Walking with Lions

This photo might justify all the crappy bus rides I have had to take to get my ass down to Zambia from Tanzania. At the very least it will make the final cut for my 2010 Christmas card.

Play nice kitty

So after a big night in Livingstone, where we imbibed a little too much with our new local friends, we woke up at 6:30 hung-over and a little worse for wear to go on a Lion walk. There is some non-profit down here where they let you walk with the cubs as they are trying to rehabilitate and re-introduce them to the wild. Overall it was pretty cool to hang out with these cats up close, and I mean VERY up close.

They basically pick you up, take you to a nice luxury lodge in the middle of a very small and controlled game preserve, give you a cup of coffee, and after a short brief  you sign a waiver. About 5min later they drop you off and you walk up to the lions who are hanging out in the bushes sleeping with some trackers/guides/volunteers. Some of the other big 5 are in park so they want to make sure the area is clear before you show up. We walked around with two 16month old cubs for about an hour.

The lions want to sleep. They sleep about 20hrs a day and the trackers roust them by clapping and yelling. It’s about the same thing you would do to get your housecat or dog off the couch or out of the trash but a tad more aggressive. I immediately started thinking shit ,did I just pay $100 bucks to watch some guys abuse and harass some lion cubs? but the trackers address your concern before you can voice it with a decent explanation. They say hey, we have got to walk them everyday, tourists or no tourists, to get them acclimated to sights, sounds, and smells of the jungle so they can continue learning and growing. Their mother prods them with the swipe of a claw and a growl, they could eat me so I clap and shout…which seemed reasonable.

These cubs are acquired at about 3-6 weeks old as orphans or are bred in captivity, this group then walks them and rehabs them until 18 months where they are then released into a small park as a part of a pride. When they are not being walked as cubs they are kept in an enclosure, depressing I know. After some time in the small park with a limited number of competitors and predators (other cats, hyenas), they move the pride or some of the lions into a big fully functioning  park or ecosystem. This system works and they have been successfully re-introducing animals for a few years. In thirty years the African Lion population has dropped from over 200,000 to less than 30,000 primarily due to loss of habitat due to growth and encroachment of the human population.  The $100  tourist fee helps fund the program and though it seems a little contrived/commercial and not quite right to have tourists interacting with the animals in such a way at least these two will eventually end up in the wild and not in a zoo.

Tiger by the tail. Lion fur is not as soft as a housecat, but about the same feel as a North American deer or Elk.

claws teeth

These cubs had just been fed a day ago so they were accused of being lazy, but they were more then happy to be manhandled in turn for some affection, petting and scratching. Despite the seemingly affectionate relationship with the guides, this pair at less than a year and a half old had taken down several of the parks herbivores on their own in the preceding few months and were more than capable of hunting and feeding themselves. You could tell when they would get a touch of instinct or aggression in their behavior toward people. The trackers would shout “watch your back” to whoever they would advance on and a shout or some confrontation would distract them.

They give you a little brief of Lion behavior beforehand, what to do, how to establish dominance, what upsets the cats and what does not. Pretty interesting. Though familiar and comfortable with the guides I had the distinct impression that these guys could and would definitely eat you if the circumstances were not in your favor.

Overall a very cool experience , a definite highlight of the trip. If I had more time I would look at volunteering at this place.

http://www.lionalert.org/

Livingstone, Zambia

So we arrived at 4:30 am on after a 9 hr bus ride that was supposed to be 6. Classic, but it still has not dampened my spirit. After a few hours of sleep we struck out for Vic falls, named after queen Victoria by David Livingstone also known for “Dr. Livingstone I presume”. Pretty cool, but I guess it is the equivalent of going to the Niagara Falls of Africa. Something I would probably not do in the states, though I think I went when I was little.

They have all the usual waterfall accoutrements, bungi jumping, boat cruises, helicopter rides, booze cruises, nature walks. We opted for a short hike on the Zambian site where we promptly got soaked by the spray and then headed over the bridge to go to the Zimbabwe side and watch the bungi jumpers scream and hurtle themselves off of a 300+ft bridge.

There are crocs and hippos in the upper and lower Zambezi and I particularly enjoyed this photo at the entrance. Justin has been angling to go on one of these canoe trips through the crocs. I don’t know if I am so game. This photo didn’t look doctored, the look of fear in this cat’s face is pretty funny.

There are guys selling 50 Billion and 100 Trillion dollar Zimbabwean notes all over the bridge. I am now officially a Zimbabwean Billionaire and it only cost me one $1USD. Thank you Mr. Mugabe.

I am considering doing bungi jumping tomorrow, however I have an acquaintance in LA who ran a bungi jumping business during the summers in college and he would regale me after a few beers on all of the “near miss” stories that he and all of his buddies had with unwitting tourists. So I think I will sleep on the idea. There is no liability waiver, like a liability waiver in Zambia.

