Livingstone and Victoria Falls

A mature baobab, hosting buffalo weaver

birds, and a nesting stork

In the beginning of May, we had to come to Lusaka for our Midterm Conference and medical physical and tests. We both got a clean bill of health, including no tuberculosis. We were a bit worried because everyone in the village seems to have a persistant cough and chickens wander in and out of huts regularly. A lot of the young girls have deep, hacking coughs similar to those produced by an 80-year-old lifelong smoker. Of course, they also spend a lot of time sitting in smoke-filled insakas, leaning over cooking fires, so that could be a contributing factor as well.

This also marks the halfway point of our service. 13 months down, 12 months to go. At this point, Peace Corps Zambia tells us, it's common to have a nosedive in morale. You start feeling like the difference you're making in the village is marginal, like your family and friends in the U.S. have forgotten about you and moved on with their lives, like you've changed too much to fit back into your old life in the states. Chris and I both feel this, along with most of our intake. (speaking of which, our original group has diminished by 9 people since February 2009. Most people were medically separated, others chose to go home). So we had a touching rededication ceremony, received some helpful project-specific books, shared ideas about what has and hasn't worked for us at our individual sites.

For some reason, Peace Corps thinks married couples should stay in a quiet guesthouse 2 kilometers away from all the other volunteers when down in Lusaka on official business. So Chris and I, and Daphne and Tyson (a LIFE couple from Kansas living in Central Province) were corralled into Cheshire Homes Guesthouse while our twenty-odd other friends stayed elsewhere. This turned out to be not so bad because Cheshire Homes is actually very nice, and we met an older American staying there named Craig, a returned PCV from Samoa in the '70s. He's a professor of epidemiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and is director of some global health programmes, and travels to Zambia frequently for work. He bought the four of us dinner at a nice Indian restaraunt, and a book about Zambia that he found out we'd never read. It was really nice that we had this instant connection to someone we might not normally know, just through similar experiences.

One night, we went out bar-hopping with our intake. We hired a mini bus to take us around for the night. We started at the new casino at Arcades Shopping Mall. Lusaka surprisingly has two classy casinos now. The first bar we went to, the band that was supposed to be practicing didn't show. So Chris picked up an electric guitar on the stage and started jamming with two Zambians that were milling around. They were really into it, and invited him to come back a few nights later. Unfortunately, we couldn't. We moved onto another bar, then ended at the infamous Alpha Bar. Infamous because if you aren't careful, your phone or money will be stolen, and it's where the prostitutes loiter; women squeezed into too-short skirts and plunging necklines hanging onto men in business suits. However, it also happens to have the best atmosphere. Inside, they blare Zambian pop music over a strobed dance floor, and outside, there's a quieter porch with picnic tables. I don't think anyone ended up getting more than 4 hours of sleep that night, before we had to be up at 8am for a session.

After MTC, Chris and I decided to take a four-day vacation in Livingstone. Livingstone, home of Victoria Falls, one of the seven wonders of the world, is the most touristy part of Zambia. It's 6 hours south of Lusaka, and the Falls are flanked by Zimbabwe across the Zambezi River. It's also very close to Mosi-o-Tunya National Park.

Victoria Falls themselves make Niagra Falls look like a small brook trickling over a pebble. It's the end of the rainy season now, so we saw them in their full grandeur. They're about 2 kilometers in width, and plunge into a deep, carved gorge sprinkled with rainforest foliage. It's really breathtaking. You can walk all along them, and onto a bridge cutting across. The spray is so strong that your clothes unavoidably become soaked through, even at a distance of 1 kilometer away. They even have a rent-a-raincoat stand set up at the entrance to the Falls. At the bridge linking Zambia to Zimbabwe, you can bungee jump off the side into the gorge. There's also light aircraft and helicopters that will give you an aerial view of the Falls. Unfortunately, it's a little beyond our volunteer budget.

The Boiling Pot and the bridge where people bungee jump

If you really squint, you can see someone at the end of her/his jump.

