In search of the source

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Issue 30

Working alongside the shallow, meandering wildlife paradise that is the Luangwa River, John Coppinger of Tafika Camp in Zambia developed an obsession – to trace the river to its source in the Mafinga Mountains, on the Zambia-Malawi border. Late in 2002, he finally succeeded. Now, together with David Foot of the Nyika Safari Company, he guides small parties of hikers there as part of a greater exploration of the Luangwa region. Mike Unwin joined them. Down there,” bellows John Coppinger into my headphones, “that’s part of the original course.” He indicates a sun-cracked crescent of clay away to our left. “Hang on, I’ll show you.” I hold my breath and clutch my camera as we bank in a low pass over Tafika camp. The microlight’s angular shadow sweeps ahead of us down river, sending crocodiles scrambling for the water. A saddle-billed stork hangs for a second in our flight path before lurching away with ponderous wing beats. Then suddenly we’re whisked up again and the valley rolls out in pin-sharp detail, buffalo filtering through the mopane woodland like ants through broccoli. Down below, the Luangwa snakes to the horizon in contours of sand, its dry-season flow reduced to a broken chain of pools and channels that wink in the dawn light. A microlight flight is one way to greet the Luangwa River. This last fortnight had shown me several others. Today seemed a long journey from the bracing mountain waters in which, just days ago, I’d dipped a tentative toe. Facts first. The Luangwa rises in Zambia’s northeastern mountains, along the border with Malawi, before flowing 700 kilometres south across the country to enter the Zambezi at the Mozambique border. Much of its course lies within a broad rift valley, enclosed by steep escarpment walls, and its history is etched across the floodplain in a maze of dead watercourses and abandoned oxbows. This forms the classic landscape of the world-famous South Luangwa National Park – Zambia’s premier safari destination and the place where most visitors meet the river. But there is more to the Luangwa than the celebrated park. I’m in Zambia on an enterprising new tour, dubbed the ‘Source Safari’, which aims to explore the river more thoroughly, starting at its source. John Coppinger, of Remote Africa in Zambia, and David Foot, of Nyika Safaris in Malawi, had pioneered a route in 2003 and were now offering it to clients in a joint venture. Their itinerary had looked intriguing. Week one would be spent in northern Malawi – first at the little-known Vwaza Marsh Reserve, then up on the nearby Nyika Plateau and finally in the remote Mafinga Mountains where the river rises. Week two would see us rejoin the river downstream in Zambia – first at Mwaleshi Camp, in the North Luangwa National Park, then at Tafika, in the south. Thus the tour would take us from montane grasslands to baking bush, from luxury lodge to flimsy canvas, and from Malawi to Zambia. It had the ring of a Livingstone expedition. Well, almost.   Things start badly: I arrive a day late at Vwaza, courtesy of fog at Nairobi and a subsequent series of missed connections. (Infuriating – but birders, if you’re ever stranded in Lilongwe, don’t miss its excellent little nature sanctuary, stuffed with broadbills, finfoots, twinspots and all sorts.) I find my new companions sprawled around the comfortable midday shade of Kazuni Lodge, watching baboons amble down to drink at the nearby pan. We introduce ourselves over the clink of glasses. They’re a mixed bunch: Fiona, a frighteningly fit adventure sports fanatic from Cape Town, is looking for a physical challenge; David and Frances, a retired couple from Essex, are safari veterans in search of something different; Lucy, a solicitor from Sussex, has previously visited Nyika for the horse riding and is now awaiting her husband and two boys (due out in three days time) to join her for the full African experience. We will all get to know each other pretty well over the next fortnight. Vwaza clearly deserves more time. But this is one thing we don’t have: we’re here to find a river. Soon we’re on the move again, heading up to the Nyika Plateau to prepare for the tour proper.   Nyika comprises over 3,000 square kilometres of undulating hills that loom high above the hot, dry bush of northern Malawi. To reach it, we take a gruelling five-hour road journey – first through the dusty villages of the foothills, then up into the park itself, where we pass through miles of crackling brachystegia woodland before emerging onto open grasslands. On top we find a fresher, cooler world, where malachite sunbirds dart between protea bushes and klipspringers bound up the granite boulders. A line of roan antelope files in silhouette along a distant ridge. Beyond them we can just make out Chelinda Lodge, our next stop. Chelinda is not your typical safari lodge. The neat log cabins are arrayed beneath an incongruous-looking pine plantation (the legacy of some ill-conceived colonial forestry experiment), and the mountain air hangs heavy with the scent of pine and wood smoke. But it has a relaxed ambience, a panorama from every window, and my chalet has enough room to swing an eland (adult, male). A