Travel Reference
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A pleasant buffet under an African sky dense with stars was all I remember of that first
evening. I was escorted back to my cabin and immediately fell asleep. Then around four
in the morning I heard the sound of some very loud cows grazing on the rough grasses
outside my window. I woke up confused. Cows, here? I turned on all the lights and peered
through my screened windows at the very large, glistening rumps of two hippopotamuses.
They were chewing up the grass at a deliberate pace, oblivious to me or the lights shining
on them. I went back to bed.
It was a sweet time in the valley. The months of rains had ended, leaving the savannah
and mopane woodlands green and the Luangwa River full. The roads had dried out.
Young lion cubs and zebra ponies were beginning to venture out slowly under their moth-
ers' sharp supervision.
At first glance, Luangwa was a testament to the proposition that tourism can save more
than it destroys. I had been told by experts of all ideological persuasions that African wild-
life safaris are the poster child for the good side of tourism. Without tourists paying to see
the wild animals, the parks would disappear, and without those parks the beasts and birds
of Africa would lose much of their habitat, plowed under to make way for human farms
and cities, and the surviving animals would be slaughtered for food. Africa would look the
same as everywhere else; and the animals would be isolated in zoos until they became ex-
tinct.
That was the refrain I heard in the United States. A more complicated story unfolded
at South Luangwa.
On my first morning I climbed into a Land Cruiser with two tourists at six-thirty. Steve
was our guide and driver. We hadn't been on the trail more than ten minutes when we
came across two lionesses sleeping soundly while their cubs played nearby, batting each
other with their paws and pouncing like animated stuffed toys. Steve pointed to a carcass
hidden behind a tree: “That's their kill—a waterbuck. They've been feasting and are now
lazy.” He zeroed in on one slumbering lioness with a fantastic muzzle brimming with
whiskers. “That is Alice—her hunting ground is near the lodge area. We know her well.”
After gazing at these sleek cats we veered off into a network of one-lane dirt roads across
a never-ending savannah. The morning air was cool and brisk; the smells were musky and
voluptuous. Up ahead two impala bucks were chasing a female. Overhead, a colony of
vultures was clustered in a tree. Two hippos were half-submerged in a vast lagoon, gorging
on the green lettuce heads of Nile cabbage that covered the surface. Three slender pukus,
an African antelope, bounded away, out of our sight just as a flock of bright green parrots
with tangerine faces flew overhead. “Those are Lilian's lovebirds,” said Steve.
He pulled off the road and drove onto the plain, where warthogs were digging up the
ground with their curved tusks and square snouts in search of bulbs. A mother and her
piglets joined them, trotting in front of our Land Cruiser with erect tails and determined
ugly faces. Baboons were watching from the sidelines, grooming and eating and keeping
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