The person on the left is coming to "rescue" the jumper before all of the blood rushes to her/his brain.

Our first hike, before we got soaked, was to the Boiling Pot, the massive, turbulent pool under the Falls. It was a beautiful walk through vivid rainforest foliage, with birds calling over our heads and monitor lizards sunning themselves on rocks.

A view from the "Boiling Pot" trail.

On the way back up, we encountered a troop of baboons foraging on the steep hill. There were about twenty in all, from small babies clinging to their mothers to a few large males strutting around. At first I was a bit nervous, because baboons are about German Shepherd-sized and have very sharp canines, but they seemed rather habituated to people wandering around, and ignored us. Until Chris dropped his open bag by our feet (we were with an American living in Tanzania named JJ), and walked up to take a picture of a baboon that was sitting on a garbage can, banging it like a drum. I was transfixed by a very adorable baby clinging to its mothers' back as a male groomed her. Another female walked over and the male grabbed the baby, walked a few meters away, and sat down to play with it. This wasn't necessarily the father; baboons have an interesting social network in which they make friendships that are sometimes lifelong, but don't always mate with that individual. I didn't even notice the male that had ambled up to us until he grabbed Chris' bag, spilling his new internet phone and other belongings on the hillside. I watched in horror for some long seconds as he picked through the bag, dragging it downhill, and considered whether I should throw a rock at him. Then JJ growled at him and raised his arms, and the baboon skulked away, realizing a bag without food wasn't worth the trouble. This occasion marked the second time in less than 4 months that a primate has rifled through our bags and stole things. (The first was when a vervet monkey named Jocko opened my bag and stole some hairclips. Luckily, like a dog, he was easily fooled when I picked up a leaf and pretended it was extremely interesting, quickly discarding the clips in favor of the new thing).

This is a good baboon. She didn't steal anything from us.

Here we are after a good soaking from walking around the falls.

JJ. Our hero.

We went to Gwembe Crocodile Farm the second day to catch a feeding. They have about 20 adult crocodiles that were wild-caught from the Zambezi River, mostly because they were causing trouble. For example, there was one female that was stealing campers' backpacks. Once she even took off someone's foot that got to close to the water, at which point she was relocated. Now all of the crocodiles are used for breeding. Their eggs are incubated at another farm, and the young are used for meat or crocodile skin products. We tried some crocodile meat, and it's pretty good. It tastes like a cross between fish and chicken.

A 1 1/2 year old crocodile we like to call "Dinner"

Our guide actually nonchalantly jumped down into this croc's enclosure and hit him on the snout with a stick to show us his teeth.

*No animals or people were harmed in the making of this picture.

One thing that surprised me was how massive adult male crocodiles can get. They're easily the size of a four seat couch, as long from head to tail as a full size pickup truck. They're not horribly exciting to watch, you can easily mistake one sunning itself on the bank for a statue. They're fed chunks of raw cow meat weekly. They become animated when the meat is dropped into their enclosure, huge jaws with pocket-knife teeth knashing in the air, stubby prehistoric bodies sliding over the ground.

We also went on a sunset booze cruise on the Zambezi River. We heard it was likely we'd see hippos or crocs as we were sailing through National Park waters, but the water level was too high. We did get a nice view of the sunset though, and as much alcohol as we could drink. We ended up spending a lot of time with a Bemba man named Kelly. The predominant tribe in Southern Province is Tonga, and many people speak Nyanja (which is very similar to Bemba. We can understand some of it, but aren't able to speak it). Kelly, though, was originally from Northern Province, very drunk, and excited to be speaking Bemba, a language not commonly used in Livingstone. He was a tour operator and kept pointing out all the other boats on the river to me. Apparently, the large double-decker boats were all Zambian, while the smaller ones came from the Zimbabwean side. Of course, Zambians are proudly nationalistic (There are private companies named ZamBike, ZamBeef, ZamChick, ZamTel, and many more), so this could have been complete heresay.

