Savanna Dawn, Pt II
Overlanding Malawi to Zimbabwe

The great attraction of independent travel lies in its very unpredictability and the spontaneity with which plans can change: for many it’s an antidote to the routine of the old 9 ‘til 5. But joining an organised overland trip needn’t necessarily curtail that freedom.
During my recent overland trip between Nairobi and Victoria Falls civil unrest in Zanzibar, unseasonable storms in Zimbabwe and a general ‘mutiny’ among the passengers in Malawi (when Kande Beach proved just too wonderful to leave) served as reminders that few of those 4,300 miles were free from African unpredictability . . . or ‘mob rule.’
Within the overlanding industry there seems to be an increasing awareness that clients want to combine the intrepidity of solo travel with the reliability and cost effectiveness (i.e. group buying-power) of an organised itinerary. With companies competing to run more regular services there are increasing opportunities to ‘jump-ship’ either to rejoin at a later point or to wait until the next truck passes. This goes a long way towards quelling that deepest of pre-trip fears: what if those ‘likeminded fellow travellers’ (so confidently promised by the brochures) are not so likeminded after all?
            But it was no such grievance that provoked my early-morning desertion of the Oasis Overland tour in Malawi to spend four days cruising down Livingstone’s ‘great inland sea.’
I hitched to the port of Chilumba where I was faced with a thirty-six hour wait in a village where the only entertainment revolved around a flyblown establishment that was an intriguing (though not totally illogical) blend of barbers, barroom and brothel. Over a warm bottle of Carlsberg I figured out that if all ran according to schedule I would arrive in Blantyre just as my travelling companions were approaching Harare - 300 miles to the south. But if, as seemed likely, the boat was delayed I might end up chasing them right across Zimbabwe.
Over my second warm Carlsberg I thought how different those first 1,700 African miles might have been as a solo traveller, relying on local transport. It was true that I might have been more immersed in local culture (sometimes even pickled in it, for 36 hours at a time!) but I could never have seen so much.
With Carlsberg number three came the realisation that since we left Nairobi I had never even found time for that desperately needed haircut!

Pork chops and mopane worms:
I turned my back on Carlsberg number four - and an evening of boiled fish and maize porridge – to hitch back to the truck at Chitunga Beach where, in late February, Christmas was being celebrated!
Paul and Lisa (Oasis’s driver and guide) had spent their Christmas at Vic Falls, working to liberate an American passenger who had been arrested for changing dollars on the black market. He spent eight days eating prison issue sadza and his rescuers decided to celebrate Christmas under less stressful conditions on the shores of Lake Malawi.
A pig, purchased from a neighbouring village, was already crackling away on a spit-roast in the shade of the truck. Although a great store of preserved food was carried under the floorboards, fresh food such as bread, eggs, vegetables and the unfortunate pig, was picked up wherever possible along the way.
We had eaten more and better than I would have imagined and never in the course of the trip was the menu duplicated. Being fairly limited in my own culinary repertoire (buttered crumpets, Fray Bentos puddings etc. etc.) I had been anxious about preparing a meal for 22 on a campfire. Every day two passengers were rostered to work as ‘cooks.’ In reality though this was little more than kitchen-porter duty: to help the Oasis crew realise an, invariably less restricted, culinary repertoire which was itself punctuated at times by carnivorous barbecues (where we ate everything from crocodile to zebra), local eateries (where we did our utmost to masticate eland biltong and roasted mopane caterpillars) and a ‘feast’ at a Malawian village (where cassava and goat seemed to featured among other less recognisable dishes).
But Paul’s and Lisa’s pièce de résistance was certainly that Christmas dinner of juicy pork (with crackling and apple sauce), roast spuds, vegetables and gravy followed by Christmas cake and custard.
To the confusion of our Argentine contingent Christmas crackers were supplied and – to the confusion of many more of us – every male was forced into drag for the evening. (As unofficial translator I hastened to explain to the increasingly puzzled Argentines that, while I could not vouch for our Antipodean companions, the latter was certainly not a British tradition).

