have not managed to shed the awkwardness and bumbling typical of Africans pressed into western-style service environments. Yesterday they mistakenly charged me $4.31 for two glasses of wine, a lemonade, and all the little pastries and sandwiches I could eat on the occasion of ‘high tea.’ Once I’d paid this fraction of my real bill I asked the barman (turned out in a dinner jacket) to convert a large note for me so that I could give him a tip. To do so seemed beyond his willingness or means. ‘Next time, Sir,’ he protested.

All the heavy-handed impressions of staid stodginess to the contrary, the hotel and bar are modern. Arnold Schwarzenegger is one of the founding investors. There are some quirky modern touches like bar lamp fixtures cast in the shape of Livingstone’s merry midnight frogs. There is wifi. There are conventions convened to discuss the latest business strategies, vaccination benchmarks, gold extraction targets, and whatever else the moneyed meet to discuss seriously in Africa. The hotel grounds sport a little zebra herd and a pair of giraffes, along with countless presumptuous blue-balled vervet monkeys who run chattering over the lawns and through the trees, pausing occasionally to steal peanuts from startled Americans enjoying a sundowner down by the bar on the riverbank. Which sundowner, I might add, is second only to the falls themselves in terms of things you should be shot for missing when in Livingstone. The deck spreads out over the fringe of the swollen river, offering a perfect view of the sun’s swift retreat and the never-ending plume of spray coming off the Falls no more than 300 yards away.

Further? The grounds are patrolled by a team of guards charged with keeping an eye on the monkeys and throwing stones at them when they get out of line. They also monitor the movements of the zebra herd and advise clueless tourists to stay out of kick-reach when approaching from behind. There is more serious wildlife, too: The riverfront is cordoned off by a 10,000 volt electric fence to enforce the apartheid of tourists from the ill-tempered beasts of the Zambezi.

I guess it’s obvious I like the place. I like to go there and do my writing in the afternoons.

It’s funny though. It’s another one of these rich man’s places in Africa where I have unrestricted access as a function of my face alone. I’m not paying the $500 a night it costs to stay there, but the staff greet me as if I were a dignitary. It is true that I’m better dressed than the fat American exemplars of the shorts-and-cross-trainers set who are too lazy or too enfeebled to cross the grounds in anything but a golf cart, and who have been overheard several times to ask the staff whether they might be able to swim in the river. It somehow seems shameful to me to be seen in shorts and a T-shirt with the staff dressed as they are.

Inter alia, I think the white face can actually be taken quite far. My doctor friend here told me that I would almost certainly be able to walk into a pharmacy and ask to buy any amount of any drug. I’d simply say I was a doctor, and no questions would be asked. I think something like this goes on in that book Shantaram that people keep talking about.

So I now have a definite departure date: On Thursday it’s off to the mines, the drill rigs, and the border.

In his last work (published some months ago in the New Yorker), Kapuscinski writes about his first experience traveling abroad. India it was. I can’t remember the circumstances of his going from that country to the next, but one line of the travel narrative stuck fast in my head. “I wanted only one thing—to cross the border.”

Itinerary

Like I said you’d said, there have been certain urgings afoot, certain requests relayed by you to me toward the end of me letting you know what the fuck is going on. Where am I? Where have I been? Lost in space, above all drifting…

Seriously though, and more importantly, where am I going? Whence and whither? Hence and how far forth? Bah! You know damn well, all of you, that I have been in Livingstone, Zambia, Africa, squarely in the southern hemisphere of this a-here planet for the past week and change. I am relaxing a bit, working off the surplus lactic acid don’t you know. What you don’t know is that I have run the wild rapids of the Zambezi*; that I have beheld the mighty cataracts from the sky courtesy of a microlite flight captained by a venturesome German**; that I have boozed on tamer sections of the river***. I have also, as you know, jaunted over to Botswana on a safari whose sights seen I esteem a privilege. But fuck all that. That’s for footnotes.