leaf through the visitor logbook, which reports leopards among the cabins and hyenas prowling round the stables, quickly dispels any doubts about this being the ‘real Africa’. But Nyika is not really about big-game viewing (though there’s no better place in Africa to see roan). The reserve’s true riches are best discovered on foot. This is ideal for our party, who are anxious to get in some mountain mileage before the Mafingas. Each trail reveals something different. One morning we potter gently down from camp to find grasslands studded with orchids and rare blue swallows darting overhead. The next afternoon we creep through a pocket of Afromontane forest, where chequered elephant shrews patter through the leaf litter and the canopy drips with birdsong. On the last day, we zig-zag down a long, broken hillside deep into the miombo trees, where splintered branches betray the recent passage of elephants. A pennant-winged nightjar takes off at my feet, streamers looping crazily through the trees. As we return to camp on this final evening, the plateau is at its alluring best – ridge after ridge bathed in golden light. Zebra emerge from the bracken for sunset poses and a side-striped jackal trots into the dusk, looking somehow bigger and more impressive than a jackal ought to. Our cheeks are aglow as we gather round the bar back at the lodge: the combined effect of a healthy day’s hiking, a roaring fire and perhaps a drop or two of the hard stuff. Excited questions bounce around the dinner table. “Will there be snakes?” “Are you taking your passport?” “What about altitude sickness?” Tomorrow’s expedition is rapidly taking on mythic proportions. But morning brings disaster: David from Essex has dropped out, laid low overnight by a crippling headache. Some blame the altitude, others the anti-malarials, but no one can change his mind. Frances, admirably, is standing by her man – so that’s two down already. But we’ve gained three more: Lucy’s husband Richard had arrived the previous evening with their teenage boys George and John, fresh out of school. I down a hasty muffin in the lodge, then join the others stamping their feet in the pre-dawn chill, as gear and supplies are loaded into the vehicles. We start our climb at Chambo Mission, northwest of Nyika, and it takes another rugged four-hour drive to get us there. The word ‘mission’ heightens my Victorian explorer delusions; this sounds like classic Livingstone territory. OK, so we’re travelling with Landcruisers, not pack mules, but the route appears to have seen little motorised traffic in the last century or so. We park the vehicles beneath the shade of a brachystegia while the porters load up. (Surely you didn’t think we’d be carrying anything ourselves?) Then, after the requisite photos, we stride out through the dusty village, straight past an astonished school assembly. Oh for a decent pith helmet. It’s a six-hour climb to the top. Six hours for us, that is; the porters have disappeared up the trail within minutes. We wind out of the village through wilting cassava fields and scramble up over the parched lower slopes. Soon we begin to get some decent altitude under our belts. By midday, the rooftops of the mission seem impossibly far below, while the distant peaks of Nyika on the eastern horizon show how far we’ve come. We file across a narrow saddle and up onto a long stony ridge. This, at last, is the top of the Mafingas. We stand at the watershed between two nations. My sense of achievement is somewhat punctured by the sight of a cairn. Clearly other people have been here before us, and – judging by the scattered crusts of dung – so have their cattle. Still, it certainly feels remote, and I bet it’s not in the Lonely Planet. A second cairn further on provokes debate. Now Richard comes into his own: a distinguished physicist, he is also an inveterate gadget man and his GPS will surely reveal the highest point. But, after much tramping back and forth, and several contradictory readings, none of us is any the wiser. In fact, we can’t even decide which country we’re in.I choose the cairn that looks higher, and pile a few more stones on top. Our next camp comes into view after an hour’s cautious descent down the other (Zambian) side of the ridge: a startling line of blue domed tents perched like spacecraft on a precipitous shoulder of hillside. It is certainly gloriously appointed: the distant plains of Zambia shimmer through a gap in the mountains; a fringe of miombo woodland lines the hillside below. And, just behind us, a tumbling stream plunges into a deep, forested ravine. This stream is our bathroom; it is also the Luangwa.   