Zambia's Lower Zambezi National Park

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Few activities concentrate the mind so absolutely as steering a flimsy canoe between a pair of hippos submerged in one of the narrow secondary channels that flank the Lower Zambezi River. In theory, it's all very simple: stick to the shallows, explains the river-guide, and you'll be in no danger whatsoever. In practice? Well, sorry, but Idon't see any signposts reading 'Shallow Water' or 'Here be Hippos'. And, even if I did, I'm acutely conscious that my canoe is as insubordinate as an unbroken steed when it comes to following my feeble attempts to dictate our mutual course. But here I am, and as the current edges me towards the point of no return, my entire being is focused on an invisible tightrope line - the stilled wake of the lead canoe - that runs diagonally from the right bank to the left. For 30 tense seconds, an exaggerated twitch in either direction will send me drifting above an invisible but potentially explosive mass of hippo flesh. Only 30 seconds, a minute at most - but when finally I pull up safely next to Smith's canoe, an eternity might have passed.

Zambia's Lower Zambezi National Park, covering 4 090 square kilometres along the border with Zimbabwe east of Lake Kariba, is dominated by the magnetic presence of the tropical waterway for which it is named. The Zambezi flows along the park's southern boundary for roughly 120 kilometres, an untrammeled riverine wilderness comparable in mood and stature to the Rufiji as it passes through the Selous Game Reserve, or the Victoria Nile below Murchison Falls. Set at an elevation of roughly 350 metres, the river is wide, shallow and liberally dotted with sandbars and islands, a meandering, forest-lined maze of channels offset by the 1 360-metre Zambezi Escarpment, a craggy extension of the Great Rift Valley that looms high on the northern horizon.

The most satisfying way to explore Lower Zambezi is undoubtedly by canoe (motorboat trips are available for the less adventurous, an experiential gulf comparable to the one that separates walking safaris from game drives). As you glide silently along the river, pods of hippos splutter and yawn around every bend, and gigantic crocodiles slither menacingly through the unexpectedly clear water. Sprawling, sandy, reed-lined islands provide refuge to herds of buffalo and waterbuck, while venerable elephant bulls forage methodically in the shady riparian forest.

Canoeing the Lower Zambezi is, as they say, a game of two halves - unequal halves, thank goodness! For 45 minutes on the trot, even an hour, it can be pure serenity: a minor navigational spat with the canoe here, a hippo erupting onto dry land there, but essentially a case of letting the current lead you through the tropical riverine scenery that characterizes southern Africa's greatest waterway. And then, suddenly, it is hippo-dodging time - not a major sweat on the main river, where there's plenty of room to maneuver without getting too close to anything large enough to overturn a canoe. But in the maze of channels that flanks the open water, the proverbial paddle in the park is briefly transformed into an adventure activity as adrenalin-charged as white-water rafting.

During the time we spent canoeing through Lower Zambezi, hippos were most often - but not exclusively - responsible for our edgier moments. On our first afternoon, in the Nkalangi Channel, we floated within 10 metres of a lion pride whose burning yellow eyes followed our passage with a guileless intensity that was decidedly unnerving, given that the metre of water that divided us from the shore was barely knee deep. The next day, in the legendary Chifungulu Channel, a breeding herd of several dozen elephants entered the water about 50 metres downriver of us. As they were merrily drinking, bathing and playing, we clung to a pair of partially submerged logs midstream before edging our canoes into the safety of an eddy.

Between the thrills and near spills, lighter entertainment was provided by the river's prodigious birdlife. The usual aquatic suspects - waders, cormorants, herons, egrets, kingfishers and colonies of bee-eaters - were supplemented by several species with a localized southern African distribution, such as African skimmer and long-toed and white-crowned plovers. In the marshier patches we saw various rails as well as rufous-bellied heron, the latter usually in flight. Fish eagles chanted continually from the treetops, while pairs of foppish Schalow's turaco and dainty Livingstone's flycatcher worked their way through the upper strata of the riparian forest.

Although activities are concentrated along the river, Lower Zambezi does support a wide diversity of terrestrial habitats. Broad-leafed miombo woodland is predominant, but much of the park also consists of sandy, grassy floodplains that are scattered with termite mounds and flat-topped umbrella thorns and fringed by mopane woodland. A distinctive feature of the park is its impressive groves of winterthorn, a dark-leafed tree up to 30 metres high whose nutritious red-brown pods form an important component of the winter diet of elephants, baboons and browsing antelope.

Diurnal game drives are generally very rewarding. Impala are abundant and referred to locally as the Zambezi goat (in which case the astonishingly common white helmetshrike should probably be dubbed the Zambezi sparrow). Greater kudu, common waterbuck and Burchell's zebra are present in significant numbers, but roan and sable antelope, once common on the plains, are now very scarce - possibly due to poaching, possibly linked to the overpopulation of impala. We regularly encountered breeding herds of elephant - one 200 strong - as well as large concentrations of buffalo, and on most days at least one large predator: lion, wild dog or spotted hyaena.

After dark, though, the road network through Lower Zambezi comes into its own. As in Zambia's other savanna reserves, night drives are reliably good - and often pretty sensational. Just before our visit, one of the lodges had notched up leopard sightings on 15 consecutive nights, with one lucky group encountering four different individuals in an evening. We weren't quite so blessed, but two separate sightings of a leopard on an arboreal kill - its presence in both cases betrayed by a hyaena padding optimistically around the trunk - were boosted by good views of porcupine, serval, African wild cat, civet and numerous genets.