Notice the hitchhiker on

back of the truck.

Zimbabwe border is behind me.

Zambia

So far I am digging Zambia, it seems the closer we get to S Africa the better the infrastructure gets. Zambia as a country is huge, allegedly bigger than UK+France and Germany. Small population and the rural areas are not as densely developed as most of the other places we have been. The roads are all paved!!!!. Lusaka is all paved. We have seen the first evidence of chain restaurants in all of Africa (not that this is necessarily good), a Subway in a suburban mall where we ate ice cream plugged into reasonable bandwidth WIFI and went to see Avatar at the cinema. I feel like I have come out of a couple months in the stone ages.
There exists an evident middle class here, people drive cars wear suits and go to regular jobs. An educated workforce is evident. Zambia’s natural resource is Copper and tourism, I suspect most of the wealth and prosperity we see here is product of mineral extraction. Population is about 12M with GDP per capital of about $1200 per person. That is 4x Uganda.
Even the bus station is organized and is a quantum level above some of the other seedier bus stations we have been in. Though there were people camping out for the night in the main kiosk on mats and plastic sheets the entire station sits on a poured concrete pad and the kiosk and bathroom area is covered. This is unheard of for us so far in Africa, most of the bus stations are these swarming dirty, muddy parking lots where we fight off touts and watch our luggage like hawks. Things were a little more subdued here. They had rules and regs for the station and even rules in the bathroom with fines. There was a dude sitting the bathroom enforcing these rules and he was cracking up when I took a photo.

Not sure what a call boy is, but I’m not asking any questions.
Off to Livingstone tonight.

The long road to Zambia

Because the MV Limba was not running down lake Tanganyika, we had to backtrack. This involved figuring out how to get back from Kigoma or from Kigoma down to Zambia. The easiest and now timeliest option (Justin is running out of time) was to fly back to Dar $160 and take the Tazara train to Zambia. This is a 45 hour journey crosses Tanzania and most of Zambia.  So basically we headed back to Dar where we spent two uneventful days doing errands and preparing for 45 hours on a train. If you ever go to Rwanda, change all your money back to dollars before you leave. You cannot exchange Rwandan Francs anywhere, in my effort to exchange them I was promptly relieved of them by a shyster…this added to my already distasteful experience in Rwanda.

Along the way we met a few interesting folks, of note was this little guy traveling with his father and a friend in Kigoma and staying at our hotel. I think he was about 7 or 8, but after we met them at the hotel we could not shake him. He was a little Indian kid who had all kinds of wild tales, by wild tales I mean he would vary from retelling a discovery channel show to describing near death experiences with baboons and would rarely allow you to get a word in edgewise. Either way he followed us everywhere and was quite a character, I felt like I had one of Indiana Jones’ little helpers for about 24 hrs.  I guess this is a precursor to India. He is in the midst of an entertaining tale here.

So on to the train, we boarded after 2 hot and sweaty hours in waiting in the 1st class lounge which was a misnomer because outside the 1st class lounge was decidedly more comfortable than inside. We had packed provisions which consisted of a couple bottles of wine, a bottle of vodka and some peanut butter. The train was 16 of the sorriest cars I have ever seen, of which we were sharing a 1st class sleeper with two Zambian accountants for the railroad Louis and Ben, both really nice guys.

So at about 3:30 on Friday we departed. We did not take the express, so we stopped just about every 45 min to pick people up or drop off. Just like the buses, whenever the train stops anywhere there is a crowd of locals that converge on the passenger compartments to beg for money or sell fruit, drinks etc. This is typical.

 

According to Louis the railroad like many other infrastructure projects in Africa was built by the Chinese. Now that they are a 2nd-1st world country they have to contribute more heavily to IMF and World Bank, one way they reportedly do this is through infrastructure projects. They contribute equipment and cost of materiel, and in turn have the Tanzanians pay for the cost of labor (their engineers) the hence they create jobs abroad for their people and meet their contribution requirements. I though this was interesting. All over Tanzania we saw Chinese engineers working on Roads and infrastructure projects.

Chinese lettering of cement railroad ties.

Rail is definitely the way to go, you can get up, go the bar car, take a shower, go to the bathroom all the luxuries that are absent on a bus. For some crazy reason is was cheaper as well. Our sleeper tickets were 60,000TSH maybe $40 and I saw the Dar-Lusaka bus ticket was 80,000TSH - $60. Who would elect to spend 30 hrs on a bus vs 45 on a train I have no idea.

So we passed the time by looking at the scenery and chatting with Louis and the other passengers. Louis is a older Zambian Mike Tyson look alike by the way. In chatting, Louis revealed the size of his family (this is pretty common in Africa, the first thing everyone asks you is how many kids you have) He is one of 5 brothers, two have passed away but between the five boys they have produced 27 grandchildren for his mother. 2 to 27 in two generations, talk about population growth.