I should esteem it a privilege, dear readers, if you were now to forbear as a grab a toehold in the next day and claw us an anticipated future. Ah yes, the future. What will the next few days bring? I will tell you, if you’d just bloody well calm down. It will bring, for one, my first ever jump from an airborne aircraft. That’s right, ladies and wildebeest, skydiving! But anon, anon, and fuck that shit. That’s right! Now what I’m talking about is the hog peanut! Gonna root around, gonna snuffle and get me my hands on some! No—what I’m talking about, friendies, is an itinerary. You may have seen this word printed on a piece of documentation issued you by your airline. But I’m trying to use it, use the word that is, use it in a way whose complexity and malleability cannot be encompassed by a page of printed times and airport codes. I am talking about a kind of cloud itinerary, and one that may change with the position of the sun, the tendings of the wind, even with the tidal effects of the moon’s pull. It is not insignificant that the word has a cousin in itinerant.

Now here’s what’s good, ye e-foregathered, and here’s my favorite part of maintaining this a-here blog for your benefit. I’m talking about the outlining (nebulous, mind) of a possible future, the fleshing out of a trajectory, the self-posting to a possible destiny, the—damn it people, I’m talking about making my bid on the Congo.

Here’s what I have in mind: I stay here for a few days—I have friends and the unmet friend of another friend rolling into town this weekend to make the end of the stay socially more interesting—I keep writing—I am working right now on something like a taxonomy of the melancholy of mining, something vaguely inspired by Melville’s punchy cetology—can you tell I’m feeling jouncy myself?—then I roll back up to Lusaka and Ndola. There is a certain temptation that I’ll not deny to stop by Mazabuco for a potshot at an impala or two on a game farm. But regardless, regardless. Likväl. I apply in Ndola for this—how do you call it—this document monikered “visa.” But I do not get my knickers in a twist over the process this time, for according to a miner I met, they’ll allow me 7 days iffen I so much as show up on the border. Izzit. Then I go to Lubumbashi and get in touch with a certain cryptic contact introduced vicariously to me by the met miner, a certain Mr. Something working for a certain mining company, which executive at what company is tight with the governor. If my contact met down here is right about the welcome I’ll stand to receive, I may be able to fly between the mine sites on their charter craft. Which stands to be a relatively secure sort of setup. This company mines ore out of the river slag in Kolwezi. Just fucking perfect if it comes together that way. Incidentally I met another fellow who works up in Copperbelt, a black Zambian, who operates drill rigs and had this to say about Kolwezi, that it’s total shit and that whereas you may be able to pick up a mobile phone signal, it is a town in which you ‘cannot buy a fucking bottle of water.’

I’ll say little more about my designs on Congo other than that I foresee a brief sojourn hard followed by some further venturings that I do feel at liberty to discuss at greater length. Quite. So check it, this imagined trajectory: A visit to Lake Tanganyika. Beginning at Mpulungu, which is Zambia’s only true port and home to some nice lodges on a bay; then onward on a ferry up to some port in Tanzania, maybe even on, anon, to the end of the line in Burundi. A place I know nothing about, this Tanganyika region. Isn’t this where Che Guevara was trying to turn Kabila père into a proper fighter?

But I know, I know, ye e-foregathered. You want a map. But whatever map I could provide would be put to shame by the schematics of the earth put out by the Nystrom Map Company; much less Google. Isn’t it? Do me a favor. Google-Earth Mpulungu, Zambia, and tell me what you get.

Of course, the northern reaches of Lake Tanganyika are where the beckoning bells of gorilla country do toll. It costs five hundred snaps just for the permit to track Mr. and Mrs. Silverback and their wee ones, but it is difficult to substantiate a logic saying that it wouldn’t be worth it. And while I’m in the neighborhood, it seems like a visit to Goma DRC might be in order. Goma is near the Rwandan border I believe, and I have an invitation of sorts to check out the good work done by the foreign-staffed clinics of there on behalf of the victims of the terrible conflict in that region. Vaginal reconstruction and similar instances of mop-up in the wake of the horrific. It seems that as far as the Congo is concerned, I will only consider border towns, as if anything more than simple frottage would impel me too close to some “pith of obscurity.”

