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Outside Magazine March 2003

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DESTINATIONS SPECIAL: The Scouting Expedition
A Trip is Born
The dream is a brand-new river route through a vast, primordial, wildlife-rich wonderland on the verge of environmental salvation.

The reality is what happens when a small band of marginally prepared adventurers attempts the 400-mile first descent of Mozambique's mighty Lugenda—a journey past kayak-eating crocs, out-of-nowhere waterfalls, and a multitude of fresh reminders that a mad dash across paradise is probably gonna hurt.
By Peter Stark


	Mr.Stark, I presume: the author paddling the Lugenda, where Livingstone never made it (Joshua Paul)

Day 1, THE PUT-IN
The bridge's fractured pilings had been cleared of land mines since the civil war. Or so the locals, who'd materialized from out of the bush, told us. There were about a hundred of them, wearing ragged T-shirts and leaning over the railing near our Land Rover. Below us, the Lugenda River of northern Mozambique—only 60 feet wide here, near its source in the swamps of Lake Amaramba—wound placidly between grassy banks and patches of forest.

In the bridge's shadow, five of us gathered around one single and two double sea kayaks. Our plan was to paddle 400 miles and three weeks down the unexplored Lugenda River, through one of Africa's last great wildernesses.

"OK," Clinton Edwards, our 28-year-old Rhodesian-born lead kayaker, called out. "Before we go, here's the safety talk. If a hippo knocks over your boat, swim away from it. It wants the boat, not you. If a croc swims at you, hit it with a paddle. If a croc bites your boat, hit seven colors of shit out of it. If you're knocked into the water and a croc's about, try to get on your boat. Don't leave your arms and legs dangling. If you're in the bush and run into an elephant, make yourself look small. If you run into a lion, make yourself look large. OK, everybody ready? Let's go."

The bare, muscular torso of our whitewater expert lent credibility to his words. The paw prints of a wild dog were tattooed over his left shoulder, nearly to his sun-bleached hair. A scar from a 9mm bullet puckered his hard belly. Another scar curved up his left forearm, where doctors had excised the putrefying flesh from his second venomous-snake bite.

"What if a croc gets hold of you in the water?" I asked, hungry for every safety detail. I'd been reading my Livingstone. His exploration journals from the 1860s were the only accounts I could find that touched anywhere near the Lugenda (pronounced "Loo-jen-duh") River. Livingstone described how one porter escaped the jaws of a croc by gouging out the beast's eyes.

"Try going for the eyes," Clinton confirmed. "Or if you can jam your arm down his throat underwater, he can't close his breathing passages. You can drown him."

"Thanks," I said. As I clambered into one of the white kayaks, I instinctively touched the river knife clipped to my blue swimming trunks. Could I unsheathe it fast enough to stab out a croc's eyes while in a "death roll"? The knife had looked so lethal when I'd purchased it two weeks before. On the banks of the Lugenda, however, it felt impossibly puny.

We shoved off, expecting some large animal to attack instantly, but the river remained placid. Our boats bristled with cudgels, axes, knives, and machetes. We also had a flare pistol, a night-vision scope, and a satellite phone. Since Mozambique had outlawed guns after the civil war, we had none—leaving us less well armed than Livingstone, who'd traveled 140 years earlier with a large pistol in his belt. He had twice neared the Lugenda in a state of obsessive determination, or desperation. In 1862 he attempted to force his way up the Ruvuma River, into which the Lugenda empties, to open a "highway of commerce and Christianity" to Africa's pagan heart. But sand shallows, cataracts, and poison arrows turned his small boats back. Four years later, he traversed the Lower Lugenda watershed during his ultimately fatal search for Herodotus's mythical "four fountains" of the Nile.

Few outsiders have visited this region since. While the Portuguese controlled the coast for centuries from their fortress at Mozambique Island, they rarely penetrated the interior— especially the northern regions. After Portugal finally withdrew from Mozambique in 1974, civil war erupted, further isolating the north. By the time peace came in 1992, thousands had died, the economy was shattered, and many of Mozambique's large mammals had been mowed down with automatic weapons as bush meat for soldiers and starving villagers. But in one place, the animals survived: the vast, remote wilderness around the Lugenda River basin.

When you fly over the forests of northern Mozambique and the Lugenda River drainage, beneath you stretches an unbroken forest thinning occasionally into reddish patches of earth, green wetlands, shimmering rivers, and domes of rock. Except for a few trails, you see zero signs of human presence.

The miombo woodlands—as ecologists now identify this ecosystem of dry, scrubby, oaklike forests—are slung in a giant belt across Africa's hips, below the waistband of equatorial rainforest and above the deserts and steppes to the south. At the center of the river's drainage lies the fledgling Niassa Reserve, a 16,216-square-mile tract that straddles the Lower Lugenda. As far as anyone knew, no one—African or European—had ever descended the length of the Lugenda River.

This would be our task.

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