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Outside Magazine March 2003

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DESTINATIONS SPECIAL: The Scouting Expedition
A Trip is Born (Cont.)

Day 11, mile 302
AT ABOUT TWO O'CLOCK, we arrived at the Luwire Hunting Camp. The African staff ran down the mud bank to greet us. Among them stood a skinny white guy in a floppy hat, very pale, with a jumpy manner that looked imported directly from the streets of Manhattan—which it was. This was photographer Josh Paul, who'd flown in by bush plane to the dirt strip. Steve, long overdue for work, would fly out.

The afternoon and evening melted into a pleasant beery haze—a party in the bush. Lance had flown in for the evening, as had bush pilot, hunting guide, and camp head Jamie Wilson and his hunting partner, Derek Littleton. Primitively elegant, the thatch-roofed dining hall overlooked a big bend of the Lugenda. The hall's rafters were adorned with croc skulls, hippo jaws, and buffalo horns. A white-jacketed Makonde waiter brought plates mounded with chicken and rice cooked over a fire. Canvas safari tents equipped with, remarkably, flush toilets and hot showers stood at the end of a lantern-lit path. A single bed in one of those tents during hunting season, I learned, costs $1,200 per night—with a 15-day minimum.

This, I suddenly knew, TO hunched and panting, was true wilderness—this sense of utter animal nakedness. I was in the midst of true wilderness, and I didn't like it at all.

It strikes those unfamiliar with African wildlife management as very odd that wildlife reserves allow hunting. In fact, some African reserves fund themselves almost exclusively through safari hunting—and thus pay for anti-poaching units, monitoring, and management of the herds. Some hunting revenue from the Niassa Reserve funds village projects: a school, medicine, a grinding mill, solar-powered electric fences to keep elephants out of village fields. The impoverished Mozambican government can't support the reserve. Astrup, whose current contract to manage the reserve ends in 2012 (he hopes to extend the lease another 40 years), contributes about a million dollars a year, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has kicked in $216,000 since 2000.

According to Wilson, the hunting camp and the reserve also employ the villagers, hiring old poachers and young people as hunting guides and enforcement wardens.

"We tell them, 'You're looking after your own resource,'" says Wilson.

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