Racing the Flood:
At dawn lightning, flashing under the eaves of my pseudo-Swiss beach bungalow (surely Switzerland is not famous for its beach bungalows), began to throw the whole room into glaring monochrome. Lake Malawi was being electrified by the most powerful tropical storm that I’ve ever seen and Kande Beach was right in the eye of that storm.
The rain accompanied us all the way to Blantyre, Malawi’s commercial capital and largest city, and finally drove us into the shelter of another in the long chain of backpacker hangouts along this route. Here I met backpackers, also travelling south from Kenya, who inspired me with the freedom of independent travel and those precious stories of months on the road. I heard them evoking the same spell of fleet-footed spontaneity that I had often used myself and refrained from pointing out that this soulful independence had kept the great national parks of Tanzania beyond their reach . . . and that the occasional hankering for ‘likeminded fellow travellers’ had still conspired to bring us together at the same place on the same stormy night.

Mozambique – bordering hysteria:
We lazed a day away shopping in Blantyre’s muddy back-street markets while Lisa went to arrange Mozambique visas. While I felt vaguely - though fleetingly - guilty for being able to delegate this responsibility I was sure that my own journey would be no less rich for the loss of several frustrating hours in the enamelled halls of the Mozambique Embassy.
            Predictably the Mozambique border was more militaristic than others we had passed through. We filed around a roadblock that had been so badly rammed that it could no longer be raised and into an office in which a layer of regulation green paint struggled to cover the pockmarks left by guerrilla AK47s. The sudden rush of work that 22 passports represented meant that even here only the first three were glanced at and within minutes the big yellow truck was speeding us southwards across the old gunrunning route of the Tete Corridor.
I had never experienced such easy border-crossings and even black-market currency exchanges felt markedly less traumatic from our fortress-like stronghold at the top of an un-scalable wall of yellow sheet metal. While these situations might not hold any great fear for the experienced traveller (and they can be good fixes for that soul-traveller adrenalin-jolt for the wide-eyed greenhorn) I was happy, for once, to miss out on this side of the African experience.
           
Harare Rocks:
Despite recent press coverage Zimbabwe is a remarkably friendly country. The big yellow truck was greeted in every village by waving figures. Enchanted, we waved back - not yet realising that Mugabe’s Zanu PF party had actually outlawed the wave!
The international open-handed symbol of greeting had become illegal in Zimbabwe because Mugabe, in his paranoia, associated it with the opposition. Instead he was doing his best to promote the clenched fist of oppression as the country’s new welcome sign.
As we turned off Enterprise Road and sped between the board-walked ‘General Stores’ and glass-and-chrome skyscrapers of downtown Harare clenched fists were few and far between . . . waves and smiles were everywhere. 
This part of Zimbabwe is heaped all over with immense piles of boulders shaped by erosion into grotesque or amusing tableaux. The Rocks campsite – built in a particularly dramatic landscape of these kopjes and, according to its own publicity, ‘a Travellers home from home, just a Rocks throw from city centre’ – is almost an obligatory stop for all the overland companies that come through Zimbabwe. The trucks carry sufficient spares for all but the most debilitating repairs but at Oasis Overland’s workshop at The Rocks (while the carefree passengers wallow in the pool / watch videos in the TV room / dance on the bar) the crew help the mechanics patch up whatever damage the African potholes have wrought in the three months since the last service.
           