I’ll say no more on that head, but will say that I am more than interested in Zanzibar, Kilimanjaro, and Mozambique.

~

Now. Ye e-foregathered. Ah, fuck it. I remember a time not too long ago—two years gone—when I was doing this same thing, shifting gaze from map to screen, from screen to map, and typing out this same sort of possible trajectory. It was at the end of the time in the Yemen, when I’d caught the pan-Arab bug well and proper. I was sitting with my computer in our mafraaj, the belvedere where we slept and studied, and planning out how I would skirt from Muscat to Hurgeisa to Mombasa to the Comoros islands, in so doing describing the historical arc of Arab trade. Of course, it never happened, but what of it? The plan was brilliant, and the memory of the joy of sitting there and planning it out makes me think that it—I mean the original Arab Swahili plan—may come together this time. Is there a great book to be written about such or a similar voyage, or am I wrong?

* The rainy season not being very far gone, the waters are very high this time of year. This meant we could only run about half of the rapids that can be done later in the dry season. I had never seen such currents: At one point I jumped from a rock into a section of water that looked calm from above, only to be sucked down much farther than mere gravity would have pulled me. Had it not been for my lifejacket, you may have been befallen by the sorry (negative) circumstance of not being able to read this post, as it would not exist. What will the next days bring? I shall tell you, if you’d just bloody well calm down. It will bring, for one, my first ever jump from an airborne aircraft.

** If you ever travel to Victoria Falls, the microlite flight must not be missed. My pilot, day and claw us into an anticipated Heiko Held—I believe he has some travel books out in German, so any Teutonophiles out there go ahead and google him—seemed a classic German-adventurer-in-Africa. He reported having lived in Congo some years back, and spoke with a true fear about the atmosphere brewing up around the time he had to leave because of the growing instability in the mid-nineties. Nasty guys, he said. The flight was a great way to see the entire sweep of the falls and to see the big geological history of the cataracts in display in the form of the great gorges where the water used to fall in the cataract’s various earlier incarnations before the power of the water sheared off the sections one after the other. Another interesting thing was that whereas the air near the surface was very cold that morning, about a thousand feet up we entered a warm current and stayed there. A bit away from the falls we could see giraffes and elephants and warthogs doing a bit of morning grazing.

*** On this sunset river cruise the thing of note is just that there was a Zambian woman staffing the cruise by the name of Vanessa had a weird schtick going on. After introducing herself she said something like ‘you don’t have to remember my name, just as long as you say something that starts with a ‘v’ that’s fine. There is only one thing that starts with a ‘v’ that I won’t let you call me.’ I don’t know how I knew, but I had a feeling about what that word was. She would have me guess, but I stopped the little game from going to far. I believe I got as far as ‘Vicious.’ My suspicion about the one word that could not be used, but whose forbidden mention she somehow seemed to desire, was later confirmed by a fellow booze cruiser from another day.

Safari

Safari, May 18-20, 2007

Sometimes I am surprised to find that an experience that for many years and for many people has been packaged and sold can actually be quite amazing. This safari I'm on in Botwana’s Chobe National Park is one of them. It’s really turning out well.

Just the facts, Jack: Yesterday set off from Livingstone around 7 in the morning. Such early departures are typical of African travel. We drove some 70 km to the Zambezi river crossing where sections of Namibia, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe can be seen to join in a single undifferentiated vista of land and water. On the way there I heard about a very nice and rustic-sounding lodge on an island in the river. No electricity and candlelight by necessity and that sort of thing. I might go check it out on my way out of Victoria Falls area. On the way I also saw my first-ever wild giraffe. It was a very stately thing that continued to browse unperturbed on the crown of an acacia and we came to a grinding halt and assessed it. At the end of the road we crossed over the Kazungula confluence on a small craft alongside two workhorse scows named the “Zambezi Cruiser” and the “Chobe Drifter,” both of which were laden with a combination of busses, big rigs and human cargo. Each scow could accommodate only one big rig at a time, and there was a large surplus of waiting trucks inventoried on either side. The river confluence was about a quarter of a mile across.

