The Amazing Journey Of Zambezi

Crocs and hippos are like icebergs. It’s tricky to tell how much of them there is floating beneath the river’s surface. Topside, you might spot a patch of reptilian spine, or a glimpse of quizzical eyes. But underneath? Hippos can top three tonnes. Like an iceberg, you don’t want your boat – or, in my case, kayak – to run into that. And crocs? Well, a guide once told me that you can estimate the size of a croc by measuring the distance between its eyes. In my opinion, if you’re close enough to accurately gauge that gap, you’re too close. Much too close. In any case, it’s not so much the distance between the eyes that’s important, but the look in them: calm or crotchety, angry or alarmed. Or hungry.

Telling the difference, of course, isn’t easy. Which is why, on hippo-heavy day three of our kayak-convoy down the Upper Zambezi, I was very glad to be accompanied by Sven, Titus and Dom – three guides with long experience reading the moods of Africa’s aquatic inhabitants. It was a day punctuated by foaming rapids and boisterous demonstrations of might from big male hippos, which reared their alarming, pink-tinged bulks above the water before flumping away with a tsunami-inducing splash. Yet it was a journey that had started so much more peacefully.

Just like Livingstone – I’d cast off from the Zambian shore at Mambova two days earlier on a Charity Challenge expedition. The first of its kind, it would see four novices (myself included) tackle a nokm stretch of the Upper Zambezi by inflatable kayak and raft, culminating in a spot of whitewater rafting below Victoria Falls. Though the ‘beasties’, as Sven dubbed them with jocular understatement, were certainly hazards, the real Challenge – capital C – was in the physical hardship of paddling and wild-camping on the riverbank. It’s an unusual choice of activity for a visit to Zambia, which is justly famed for its walking safaris and spectacular terrestrial wildlife. Yet my five-day, paddle-powered odyssey would truly constitute a safari, or long journey’ in Swahili, following in the wake of David Livingstone’s Zambezi expedition of some 160 years earlier.

We started, aptly enough, in the same type of craft Livingstone had used: a mokoro – a traditional dugout canoe. Pairing up nervously on the riverbank a two-hour drive west of Livingstone, my partner in incompetence and I clambered into the rolling vessel. Our chaperone, a local poler called Costa, helped us launch into a narrow, reed-fringed channel. My first thought, wobbling upright at the bow, was that poling a mokoro isn’t as easy as it looks. My second thought, once I’d swapped places with my boat-mate Mark and hunkered down with an oar in the middle seat, was that paddling a mokoro isn’t as easy as it looks. Standing, my shoulders ached; sitting, my rump throbbed even more. My wrist quickly started to seize, and both pole and paddle soon chafed a blister in the crook of thumb and forefinger.

The payoff was that I’d rarely punted through a more bewitching habitat. Cobalt skies dripped sunshine, and the metronomic plop of paddle in water was almost soporific. Though wildlife wasn’t the main attraction on this journey, nature wasn’t bashful; we’d arrived in the latter months of the euphemistically named ‘Emerald Season’, and birds were resplendent in breeding finery. A male red bishop paused on a reed to peer at the wazungu (white people) paddling past, a rubicund balaclava of courtship plumage surrounding its coal-black face. Sand martins hawked for red dragonflies above the water, and Africa’s chipperest riverine species, the malachite kingfisher, displayed its harlequin livery as it flitted among the papyrus.

Beware the crocs – The mokoro, it turned out, was the easy bit. After a couple of hours’ yawing from bank to bank – steering a vessel that’s essentially a 4in-long log isn’t the most straightforward exercise – we transferred into the inflatable kayaks that would be our craft for the next three days. And that’s when the serious safety briefings commenced. “When we get into the kayaks, paddle away from the banks quickly together,” Sven asserted. With his shaggy blond hair, equally shaggy dog stories and khaki shirt, Sven ticked most of the adventure-guide cliches – though the addition of thick specs, heavy-duty knee brace and Yorkshire accent lent him an unusual mien for a Wild Man of the River. But he certainly did a good job of tweaking our nerves. “When we land, the drill is the same: you’ll probably get your feet wet, but keep it brief – haul the kayaks out and move well away from the water. You won’t see the crocs in the shallow water -but they’re there. And they do attack.”

To our relief (and slight disappointment), on that first day both crocs and hippos were notable by their absence. Or perhaps we did pass them – I might have been too busy straining, sweating and swearing to notice; I even missed the clawless otter that Dom spotted, turning just in time to admire the radiating ripples it created as it dived under. Good kayaking technique, I’m told, involves using abdominal muscles to twist the torso, and flexing shoulders to power the stroke, rather than dragging with the forearms. Fine, if you have the abs to handle it. Mine complained uncomfortably from the oft’, echoed by aching glutes, wrists and that throbbing blister on my thumb. Of course, I’d have been disillusioned if negotiating the Zambezi was a doddle. Since that name first leapt out from the pages of my children’s atlas it has conjured up deliciously exotic images -Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Kipling’s Great Grey-Green Greasy Limpopo combined. The reality doesn’t fall short.

Rising in Angola, the Zambezi snakes 2,574km past Zambia, Namibia, Botswana and Zimbabwe before emerging into the Indian Ocean in Mozambique. To David Livingstone, it represented hope and, in a way, redemption; he believed that pioneering a navigable route into Africa’s interior along the Zambezi would open the region to trade, suppress conflict and eradicate slavery. In simple terms, he failed in his mission; he couldn’t admit that the tumultuous rapids were fatal to smooth passage for merchant vessels.