That evening I clamber through the dark tangle of undergrowth for a ceremonial wash. A terraced chain of pools catches the rising moon, and I ease into one of them, hanging my towel from a convenient root. The quavering whistle of a mountain nightjar drifts across the hillside. Now this really does feel wild. True, the porters carried up most of the gear, and Joe and Akim – our cooks – have already conjured up a miraculous meal from little more than a hole in the ground (chicken casserole with shallots, since you ask). But there’s no escaping the hard reality of sleeping on a stony ridge, digging a hole to answer nature’s call and washing off the day’s exertions in a mountain stream. The source itself has to wait until morning. To subscribe or order this issue click here After an immense fry-up, David leads us back up to the ridge and around towards the top of the gorge. Leopard scat on the trail heightens the frisson of adventure as we make our way towards a dense grove of waterberries. “I’m not going in there!” protests John, with true Livingstonian bravado. But in he goes, we join him, and there it is: a gleam of water below a rock and a weedy trickle through the fern fronds. Could this really be the Luangwa? It looks like nothing a decent plumber couldn’t fix. But David and John checked the maps last year, and anyway, who’s going to argue? I end that day perched on a crumbling ledge near camp, scanning the tree-tops below for an elusive bar-tailed trogon. We know it’s there: its enigmatic hoo hoo hoo has been approaching steadily for the last half hour, lured up from the depths by David’s canny imitation. Moloney’s monkeys crash through the canopy. Still we sit. Then suddenly, in a flutter of emerald and crimson, our bird appears. My inner twitcher rejoices: a tick! But I restrain myself, and the moment remains intact.   Two days later, the Luangwa swings into view again. But now we’re 300 kilometres further south and cruising 1,000 feet above it. Ahead we can just make out the Mwaleshi airstrip in a wasteland of bush. David and Frances from Essex are back with us – David now fully recovered; they are old ‘valley’ hands, and as we descend their excitement is tangible. Remote Safaris lives up to its name at Mwaleshi, which is one of only two camps in the whole of North Luangwa’s 4,600 square kilometres – both of which pack up when the rains come. My open-fronted chalet squats discreetly on the bank of the Mwaleshi River, whose shallow waters reach the Luangwa ten kilometres downstream. I unload my gear onto shelves lashed together from reeds, beneath a grass-thatch roof supported on rough-hewn mopane poles. In fact the whole camp seems to have been knocked up from the bush that surrounds it – except, apparently, for the ceramic toilet bowls: Fordson Mbewe, our camp caretaker, looks after these in his village during the off-season. It’s a triumph of comfortable simplicity. And all around is wilderness: no people, no camps, no roads – except the one that brought us from the airstrip. After dark, gathered around the fire beneath a bewildering canopy of stars, we could be the only people on the planet. That night the wilderness gives me a personal performance. I’m woken by a splashing, and scramble from my mozzie net just in time to see three hyenas bounding through the shallows. They crash into the reeds on the far bank, and soon the crunch of bone and a maniacal giggling violates the night. Then I hear something scrambling down the near bank, just downstream from my chalet, and a huge male lion comes trotting across the river toward the noise. Moonlight makes him the size of a truck. The hyenas clam up, the lion disappears into the reeds, and I steel my nerves for the inevitable bust-up. It never comes. Gradually, more subtle night sounds take over: the churring of a Mozambique nightjar; the distant grunting of a Pel’s fishing owl. And then the lion vents his frustration with a thunderous, chalet-shaking roar. Quivering silence follows, before ten minutes later he roars again. And again. But he’s moving away, and each roar comes fainter than the last until finally the sound is only in my head. The hyenas have got away with it; I hear a furtive crunch as they return to their grisly business.   The next morning I’m astonished to find that nobody else witnessed last night’s drama. Surely they’d at least heard the lion? I’m worried: could it all have been a Lariam-induced hallucination? It’s only at lunchtime, when I pace out the riverbank with Ed Sayer, our guide, that we find the story written in the sands: the hyena tracks leading into the reeds – dragging something, not chasing it, as I’d thoughtlast night – and the huge pads of the lion, where he’d entered the river and where he’d left it. Ed’s forensic skills serve us in good stead at Mwaleshi. With very few roads, North Luangwa is a good place for walking safaris; in fact, probably the place for walking safaris. On foot, as any bush-walking aficionado knows, the animals do not simply line up for the camera. But they leave compelling clues: tracks, droppings, scent. Views are mostly glimpses, but we have the odd pulse-quickening encounter, such as when a stroppy hippo crashes wildly out of a thicket and we cluster nervously around Ed’s barked instructions. This is the bush on its own terms. We feel its cracked earth beneath our feet. We unearth its secret details: the silk-lined burrow of a baboon spider; a butchered bushbuck slung over a branch; two red-necked falcon chicks crouched high in their palm-tree nest.   