No Stopping for Lions (10 page)

We see the Spice Girls one more time before we leave. It's a new moon and inky black as we return from a night drive. The guide suddenly stops, very alert. He motions for us to keep quiet then swings the spotlight in big arcs around our vehicle. We see nothing but can tell by his body language that he's onto something. Then, out of the grasses behind us wanders a lion. Then another. Then there's more to the side and in front of us. We're surrounded, but we're not the object of their attention. The whole pride is focused on something else and we just happen to be in the middle. We watch thrilled and tense as these beautiful girls pad right by the tyres then spread out in formation, now stalking, to melt into the heart of darkness without a sound.

Just outside Hwange is the education centre for the Painted Dog Research Project, where we're told it's possible to observe at close quarters African wild dogs, also known as painted dogs. But we get lost, and after a couple of bad re-directions we decide to go in to Hwange Safari Lodge for help. At the entrance barrier the thin security man marches on the spot and snappily salutes us, military style. We drive in to a hotel time-warped in more prosperous times. Tidy, manicured, ready and waiting for the tourists who stopped coming years ago. There's not a person in sight except for two Japanese visitors waiting patiently for transport to take them out of there. The hotel is hardly recognisable as the bustling, crowded place Neil and I visited on our first trip together to Africa in the 1980s, where safari vehicles lined up in a long queue to set off on game drives stacked to the roll bars with excited visitors, and the lobby was filled with dozens of people arriving, leaving, complaining, pointing at and shouting about luggage. I find myself wishing that it were still like that, full of the pushy, excited crowds that annoyed me then, because that would mean that Zimbabwe was thriving and vibrant once more, and Mugabe's destruction of this once-bountiful country was over.

We drive into Zambia and head for Gwabi Lodge on the banks of the Kafue River, close to its confluence with the Lower Zambezi. Here we're to stay the night before spending three days camping and canoeing on the Zambezi, and we think that tonight might be the last good night's sleep we'll have until the paddling is over. The lodge owner's wife takes Viv and me through long grass and under thick foliage in search of the big resident python. We don't find it —
it must be out shopping
, she says — and Viv and I agree to give its empty bed in the rushes a wide berth when we row past the next day. At night, just after we've gone to bed, Neil and I hear movement in Viv's rondavel next door. Her light is on and there are the sounds of furniture being dragged and shutters snapping closed. Neil is concerned but I know what's going on: she's making her room python-proof, and I suspect that she'll get little sleep tonight after all.

The canoe safari is shaping up to be problematic. After all these years Neil still can't resist telling me when to change lanes when I'm driving and when to indicate, so of course I get annoyed and do the opposite. On the water, two to a canoe, it'll be no different. To make things worse, everyone has been telling us stories of couples on these trips constantly bickering, with accusations flying of poor rowing technique and navigational skills — even one notorious time when an engaged couple split up while on the water, the ring hurled into the waiting waters of the Zambezi. I have a quiet word with Viv, suggesting that we all rotate rowing partners on a regular basis.

On the first day we set off with great confidence, Viv with Epsom the guide, Neil with me. For his part, Epsom has assumed that Viv and I are both Neil's wives and that the whispered scheming he's overheard is all just part of the familiar petty jealousies between wives. Not even after he's bold enough to ask and it's explained that Viv and I are sisters does it clarify the matter for him. After all, this is a land where, as a matter of course, wives go to live with their brother-in-law upon the death of their husband.

After one early encounter with the bank and a thorny acacia, Neil and I sail along, the perfect pair. We'd anticipated a leisurely drift with the current, dodging hippos on an obliging river, but the choppy conditions caused by strong headwinds make it a constant battle just to keep moving forward. That evening we beach on a sand island where a forward party has set up a flycamp. There's dinner cooking on the campfire and pup tents erected with camp stretchers to sleep on. We're tired and sore after our first hard day on the water and sit around the fire drinking Mosi, Zambia's most popular beer, re-living the day, and still no words are exchanged in anger between Neil and me. I can only think that Neil must have overheard my earlier scheming and has resolved to prove me wrong.

We retire early for the night but, whether it's the full moon or our stiffening bodies, none of us sleeps well. At about midnight Neil and I decide to venture out for a toilet stop and just as we emerge from our tent, Viv does from hers. And coming towards us across the sand is a big elephant, who gets as much of a shock as we do. All four of us bellow and beat a retreat. The staff, who are listening from their tent, think this particularly funny but I suspect that this is bravado as the big tusker had been heading in their direction.

