Stay on the Ride: Safari!

Around mid-June (three months of being here), I notice a significant shift in feeling MUCH more comfortable, and that I am finally being genuinely productive at work. One week shortly after that, I have a fabulous road trip with my colleague Mike and our driver for the week, Steve.

Sunset on the Shire River, Liwonde

When they pick me up Monday afternoon, Mike moves into the back seat of the SUV he’d rented for the trip saying that we needed to stop to fill up the car. I'm not sure why he, and not Steve, would need to get out to fill up, but I get into the front passenger seat without inquiring further.

As we approach the edge of town, we pull over to the side of the road beside a gas station. I look over and notice that the gas tank was full. Now I'm really puzzled.

Mike jumps out of the back seat, and five people who had been waiting on the roadside climb in. All of them, I realize, are getting a lift with us to Liwonde or points in between. So THAT’S what filling up the car means! This is one of many examples of how even though we're all speaking English, the meaning of what people are saying sometimes eludes and confuses me.

The radio plays gospel music as we drive, passing beautiful scenery and many village vignettes. We speed past villagers walking, cycling, herding cattle, and sometimes driving ox carts.

On Monday and Tuesday nights, we stay in Liwonde for a meeting on Tuesday morning. On Wednesday, we will drive five hours to Nsanje in the far south of Malawi. Since Liwonde National Wildlife Preserve is only a few kilometres outside of town, and we have some time, I arrange for us to go on a boat tour into the park on Wednesday morning.

Steve has never been to a wildlife preserve, and Mike has only been once during high school. Neither has ever been on a boat tour. It's just us, the guide (a former wildlife officer who has been working as a guide since he retired 17 years ago), and the two crew on an open flatbed metal boat with an awning.

Mike on the left, Steve in front, our guide in back, and the boat crew

The Shire (pronounced shee-ray) flows out of the south end of Lake Malombe, which is itself just south of and connected with Lake Malawi. The northernmost section of Shire River is within Liwonde National Park.

Almost as soon as our boat first sets out, I can see what looked like giant frogs peering up from the water: Hippos! One doesn't have to be in the park to see them. We pass pod after pod, only their ears, eyes, and very tops of their slate black snouts breaching the surface. Finding them so abundant, I'm surprised to later learn that hippos' range in other parts of Africa has become extremely limited. Malawi, in stark contrast, is a haven for them.

Hippos swimming

There are also many beautiful egrets -- one the size of a blue heron -- fish eagles, snake eagles, small black and white cormorants, and other birds.

Once inside the park, the crew pull the boat up to a marshy area beside the shore. The park ranger points into the forest. “Do you see them?” he asks me. See what, I wonder, looking intently. “Elephants.” And I realize that the things that I thought were thick grey tree trunks are not tree trunks at all.

As we watch, the elephants emerge from the forest and stroll over to a tree to congregate to our left. The guide points to our far right, and there we see another herd of elephants approaching, babies and all. These elephants gradually stroll toward us, and slowly another herd comes to join them. In all, there are over 50 elephants, many no further away than if we had been across a small highway from each other, eating, lifting their trunks to smell the wind, mingling with each other.

After perhaps half an hour, our guide asks whether we can move on. I plead for just fifteen more minutes here. Eventually, though, the time comes. The boatmen push us off, and we silently glide away from the shore, savouring our connection with these magnificent animals. When we've drifted far enough away, the pilot starts the motor, and we continue our journey upstream.

We motor further up into the park, and come across a crocodile sunning on a rock in a secluded area. It's startled by us, and dramatically rises up from its resting place, opens its jaws, arches its back, and dives into the water.

Further along the river shore, we find a pod of hippos on the shoreline, knee deep in mud, white egrets perched on their backs and intermingling with them. As we watch, we notice mud mounds along the shoreline start moving, and realize that these mounds are more hippos snuggled close together in muddy allegiance, slowly pulling themselves up and swimming one by one deeper into the river away from us. It's amazing to be able to share this experience with Steve and Mike – remarkable for all of us.

Observing them, they seem like such gentle creatures. Their round ears, round snouts, round, sturdy bodies, and slow, deliberate movements; the physical closeness they maintain with each other; their interrelationship with the egrets and other birds all bespeak peace, kinship, and community. How unlike they are from the sharp, long, muscular, and well-armoured crocodile who lies in solitary wait to lash out and attack its prey.

"No one swims in the Shire River," the boatman tells me a few days later after we cross in his dugout canoe from Nsanje to Mozambique. "Too many hippos. Too many crocodile." He points downstream to a small islet, not far, and a crocodile lying still and quiet just off its shore. Just seeing it sends a chill up my spine, and evokes the memory from our boat safari of its cousin gnashing its enormous jaws toward the sky, and lashing its tail as it dove into the water — a true monster!

Yet each year many, many more people are attacked, injured, and killed by the peaceful hippo.