Life on the riverbank – Livingstone, of course, didn’t have the benefit of lifejackets, inflatable kayaks, backup teams and some of the best white water guides in Africa. Dom, Titus and Sven not only doled out safety instructions and directions but also titbits of river lore. Here, the river serves diverse functions: border, road, water source and larder for the villagers living alongside its implacable sweep. We watched fishermen poling mokoro laden with glittering riches – fish. “Daninga fish migrate upstream,” explained Dom. “Last night these men set conical traps in the rapids to catch them. In the mornings they return to collect the fish, drying them in the sun to eat or sell.”

The Zambezi offers fun as well as food: we passed several yelling gangs of kids leaping into the murky shallows, stopping to wave and shout greetings as we hove into view. We covered 24km on that first day, passing the Kazungula ferry crossing where Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe and Zambia meet, and arriving at our campsite by late afternoon. A lumpy, grassy glade between scrubby copses, it was close enough to the water to lend it a ‘what if the crocs come ashore in the night’ thrill. That night, after an impressive feast of campfire curry, sleep came quickly: the combination of exhaustion and the glockenspiel calls of the reed frogs proved a powerful sedative. But I woke at regular intervals, jolted by elephant trumpeting and what I could swear were leonine roars carrying across from Zimbabwe’s Zambezi National Park on the opposite bank. At least, I hoped it was the opposite bank.

The right sort of rain – Next morning my fellow paddlers seemed equally bleary-eyed as we packed up canvas and poles before pushing out – swiftly, of course -into the middle of the broad, relentless Zambezi. Today’s slice of the journey would cover a similar distance, but with more confidence (if not prowess) in my paddling, I was able to glance around a little more and absorb the surroundings. If the sky was drab and grey, the wildlife certainly wasn’t. Emerald-backed, Zorro-masked little bee-eaters emerged from their nest burrows in steeper sections of the sandy banks. Reed cormorants adopted crucifix poses atop tree stumps in the river, wings spread out to dry.

Flocks of egrets stilt-walked through the shallows. On small islands, trees were adorned with dozens of weaver-bird nests dangling like Christmas decorations, while on the Zimbabwean shoreline a bickering troop of chacma baboons raided the waterberry trees. After a lunch pitstop on a midriver island, the glowering sky delivered its load as threatened. A rat-tat-tat of raindrops stung my bare arms and drummed the otherwise still water, as if a celestial deity had emptied a sack of pearls onto a sheet of glass. Prepared to be miserable, instead I was mesmerised – it was rain as I’d never seen it before. And in the warm Zambian air, the downpour was as refreshing as it was transient, clearing up within half an hour.

Hippo alert – “There’ll be plenty of beasties today, for sure,” Sven announced cheerfully on our third morning. It was to be our last full day of kayaking, taking in the Class II to III rapids at Sinasimba. What with the hippos and whitewater, we were bombarded with volleys of instructions. “Try to avoid knocking your paddle against the kayak,” advised Sven. “Hippos don’t like that noise.” Mostly, though, the directions were simpler: veer left, take a 45-degree line, or simply, paddle hard. Periodically we’d hit a patch of eddies, the drag nullifying our efforts so it was like paddling through treacle. Muscles burning, the temptation to down sticks and just drift was offset more than once by the appearance of suspiciously rounded rocks midstream. Rocks that sunk out of site or, more alarmingly, raised bulbous heads above the surface to stare us out.

Fall for the falls – We spent our final morning above the falls in a six-person inflatable raft. I felt both better and worse in this larger vessel. Better, because there was a sense of safety in numbers (and Sven was steering, a clear improvement on my own). Worse, because it was harder to shift direction quickly on the occasions – and there were many – when a pair of twitchy ears signalled a territorial hippo lurking nearby. But our attention was torn between those irascible mammals and the white, billowing column that appeared on the horizon.

Rising like an ethereal lighthouse, the spray from Victoria Falls reached some 500m into the sky, and was visible from several kilometres distant; it was our guide and companion throughout that final day on the river. So, too, was the rain, which only eased off once we’d hauled out and made our way (by road – cheating, rather) to our final campsite. Perched high on the edge of Batoka Gorge – the deep cleft carved out by the Zambezi below’ Victoria Falls – the site at Rapid 10 is as far from glamping as you could imagine. As with our other halts, the loo was a hastily dug hole, topped with a plastic seat. Shower: none. Neighbours: none. Bar: a coolbox. Views: heart-stopping.

Beneath my feet, just steps from my tent zip, the land fell away into the basalt canyon, which echoed with the Zambezi’s muffled roar. This scene, which seemed so timeless, has actually changed frequently over even the past few thousand years as the river has re-routed its course. In a few more millennia, the rock under the falls will collapse, and another cataract will be created farther upstream. In the more immediate future, a hydroelectric dam, which is due to be built 50km downstream, may see the gorge flooded almost up to the falls, with disastrous effects on both wildlife and whitewater rafting industry – a good reason to get here quick. But for now, as I sat alone under the glittering feather boa of the Milky Way, such change seemed impossible, and the world full of nothing but the Zambezi’s immense, relentless flow.