The canoeing ends at a river lodge abutting the Lower Zambezi National Park and we stay there for a few days. True to form, Neil befriends the manager, who gives us a discount plus an upgrade, and we spend our last days on the Zambezi in tents that look out over a languid sweep of this generous river. In the mornings we sit on Viv's deck and over coffee watch the water like a blue perfect mirror wake up with the day. We make forays into the park while it's still cool then, after lunch, sit lazy and quiet under the arms of a leadwood tree. Sometimes we raise a casual wave to canoeists drifting past and sometimes we train the binoculars on the Zimbabwean side of the river, looking for poachers. One day a herd of elephants passes through the camp and as we run to hide in the bar the garden boy stands immobile, frozen to his rake. The herd ignores him and heads for the swimming pool, where they reduce the water level by half after just a few minutes' drinking. Due to some dicky drainage, Neil and I have been making a millpond of the bathroom floor every time we shower and this attracts a family of frogs who decide to move in permanently. Relocating them is short-lived so we get used to treading warily when we move around in the darkness of night.

Before we left for Africa I jokingly said to anyone who asked that we'd return home early only if we got sick, or sick of each other. I could say this because I was quite sure that our travelling partnership would fall into place just as it had every other time we'd run away from home over the past 30 years, and that the preoccupations and responsibilities of everyday life would drop away as before. I was confident that, away from our working life, the business of living together would not get in the way of being together. When Viv joined us I was anticipating some changes, a shift in the ballast. Neil must have been too because a few days before she arrived he'd broached the subject, expressing the hope that Viv and I didn't ‘carry on and be silly' like we often did at home. This tends to irritate him and make him short-tempered, but we've always suspected that behind his grumpiness is a sense of being left out.

When Viv arrived in Botswana, we were indeed silly, caught up in the excitement of those first few days together, and wrapped up in dodging lions and avoiding stampeding zebras. The dynamics changed and it wasn't long before the effect was felt on Neil and me. One morning we were at a picnic site on the banks of a waterhole, along with a handful of other visitors, when Neil accused me of misplacing his sunglasses and I snapped. Totally and embarrassingly. I can't even remember what I said, but I'm pretty sure the onlookers do. There was silence. Even Neil was struck dumb. But after that I felt good and in a quieter moment I reasoned that I was relieving some subterranean pressure that had built up in our nation of two.

Neil relieved the pressure in his own way. On one long leg I was driving and Viv was co-piloting and we kept slowing down for photo opportunities, or to see what was going on in the markets and up village alleys. I'd also decelerate every time we passed people on the side of the road offering fish, roosters, even a puppy for sale, and Neil was getting grumpier by the minute. ‘No stopping!' came from the backseat. Then we drove towards a man holding up something big and strange, a bulky thing with a long neck. I went slower and slower, all the while chattering and guessing with Viv as to what the heck it could be. That was the final straw for Neil. From the backseat came an exasperated ‘No stopping for turkeys!'

This wasn't the last time Neil lost patience with our babbling. Viv hadn't seen a rhino during her stay and her last opportunity was as we drove out of Hwange National Park. Everyone said that we were sure to spot one, that there was often one at Kennedy II waterhole, but we cruised past and saw nothing. We had a long drive ahead of us but we paused to photograph a handsome sable. I turned around and there was a whopping big white rhino, grazing near a waterhole behind us.
Rhino, rhino!
Viv and I shouted directions to Neil —
go around there, retrace our steps, not this track it goes nowhere, go off-road, who cares about the rules!
Neil followed instructions up to a point then, after another attack of conflicting instructions, he totally lost patience. We were not going off-road, we couldn't turn around and we could only stay for two minutes. It seemed there was to be no stopping for rhinos, either.

But now, after four weeks together, it's time for Viv to return home. The days have flown by. We've seen so much and had so much fun together; it's been a wonderful time of discovery for all of us. It seems that we've only just adjusted to a happy
tour de trois
and it's going to change again.

We're at Pioneer Camp, Lusaka, on the day she is to fly home. We wake up to a cloudy windy day after a sleepless night. Wedding celebrations in an adjoining village have played loud bad music until 6 a.m. and we are all puffy-eyed and distracted. Viv and I make a silent breakfast and she, through habit, goes out and stokes the hot-water donkey. We sit outside, not talking, and can hear Neil moving about inside, picking things up, putting them down, being busy. He comes out and tries a few jokes, ones we've heard a million times before, but Viv and I laugh anyway because he's trying so hard to lighten things. The drive to the airport is taken up with desultory talk: good weather for flying, have you got money for airport tax, packed your carving? Then it's teary, garbled farewells and promises … and goodbye. She's gone through security and I try to wave through the gap in the screens.