On the other side lay Botswana, where we were met by Vasco, who would be our driver on the safari. Immigration into that country—whose capital, for the sake of idle reference, is Gabarone (pronounced “Khabaronay” but often just abbreviated as “Gabs”) consisted of nothing more than a perfunctory (and free) stamp in our passports and an instruction to wipe the soles of our shoes across a kind of soaked rug laying on the ground of which the dubious claim was made that it would prevent us from introducing parasites and non-native species into the country. This little rug looked like no more and no less than a wet doormat rigged with a little line running liquid antiseptic from a jerrican. There was a similarly ineffective-looking depression for rinsing off the tires of entering vehicles. We shuffled through these formalities in a motley crew of Americans and Aussies at about 9 o’clock.

We proceeded along a very nice tarred road for a few miles before turning into a very nice looking lodge on the Chobe River, which is an offhoot fed by the Zambezi. The place was littered with beautiful carvings done in teak and other similarly charming artifacts. The main walkway down to the riverfront was presided over by two burnished teak busts of what looked like guardian spirits. There were other nice touches, too, like a dugout canoe that has been turned into a couch, the decaying iron paddlewheel of some ancient steamer, and a banana bush that had already completed more than 20 feet of an apparently megalomaniacal push for the sky. After a few more formalities we were on our way, this time embarked on a little Chobe Drifter of our own. A pontoon craft of about 20 feet, the entirety of her deck covered by a sunshade, she was skippered by a quiet but enthusiastic Botswana named Moffat. There was also “tiffin,” a little smorgasbord of rusks, beef patty sandwiches, tea and coffee. All very civilized.

But the wild things were there, and we soon saw them. It started off small: A fish eagle here and a marshall eagle there. Then a small crocodile on one bench of sand and an ancient-looking monitor lizard on another. The monitor lizard is a great connoisseur of air: He is forever flicking out his forked purple tongue to see what whiffs of tasty morsels might be borne on the next gust. These things were nice, and necessary, but then Moffat drew our attention to a pair of young bachelor bull elephants making their way down to the riverfront for a drink. Once they had picked their spot he pulled us in close. So close, in fact, that the elephants, if so minded, could easily have approached the boat and overturned it. But Moffat appeared to have an understanding with them. They simply stood there, and were a lesson in composure as they snuffled up water gallons at a time, drawing it first into their prehensile trunks and then, bending these double, transferred it into their waiting mouths. We, too, stood with our mouths agape and laved up the scene with our eyes and with our zoom lenses. This went on for about ten minutes, with Moffat advising us on the behavior and peculiarities of the elephant, until at length he pulled us back to make room for other safari boats crowding in wait.

We then moved along the current for a while, stopping off here and there to view impala or kudu advancing to the edge for a drink, always with fear in their eyes. The impala have strange eyes that look like glass that has not only been smoked to an impenetrable opacity, but also burnished bright a hard like obsidian. Like a mirror that has been smoked and then reglazed, maybe.

There were more crocodiles, dozens of them in fact, always waiting just at the edge of the water for their next serendipitous meal as they basked in the warming sun. We also saw pods of dozing hippopotamus all grouped together, their backs gleaming in the water like stepping stones in a shallow pond. These river horses are Africa’s greatest killer of man, and Moffat gave them a wide berth. Later on there was a lone hippo, too, who was playing a game of bob and dive with our boat in the manner of a loon. As soon as he surfaced Moffat would proceed to where we saw him. But, seeing us with his dim and piggy eyes, he would soon dive again. Minutes would pass as we waited for sign of his bubbles, and when he surfaced the game would be taken from the top. A hippo, just to be clear, has jaws easily capable of snapping a man in half.

