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.”
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