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Outside Magazine March 2003

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


	The Lugenda River near Luwire Hunting Camp and the Niassa Reserve (Joshua Paul)

Day 3, mile 75
"YOU KNOW," I SAID TO CHERRI as I was lying on a slab of granite near our campfire while massaging my back against the bumpy rock, "I'm sore all over, I have diarrhea, there are lions out there—but I'm strangely content."

Cherri laughed. She sat nearby peeling sweet potatoes for the sauce that Rod, the usual cook, stirred. I sipped the small nightly ration of whiskey that Rod had poured us. It was a beautiful spot—"a lekker place to kip," said Rod in Afrikaans-flavored slang— with granite slabs, beds of sand, and a large baobab tree. We hadn't seen anyone since that first fisherman. Stars shone intensely: the Southern Cross and the band of the Milky Way. Crickets chirped. The river shushed by. At dusk, Rod had spotted hyena and lion tracks, asked us to gather big logs for the fire and pitch our tents close, and warned us not to wander out after dark. Whatever one had to do during the night, it had to be right beside one's tent.

As Cherri peeled, she mimicked the sounds of the night: the huff...huff...huff of a lion, the sawing sound of a leopard, the whoop of a hyena.

"If you're really lucky," she said, "you'll hear a lion roaring right outside your tent. You'll never have been so scared in all your life. But don't panic and run out."

"If lions use this spot to drink from the river, they're probably watching us now," Cherri said. "The thing is to be aware but not paranoid. That's what I like about Africa. It makes you be aware."

She described the fate of a British tourist who bolted from his tent straight into a pride of 12. She'd already told of the Israeli tourist on honeymoon who, ignoring the guide's warnings about standing too close to the riverbank, had been swallowed whole by an 18-foot croc while having his picture taken with his bride. I'd begun to think of Cherri as part mother hen, part "Cherri Danger"—putting the most dramatic face on things.

"Bear in mind," she continued, "that if lions use this spot to drink from the river, they're probably watching us right now. The thing is to be aware but not paranoid. That's what I like about Africa. It makes you be aware."

In addition to the civil war, the poor soil and the sleeping-sickness-bearing tsetse fly of the miombo woodlands have minimized human presence in this region, which had been set aside as a protected area by the Portuguese in 1954 but was never managed. Then, in 1992— while the civil war still crackled—a Norwegian businessman named Halvor Astrup and his longtime African safari guide, Zambian hunter and conservationist Phillip Nel, decided to explore northern Mozambique. The two were astounded by the region's beauty and the number of elephants still roaming its forests. After months of lobbying, Nel persuaded the Mozambican government to give a concession for a three-year trial period to run the reserve. But in 1996, Nel, along with his wife, died in a plane crash on a flight from the reserve to South Africa. In 2002, Astrup signed a ten-year lease with the government in a unique public-private partnership to manage and invest in the reserve.

This wilderness still remains largely unknown. Recent estimates suggest that there are more than 12,000 elephants, 3,000 Cape buffalo, 9,000 sable antelope, 3,000 elands, and a few hundred each of leopards, lions, and spotted hyena, among other animals. One species, the Niassa wildebeest, has been identified as unique to the region, and undoubtedly there are species in the reserve still to be discovered. In 1999, the Mozambican government doubled the Niassa to its current size, partly by creating a "buffer zone" where safari hunting is allowed on a limited basis. If, as has been proposed, a wildlife migration corridor connects the Niassa Reserve to the nearby Selous Game Reserve in southern Tanzania, the two would create the world's largest managed wildlife reserve—an area roughly the size of New York State.

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