The next morning it's with me, as I wake, that our nation is back to two again. Viv's not there and it seems incomplete and I miss her. Neil feels it as well and busies himself with making plans for the day. We'll go to an electrician to have a faulty power board repaired, then we'll have lunch in the showground — that'll be an adventure, a distraction to cheer us up. We get through the day and move through the week, but for the first 48 hours the fire has gone out. I'm left with the feeling that one chapter of our journey is over. It was a month of fun and games spent with Viv in places wild and exciting, a holiday within a holiday. Now we have to settle down and make plans for the next few weeks and the campaign to locate Itembwe will soon have to start in earnest.

By the road between Lusaka and Pioneer Camp is a commercial tomato farm, a sea of red and green. Every time we drive past labourers are in long lines, waiting in hope of a day's work or lugging filled-to-the-brim big wooden crates on their head, queuing to get paid. Further on, just around a bend, there is always a handful of people selling … tomatoes. These are excellent, the best I've had outside Italy, but there's always that niggling feeling that their source isn't exactly legal.

Overall, fresh produce has been of a high quality and what turns up where has sometimes amazed us. A rocket salad in an isolated camp in Hwange National Park, where no gardens or planting are permitted. Salmon in a restaurant in landlocked Lusaka. This was described to us by the young waiter as ‘salmon with honeys' so Neil had to have it. No nymphets arrived at the table, but a beautifully honey-cured fillet. We've had some of the best meat pies we've ever eaten from the same shop that sold bright-green slices of sponge cake, and we've bought a really good barbecued chicken that was displayed alongside goat guts and pig's offal. I love
bobotie
, a South African dish of lightly spiced or curried minced meat baked with an egg custard, which I order whenever it's on the menu, and Neil can't go past his mielie-meal porridge, a taste he developed in boarding school. The staple for most Africans in southern and Central Africa, this is a gruel made from maize meal and it's prepared in basically the same way whichever country you're in. It can be cooked with milk and sugar for breakfast, or made thicker, with water, and served with a little meat if available. Known as
mieliepap
in South Africa,
nshima
in Zambia and
sadza
in Zimbabwe, it's at its best when it's cooked by some old camp cook in the bush on a cold winter's morning. When in camp I've taken to asking for a tour of these bush kitchens and I'm always surprised at how the staff manage without much refrigeration and often just a burner or two for cooking. Sometimes the oven is an old wood-burner, shiny black with boot-polish sitting out in the yard, and sometimes the oven is a hole in the ground with a fire over it. The quality of the baking is extraordinary considering these handicaps, and the beautiful breads and cakes produced wouldn't be out of place in a glossy cookbook.

Lusaka, Zambia's capital, takes a bit of getting used to after being in the bush for many weeks. It's big and cosmopolitan, with a lot of Asians and Middle Easterners, and of course there are the street kids. A million in total we've been told, and nearly all a result of being orphaned through AIDS. The boys at intersections are thin and dirty, and they sniff petrol from Coke bottles and beg for food. They are always grateful if you can give them just a piece of fruit or a biscuit, and their hunger is obvious as the food is gobbled immediately. Every morning we drive past the Manda Hill intersection and notice one particular little boy, matchstick thin and soft-eyed, who always sidles up to the female in a car and takes any opportunity to touch her. Just the soft touch of a hand on her arm, barely there, is what he needs, and we are surprised to see that many ladies allow the contact, perhaps because they are mothers themselves.

Neil says a few words to the boys as he's handing over apples.

'Where do you sleep?'

'In the drain, Sir.'

'Ah-ah-ah, that's not good. Who looks after you?'

'Myself.'

'Do you have any family?'

'These are my family,' said with a nod towards the others. These children are ever polite, with a natural courtesy learnt from a mother with dreams for her young son's future.

A sobering drive is along Leopards Hill Road, past the Lusaka cemetery. Beyond the official denominational sections is field after field of neat rows of fresh mounds, most unmarked and so close together that there's barely space to walk between them. We're told that there is a special place for the young homeless, but we don't have the will to visit.

Each new day is so totally absorbing, and there's so much in Africa that is confronting and different. Our preconceptions and beliefs are continually challenged, sometimes on an hourly basis. We go to bed some nights and find ourselves wide awake, full of what we have seen and the stories that people have told us, wondering where in all of this is justice and hope. At first I was dismissive of what I took to be Neil's cynicism and we would argue the issues for long sleepless hours. Where I saw a lack of infrastructure, he saw mismanagement; when I praised enterprise, he called it corruption; and when I recoiled at the poverty, he said, ‘That's life.' But over the weeks I've come to understand his point of view, his frustration with the disparity between what is and what could have been. I've come to question why quality of life for the majority of the population doesn't appear to improve when the rest of the world gives so much, and I am learning that tribal loyalties are paramount and determine career prospects and government decisions. I'm realising that the complexities go far beyond drought, floods and big brown soulful eyes.