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Outside Magazine March 2003

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


	"Cherri Danger" and the boys: from left, Cherri Briggs, Rod Wilson, Clinton Edwards, and Peter Stark

Day 1, Mile 12
WHACK! CLINTON SLAPPED HIS BACK, yelling, "Suffer and die!" A blood-bloated tsetse fly plopped into the water. Dispatching the occasional tsetse was about as exciting as it got for the first miles of the Lugenda, which brought to mind the narrow, twisting rivers of my southern Wisconsin youth. I first went wilderness canoeing with my grandfather at age four and have paddled thousands of miles since, including the length of the Mississippi. Here on the Lugenda, waterberry trees, instead of silver maples, drooped over a greenish, sun-dappled current, and in place of cows, troops of vervet monkeys and yellow baboons knuckled along the muddy banks. Clinton pried or macheted a passage through fish traps, sievelike dams of woven sticks. Children emerged from a mud-and-thatch village and, screaming, chased us along the bank as though we were rock stars riding in long, white limos through their backyard.

If it keeps on like this for three weeks, I thought, it's going to be the boredom that kills me.

Boredom and listening to Cherri Briggs—her long blond hair glamorously streaming from beneath a Katharine Hepburn-esque straw hat—issue orders from the bow of the other tandem kayak: "Right!" "Left!" "Watch out for that log!" Cherri, 48, owns Explore, a Steamboat Springs, ColoradoÐbased adventure travel company specializing in African trips, and was the driving force—the epicenter, really—of the Lugenda River expedition. "There aren't many expeditions like this left on Planet Earth," she'd e-mailed me a few months earlier. Cherri had also reported to me with some pride that Town & Country had called her "The African Queen."

As a young girl, Cherri had wanted to be an explorer. When she heard three years ago about the Lugenda River, from kayakers who had completed the first descent of the nearby Ruvuma, she pledged to be the first to paddle down it. She secured the cooperation of Mozambique's government and the Niassa Reserve, which is hoping to increase its funding by introducing adventure travel in the region.

Clinton teased Cherri for "lilydipping" her paddle. Neither she nor her 45-year-old brother Steve, a genial and brawny electronics salesman from Phoenix who now sat in the bow of my boat, had ever paddled a kayak until a few weeks before. The fifth member of the party, muscle-packed Rod Wilson, a 31-year-old South African safari guide, sat in the stern behind Cherri and dug their boat powerfully through the water.

"Duck!" Cherri shouted. "There's a branch!"

"Cherri's a born leader," Steve finally said, "and she's going to lead whether she knows what she's doing or not."

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