‘BEWARE: All Animals Are Dangerous’ (but some more than others):
Our westward journey was again hampered by heavy rainfall. The tarmac became a dirt-track. The dirt-track became a mud-bath. And the truck became a monstrous yellow hippo that rolled over, almost onto her side, to wallow in the mud.
We spent an hour trying to coax her loose, with sand-mats and scorpion-infested brushwood for added traction, before we conceded defeat. Then, begging the muscle power of a John Deere from a nearby village, we sat back to watch some impromptu mud-wrestling involving some of our number whom, it was noticed, had been unusually fastidious while the actual ‘hippo-coaxing’ had been going on!
Late that afternoon, at Mazuri campsite, we pitched our tents next to a sign warning: ‘Do not walk out of camping area. All animals are dangerous.’ This un-nerving generalisation could have referred specifically to the young bull elephant that greeted our arrival with bellowing, ear-flapping bravado but it turned out that this was a tame animal, used for elephant rides.
The sign might more accurately have been directed at Cleo, the fifteen month-old pet lion that lives, in true ‘Born Free’ fashion, at Mazuri Ranch. It seemed that Cleo was reaching the age when she was beginning to realise that she was more of a lion and less of a pet. Or, to put it another way, she was becoming aware of her ‘lion-ness.’
Perhaps mistaking Little Lisa (our truck was blessed with three Lisas) for some sort of gazelle, Cleo leapt on her in a playful mock attack . . . There was nothing playful, however, in the scratch on ‘the gazelle’s’ shoulder that proved that Cleo had been sufficiently business-like to erect her claws!
            As George Orwell might have said, ‘All animals are dangerous - but some are more dangerous than others’ and one group that could definitely qualify for top-rank at Mazuri was the local population of some of the last free-ranging black rhinos left in Africa. Black rhinos have extremely poor-eyesight and are notorious for charging immediately at the source of any unfamiliar sound or scent. As I followed our guide and two rifle-toting scouts into the area where the rhinos had last been spotted I focussed on evasion tactics . . . but in this scraggy bush there were few climbable trees that looked like they would stand up to three tons of rhino travelling at 30 miles-an-hour!
We had been tracking the mother and calf for over an hour and when we finally got a brief view of them across a grassy clearing I was amazed that they managed to conceal such impressive bulk so effectively.
It’s strange that, whereas the black rhino instinctively forms a rear-guard and drives her baby ahead, the white rhino mother always leads her calf away from danger. A week later, on a walking safari through Matobo National Park (which boasts the highest concentration of leopards in Africa), we had the opportunity to test our newfound tracking skills again: this time on the trail of white rhino. The white rhino is a grazer of the open savanna and is as docile as its scrubland counterpart is aggressive. Nevertheless, in light of the commando tactics that we’d employed merely to catch a fleeting glimpse of Mazuri’s black rhinos I was astounded to spend forty minutes in open grassland ten metres from a huge male, a female and a three-month old calf!

A Civilisation in Ruins:
Zimbabwe, in Shona, means ‘great stone houses’ and dates back to the 13th century, to the great empire that stretched all the way from Mozambique through Botswana into South Africa. More specifically the country’s name comes from the Great Zimbabwe National Monument, the ruins of the greatest medieval city in sub-Saharan Africa.
            We spent an afternoon wandering between the impressive 8-metre casement walls and royal courtyards with a local guide who wowed us with his description of one of the most powerful regimes that Africa has ever known . . . and with the story (and scars) of a life-and-death struggle with a 3-metre crocodile on nearby Lake Mutirikwe!
            Few of us were in a fit state to make the dawn climb to the summit of the royal compound the next morning but as we sat high on the witch-doctor’s platform above the ritual enclosure, listening to the baboons coughing, the mist swirling around the walls of the great enclosure in the valley was suddenly gilded by the first blast of African sun. It was easy to appreciate the religious power that this place had held for various communities over almost a millennium . . . and the patriotic fervour that it still inspires today.

The Vic Falls ‘Express’:
Paradoxically the legendary Vic Falls ‘Express’ served as a final reminder for us of the inherent unpredictability of African travel although, strictly speaking, it was the cargo-train in front that derailed and stranded us in a nondescript village about five hours from Bulawayo.
            Although the truck would carry on for another month to Cape Town the majority of us would be disembarking at Vic Falls. After 4,300 miles of ‘adventure’ and merry-making (almost in equal measure) some of us were already gratefully licking the wounds of a long-distance African safari and Mosi-ua-Tunya - The Smoke that Thunders – was the setting for what were, after only a month on the road together, some unnaturally intense farewells.
            Victoria Falls – lauded in brochures as ‘adventure capital of the world’ and ‘Mecca of Xtreme adrenalin sports’ – was where we would spend our last few days rafting, river-boarding, rock-jumping, micro-lighting, partying . . .
            On our last morning together we walked out onto the Vic Falls Bridge like the doomed – refusing to look into the abyss as a condemned man might try not to see the eyes of his executioners. Bundi alone peered into the misty Zambezi gorge: “Oooh, she’s a shocker alright!”
            Even, as my toes wriggled out over 111 metres of ‘Big African Air’ I was thinking ‘I don’t have to do this, I don’t have to do this, I don’t . . .’

The End