& c, & c. Probably the coolest thing glimpsed on the water was a pair of young elephants having a bath and a rumpus. They would dunk each other in the water and flail about, all in the name of fun. Both then in the water and later on land, I had the impression that the fauna, albeit wild, was putting on a sort of docile show for our benefit. Large groups of wild animals are a rare sight in the rich and tame world, and to a mind used to the scarcity of those tamed regions, it’s hard not to suspect a shore lined end to end with teeming wildlife as a kind of orchestrated sham put on for the benefit of his lustily roving eye. The cynic in me might go further and see some sort of truth in this. In Botswana, as far as I know, there is no culling of any sort. And they say that the elephant population in Chobe alone is approaching 100,000. And the vegetation is a bit nude-looking. Could it be that they’re letting the browsers run amok to keep the dollars flowing into the park’s coffers?

After debarking the launch we boarded a modified Toyota Land Cruiser, the archetypical workhorse of the wilderness tourism business. Behind the front cabin the bed can been kitted out with four rows of seats and a hardtop canopy with removable plastic sheeting for windows and a sunroof. We boarded this rugged vehicle and, en route to our bushcamp, went on the day’s first game drive, with Vasco as our driver. The park animals continued along their solicitous and collaborative vein on land, which was an open kind of woodland featuring acacias, wattles, rain trees, wooly caper bushes, sausage trees. I believe this is what they call mopani woodland. The first animal thing we noticed were dozens upon dozens of browsing giraffes. They were munching happily on acacias and wattles. Some were large, some small. One had an ear that hung floppy and shredded, the victim of some losing encounter. Some were gray in shade and others brown. But the aspect that unified them all was their docility, their willingness to keep going about their business as we pulled up in our gurgling vehicles and began clicking away. On a few occasions on that initial drive to our bushcamp we saw a giraffe split its legs wide and bend down far, as far as it could possibly go, until its camel-like snout made contact with the ground. What were they doing, we wondered. Dowsing for water? Browsing for fallen nuts or capers? No. Vasco confirmed my suspicion that they might be licking the soil for salt. The leaves and thorns of the acacia tree can’t be a very savory diet, after all.

Later that day, after a nice lunch and a little rest, we went on a second game drive. Our objective? Lion. Our chances of sighting any according to Vasco? Slim. The first part of the drive proceeded much the way the first had gone. We saw elephant, giraffe, impala, kudu. There were also baboons (awful creatures, I would recommend that you poach these on sight if you follow in my footsteps—we saw one get an erection as his female companion groomed him and he leered at us), bustards, mongoose, tree squirrels, snakes, etc., etc. Again, these creatures seemed to brook photography without a problem. It was as if the game wardens had gathered them in a meeting and said now listen up you animals, your future depends on this…if we can’t make enough money off the tourists who come in here with their cameras we’re going to have to open the park up to hunters, and you know what that means…The absurd thought also occurred to me that maybe the animals’ docility owed to the river having been laced with an opiate.

As we proceeded Vasco would stop to confer with the drivers of other safari vehicles. After a few encounters we established that lions had been sighted somewhere up ahead earlier that morning. Leopard activity was also rumored. We peeled our eyes and honed our gazes. Our vigilance was given a boost when we stopped the vehicle and rolled open the sunroof, which let us stand up and take in a panoramic view over the top of the cab. Like a band of patrolling soldiers, every one of us stood up in his seat and goggled into the bush. And at some point there was a change of mood. It was getting to be very late in the afternoon, with the sun slung low over the horizon. We noticed two things at the same time: Vultures in the trees and safari jeeps parked in a gaggle alongside the road. This was suggestive of anything from carrion to a hunt in progress. As we pulled up into the little depression where the jeeps were parked, the first thing we noticed was a little herd of cape buffalo. Just as we got there, they began to run away. My first thought was that we were the cause of their fright—actually more of a flash than a thought, or perhaps a thought in retrospect, since it all played out so quickly, but then a scene unlike any I’ve ever seen played out before our privileged eyes. The buffalo were trailed in their flight by a roaring pride of lions. Over the course of no more than a few seconds wild with the zooming of lenses and the closing of shutters, we saw the pride isolate and converge on a junior member of the buffalo herd, and, just as quickly, take him down about fifty yards away. Once the buffalo was down, instead of killing it right off the lions began to throttle it. They split their efforts to pin down its legs while another lion bore down on its throat. The buzzards roosted in the dead trees overhead all the while, greedily attentive to the whole spectacle.