But, of course, we can’t forget the Luangwa. So we follow the Mwaleshi downstream to the confluence. It’s a tough hike, taking us back and forth through the clutching mopane and over the sandy floodplain, where zebra snort their indignation and warthog simply stare. By mid-morning, as temperatures soar and tsetse flies get stuck in, interest is waning: there’s only so much excitement you can conjure out of seed pods when what you really need is a coffee. Finally we emerge from a grove of winter-thorns and trudge out onto a blinding expanse of sand. There, in the deep shade of the far bank, is our river. This is no longer the clear, tumbling stream of the Mafingas; it’s now a stagnant channel heaving with hippos. Rows of goggle eyes and twitching ears pop up, and the dark waters bubble and churn as massive bodies shift uncomfortably below the surface. I count three hundred and seventy six in this first pool and, judging by the noise, there are more round the corner. God knows what this amounts to in tonnage. One opens its jaws in a yawning threat, its great bulk revolving in the water. Another breaks into resonant whinnying grunts; the cavernous noise echoing across the sand to be picked up by others, sending a chain of grunting downriver. Crocodiles cruise the fetid shallows. Despite their comic bulk and endearing pink grins, these are not happy hippos. Late dry season is a stressful time, with shrinking pools and sparse grazing causing much argy-bargy. Ed leads us on a long detour across the sand to avoid disturbing them further. We haul ourselves wearily up the far bank. Where now? On top, to our amazement, we find a breakfast table groaning with goodies: newly baked bread, cereals, a pot of coffee, the works. There’s a glint of Landcruiser behind a thicket, and we spot Patson Mwandila, our cook, crouched over a sizzling frying pan. He looks up and grins. We slump into the shade.   Tafika – microlight notwithstanding – seems almost tame after the isolation of Mwaleshi. The camp lies on the outskirts of Mkasanga village, and at the airstrip a retinue of local children watch us offload what now seems like an absurd amount of gear. The lodge has a fence and a lawn. OK, so gaps in the fence allow hippos to wander through the grounds every night (“We had to leave gaps,” explains Carol Coppinger, with faultless logic, “otherwise they’d break the fence down.”) But it all imparts a sense of ordered tranquility. This is, however, one of the more remote camps of South Luangwa National Park, lying well north of the burgeoning safari hub of Mfuwe. John and Carol Coppinger, who run both Tafika and Mwaleshi, are among the most experienced and respected of the valley operators, and they have chosen a superb location as their base. Our chalets, built ingeniously around statuesque leadwoods and sausage trees, look out across a broad sweep of Luangwa, and it’s hard to tear yourself away from the view – especially given the daily pageant of wildlife. One afternoon, cup of tea in hand, I watch a thwarted lioness pull up in a cloud of dust on the far bank as zebra thunder away from its failed ambush. The following morning, over breakfast, I see more than thirty species of bird without moving from my chair – including a pair of African skimmers that trawl the pool in front of me on elegant, elastic wings. After the rigours of the last ten days, Tafika is safari laid on a plate. John and his team lead us expertly to the wildlife that puts South Luangwa up on the A-list of African parks. A morning hike takes us around a drying lagoon, where waterbuck hang back as a small family of elephant plough into the glutinous mud. An afternoon drive takes us across the open Mutanda Plains, where kudu emerge from the distant treeline and bugling crowned cranes head out to their roost. Sundown on the riverbank sees us sipping colonial-strength gin and tonics beneath darting carmine bee-eaters. And after dark, our spotlight picks out nocturnal eyes from the tangled riverine bush: genets, civets, a tiny Sharpe’s grysbok and even a wary serval, flattening itself into the grass at our intrusion. We also finally catch up with the valley’s most iconic resident. Luangwa is celebrated for its leopards; there is, apparently, one of these elusive cats for every two-and-a-half square kilometres of park. ‘Guaranteed’, claims one guidebook. But experience has taught me to be wary, so I’m thrilled when – driving back to camp on our penultimate night – we spot a young female crossing the sandbanks toward us. We kill the lights and watch by moonlight as she stalks a group of puku, metres from our vehicle. The drama ends abruptly with an alarm whistle, drumming hooves and a half-hearted charge. Then she pads back, disgruntled, into the night.   At Lilongwe airport one day later, leaving Malawi proves easier than arriving. Shame, I’d been half hoping for another unscheduled stopover. My problem with tours is the moving on, and this one had been no exception: each destination had easily merited a fortnight in its own right. Yet the trip had offered something different from the usual greatest hits package. The Luangwa River had given us a theme and imbued us with a sense of purpose. It had led us to one breathtaking place after another, and – despite five-star service all the way – we’d had to get ourselves a little hot and bothered in the process. Now I wanted to finish the job by seeing the river safely to the Zambezi. After all, I’m sure that’s what Livingstone would have done. To subscribe or order this issue click here

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