Obviously not a Zimbabwean boat.

The following day, we went on a "lion encounter." There's an organization named ALERT in Zambia and Zimbabwe that works specifially on lion conservation. They relocate at-risk lion populations and orphaned cubs. Starting at 6 weeks old, cubs are taken on walks in the bush in order to become familiar with it and develop hunting instincts. Once they are able to become self-sufficient, they are put in a fenced, managed area with no competition like hyenas, and allowed to form prides on their own. Finally, they are released into the larger park to have wildborne cubs and become completely independent from humans. So Chris and I went on one of these walks with three 11-month old cubs named Rwanda, Rema, and Rafiji. There were guides with us, and two scouts walking ahead to make sure we wouldn't run into any game. The cubs were playful with eachother, rolling and tackling until they turned into one large blur of golden fur. Chris took some great pictures. At one point, the male Rwanda found a pile of elephant dung and began rolling around in it. Whenever lions find dung they will cover themselves in it to disguise their own scent, so that their prey becomes confused.

Elephant dung: catnip for lions.

Our final activity was a walking safari in Mosi-o-Tunya National Park (only 66 km2). I've only been on game drives before and was afraid that being on foot, we wouldn't cover as much distance, and would be less likely to see any animals, but the opposite was true. On foot, we were able to get deeper into the bush past the roads, and weren't competing with other Land Rovers. We went on the walk with a German couple, the company owner, and a game scout, walking at the front with an AK 47. The AK, he told us, was to fire into the air to scare away an animals in case of an incident. That, and for killing poachers. The first animals we happened across were a herd of zebra grazing on the savanna. We were able to slowly get closer, until we were about 40 feet away. The stallion made sure to stay between us and his herd, keeping one eye on us while he lipped sunburnt grass. The rest of the herd meandered away to keep some distance, then indifferently returned to grazing, flicking their ears against flies. A small brown oxpecker with a red beak perched on one of the zebra's withers, eating its parasites. Slowly, the herd moved

away, and the scout pointed into a thicket of small trees, where a buffalo was staring at us. Unfortunately, we were in an open savanna while the buffalo had the advantage of cover, so it was unsafe for us to approach him any closer. Undoubtedly he had friends hidden from us nearby, so we didn't want to stumble into a herd of buffalo, and gave him a wide berth. We edged away, but he continued to watch us uneasily. Then, a solitary giraffe with eyes half-closed crossed our path, not noticing us until he was just 25 feet away.

He looked at us curiously once from under a fringe of thick eyelashes, then turned to a scraggly low tree. He too ambled away, and we continued, all the while with the buffalo still glaring at us. The scout went ahead because he spotted a rhino in the trees ahead and wanted to make sure it was safe for us to approach. For the grand finale, we were 25 feet away from a white rhino, dozing in the shade. White or square-lipped rhinos are among the rarest of Africa's endangered species. There are only five in the whole 66 km squared Mosi-o-Tunya park. Female rhinos have a gestation period of 18 months, then raise their young for five years. This means female rhinos only have two young during their lifetimes; three if they are extremely lucky. The large male dozing in front of us was one of a dying species. Unconcerned with us, he laboriously shifted onto his side, then stood up, all 3 tons of him. He had intense marble-sized eyes under long, horse-like ears and a snout with two horns underlined by his large, square lips. Except for a hump on his back, his wrinkled body almost looked like an elephant's.

After admiring him for fifteen minutes, we trekked back to the Land Rover, and took the long way out of the park, and managed to see some baboons and vervet monkeys, a family of running warthogs, countless impala, and some hornbills, beautiful graceful cranes and a vulture, both carrion eaters. This was Chris' first game park adventure (and almost, I feel, a rite of passage for travelers in Africa), and he was ecstatic, looking at me every so often with a big grin. I've been on several game drives in South Africa, including a night one at Kruger National Park, but never have I had an experience like this one. A walking safari is definately the way to go to get up close to these animals.