This was not the only thing going on. Vasco was quick to point out that there was a little group of lion cubs camped out in the shade of some wooly caper no more than twenty feet from our truck. They were brooding contentedly over the remains of some earlier kill. No sooner had we begun our photographic feasting on this compound sight than a bull elephant began to trumpet angrily just beyond the thicket of bushes to the other side of our vehicle. When we turned to look, it proceeded to uproot a small tree no more than 15 feet from us. The diciest part was that the truck was parked at an angle that made forward escape contingent on a 3-point turn. I was nervous. After issuing another furious burst, the elephant charged across the road toward the lions and their kill. It routed up the mother of the brood and chased her away from her cubs and the still struggling kill. She scampered back across the road, and the elephant charged after, kicking up a dust cloud that washed slowly across the deep golden prospect framed by the road.

While the elephant chased the lion, we noticed that the downed cape buffalo had struggled to its feet and was trying to drag itself off before the mother returned. The cubs succeeded in bringing it down again by clawing into its back and hanging themselves off it, but it was a struggle. Once back down, the buffalo started making plaintive snorts, chest heaving.

Meanwhile, everyone in the car was nearly delirious with excitement. Few of us ha seen lions in the wild, and none had witnessed a kill. Vasco said it was the first he had seen in his year and change guiding in Chobe. Our shutters clacked and our mouths gibbered away excitedly: Holy shit, Jesus fuck, Oh my…I’m likely not far from the truth if I speculate that everyone was privately thinking that this experience had redeemed the full value of the trip’s cost. I think the essential part of the sight though, and one which is difficult to communicate with an ever accumulating volume of words, is that it all happened very quickly. In the mode of a movie preview, we were in the thick of the action just as soon as we arrived.

Also, because all of this was seen and shot through scrub and brush, the pictures will not be great. You will have to take my word for it. Seeing the hunt made me think of a Russian expression full of laconic gravitas: Life’s a nasty business that no one has yet survived.

~

That was two days ago. There’s been nothing to match the excitement of the first afternoon since, but the park has continued to impress not only with the abundance of its game, but with the pageantry of their activities as we drive among them. We’ve seen hammerkops building nests with shore grass, lions lazily stretching their muscles after a day spent snoozing, an elephant with an erection so large that it dragged along the ground where it shuffled along glowering at us, birds chasing one another through the sky, impala making their peculiar high and low mating call, sometimes at each other, and sometimes seemingly at us.

I also got a flavor for some of the shrubs and trees that grow on this sandy floodplain and in the woodland above it. With a little guidance from Vasco, I’ve learnt to identify the rain tree, the wattle, different kinds of acacia, the sausage tree, the baobab, the common fig, the wooly caper, and the fever tree. Our camp itself was made in a grove of Zambezi teak which, in addition to providing needed shade and soothing rustle, yields stout logs that burn for as long as hickory and give off a smoke that reminds me of cinnamon no less than creosote.

The other very impressive thing worthy of note was the firmament. This is as remote as I’ve been while in southern Africa, and with nearly a new moon to boot, I could see not only all the major constellations of the southern sky, but also the thin mist of the Magellan galaxy appended like a gauzy veil across the spectrum of the southern celestial hemisphere. I could not see all of the stars down near the celestial horizon for the trees, but even they could be seen glimmering brightly through the rustling foliage.