 

Zambia and rural Tanzania are beautiful and this is definitely a good way to see the country. The locomotive broke down on night two, so our 45 hour journey turned into a 54 hour one.  It was comfortable relative to taking a bus, but way too long.  By evening number three I broke into the Vodka.

This was a typical scene from our compartment when we stopped at a village.

While at one of our stops we had the metaphor for African Aid moment. Little kids (mostly 5-8yrs old) are yelling and begging outside the window. “Give me money Mzungo” I don’t give them money, but we have some bananas so I toss those down and then have to admonish the kids to share. I’m sure they don’t understand English. More kids show up, I dig around in my bag and pull out a candy bar and before I can toss that down to the kid who didn’t get a banana, some teenager sneaks up and steals it out of my hand and takes off down the tracks as I yell at him (he is clearly not going to share it) so the little kids are still left empty handed. I consider getting out of the train and pursuing him to reclaim the chocolate bar. About this time Justin gets into the fray and pulls out a 3/4 consumed jar of green olives. He tries to hand this down to the little kids,  they fight over it, then drop it and the glass breaks. They are picking the olives off the ground and eating them, it is apparent they don’t really like olives. So we start yelling at them to watch out for the broken glass on the tracks because they are all barefoot. Why is this a metaphor? You see a person in need and try to help, but your first donation is not shared. They next time you donate a crook steals your donation, on the third donation as an unintended consequence the people you are trying to help get hurt or don’t need what you give them. Hmmm….

Gombe and the chimps

After that ride, Gombe was paradise. We are the only people here except for the staff, we have a nice room there are cold drinks aplenty and the beach and lake are gorgeous. No crocs no bilharzias, so we can swim and lounge danger free. We had a good dinner and watched half of “the hangover” on my laptop with Shakira one of the local girls that works here. Having probably never been out of Kigoma, my explanation for the the strange bachelor party antics in Vegas were probably a more surreal experience for her than for me. (as I’m writing this there are a bunch of Baboons prowling around outside).

So up early we had breakfast and hooked up with our guide Isaiah and headed up the mountain. It was hot and wet and I was soaked by the time we got to the top. We trampled through thick jungle for 45min until we broke through the top layer of jungle to a grassy clearing.

Here we hiked up in knee high grass about 500m and then we could hear and see the chimps making a racket in the trees to our left about 700m across the ridge. We then traversed a 45 degree slope to arrive upslope of a troupe of 15 chimps headed by Ferdinand the alpha male he was with Titan, Frodo, Swine, and Sandy among others. There are 150 chimps in the park, they are all named and guides can recognize them all. Amazing, way better than the gorillas.  They are so active and so human. If you believe in creation, stop reading here.

These guys are about 5feet away, Ferdinand is on the left.

So we just hung out with the Chimps and Isaiah for about 2 hours. These groups in the Goodall study are all acclimated to humans, so they pretty much go about their business and ignore you.  When they got close I got a little nervous, all I could think about was some story on This American Life where they recount a tale of three policemen trying to separate a agitated chimp from his owner, a crowd forms and some bystander yells “a chimp a tear a man apart limb by limb!!”, the cops relented. That was my seminal memory as Ferdinand shot us hard looks from a short distance.

According to Isaiah they all have different personalities and different skills…just like people. He pointed out the ones that do somersaults, the ones the like to fight, the ones that chase the baboons.  It finally started to rain hard and they hunkered down just like the three of us. Pretty funny I looked over and our poses and expressions sitting in the rain matched the 10 chimps in the trees.  When we got down, I casually chatted with some biologist at the base camp, we are 98.8% genetically similar to chimps. In fact we are genetically closer to chimps than they are to gorillas, that is probably why it is so captivating and fascinating to watch these guys up close. If it wasn’t raining we probably would have been there all afternoon. During our visit a couple of the females were in heat and they would flirt with Ferdinand, I’ve seen similar behavior in many bars. It was so amazingly human.

This guy was eating

  Deep in thought 

There are about 10 chimps right in the trees behind us here.

We went for a nature hike down through the rain with Isaiah on the way down and saw Gombe stream and some famous waterfall. After lunch and for the next several hours the camp was literally overrun by baboons. At about 6pm while Justin and I were quietly reading inside the lodge, one of these suckers opened up the door downstairs and snuck in the lodge crept up the stairs a scared the crap out of us. You should see the canines on a Baboon to appreciate him creeping up the stairs in your lodge.

Overall very cool day, I was 50/50 on coming out here after our two days of hard travel. I would recommend this over the gorilla’s any day. Much cheaper as well, park passes are $100 vs $500 for the gorillas.