Lower Zambezi shares roughly 30 kilometres of Zambezi frontage with Zimbabwe's Mana Pools National Park. Vague talk of joint management seems unlikely to translate into reality in Zimbabwe's present political climate, but the two parks unambiguously form a cohesive cross-border ecological unit, with elephant in particular regularly crossing the river. The two parks also offer a broadly similar experience to visitors, and the relative obscurity of Lower Zambezi by comparison to the legendary Mana Pools is a reflection of their recent history rather than their comparative worth today.

Accorded low-level conservation status since colonial times, Lower Zambezi was gazetted as a national park in 1983, three years after Zimbabwe attained independence. Over the ensuing decade, Zimbabwe laid the groundwork for its emergence as one of Africa's top tourist destinations. Zambia, by contrast, regressed into economic torpor, while government paranoia about South African spies, though not entirely without foundation, did little to encourage tourism. In the late 1980s, travelers openly carrying cameras were routinely apprehended by the Zambian police.

So, while the 1980s saw Mana Pools consolidate a reputation as one of the premier game reserves in southern Africa, Lower Zambezi was neglected by all but the poaching fraternity. No internal roads ran through the park, no tourist lodges were constructed, rhinos were hunted to local extinction, and any elephant with its head screwed on properly fled south across the Zambezi into Zimbabwe. River-guide Roddy Smith, a 12-year veteran of the park's network of islands and channels, told us: 'When I first came here there was no tourist development and the animals were very nervous - anything you did see made a beeline straight into the bush when you approached it.'

The CITES ivory ban of 1989 and the electoral defeat of Zambia's long-serving president Kenneth Kaunda two years later are among several factors that fostered Zambia's late blossoming as perhaps the most exclusive of safari destinations in the 1990s. And in the new millennium, Zimbabwe and Zambia have experienced a reversal of fortunes. As one long-time Lusaka resident commented: 'It's strange to think that 10 years ago they were cracking open beers on the other side of the Zambezi, pointing across the water, and saying "Thank goodness we don't live over there". Now, here we are sitting on this side doing exactly the same thing!'

While the early 1990s saw the first signs of rehabilitation and tourism development in Lower Zambezi, poaching remained a serious problem. No statistics are available for this period - there was nobody there to gather them - but Smith describes routinely coming across the carcasses of tuskless elephants and reckons conservatively that they were being poached at a rate of 50 per year. Then, in 1995, safari operators and other stakeholders in Lower Zambezi and associated Game Management Areas (GMAs) banded together to found Conservation Lower Zambezi (CLZ), a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the official anti-poaching activities of the National Parks and Wildlife Service - subsequently renamed the Zambia Wildlife Authority (ZAWA).

From its somewhat inauspicious beginnings as what one Lower Zambezi stalwart half-jokingly refers to as a 'boy's drinking club', CLZ has evolved into a formidably dynamic organization that is funded by local stakeholders, as well as donations from Danida (the Danish Agency for Development Assistance) and various private foundations. Leanne Edwards and Ian Stevenson, an Antipodean couple who originally settled in Lower Zambezi as lodge managers but now work as volunteers handling all CLZ ground operations, dedicate most of their time to backing up anti-poaching activities. At least once a week Stevenson flies CLZ's light aircraft over the park looking for the telltale campfires made by commercial poaching parties. The couple also oversee the provision of fuel, rations and other logistical support to ground patrols undertaken by ZAWA scouts. Over the course of 2001, no fewer than 72 scout patrols were supported by CLZ - more than 3 000 man-days in the field - resulting in the apprehension of more than 100 poachers and the confiscation of 200 firearms, 300 snares, 30 pieces of ivory and two tonnes of dried bushmeat.

The partnership between CLZ and ZAWA may well be proving effective, but the battle against poaching is far from over. True, the past five years have seen a stabilization in Lower Zambezi's wildlife populations - including that of elephant, although 14 carcasses were discovered within the national park during 2001, one shot within a kilometre of a lodge. But commercial bushmeat poaching parties, mostly based out of Mulalika village on the escarpment, are a perennial threat, and quick to exploit any lapse in vigilance; one such party entered the park during our visit, when CLZ's aircraft was grounded for repairs. Subsistence poaching, largely confined to the fringes of the park, is more sustainable, and CLZ accords it relatively low priority, preferring to focus its limited resources on combating the commercial poachers. As things stand, reckons Edwards, CLZ is essentially performing a holding operation; were it to cease functioning tomorrow, poaching would in all probability soon rise to its pre-1995 level.

While anti-poaching measures of necessity dominate CLZ's immediate agenda, the long-term future of Lower Zambezi is linked to greater community involvement in conservation, most importantly channeling a portion of tourist revenue into neighboring villages. In this respect, one of CLZ's most significant achievements has been brokering a deal in which local community leaders and ZAWA agreed to curtail commercial hunting and fishing within Chiawa GMA in exchange for a substantial levy paid annually by the lodge owners to a Community Resource Board. CLZ has, in addition, expanded its brief to include internal road maintenance and scout training. Also in the pipeline is an education programme that will bring groups of local school children into a training camp within the park, where conservation classes will be supplemented by river trips and game drives.

When I left Lower Zambezi it was with conflicting impressions. This, surely, is as compelling a slice of bush as remains in southern Africa, and one that is defined by the brooding magnificence of what is perhaps the last stretch of the Zambezi to retain the wilderness aura it possessed when Livingstone followed its course to the Indian Ocean. And, while Lower Zambezi is not a quick-fix 'Big Five' reserve à la Sabi Sands, our week there was punctuated by some truly wonderful wildlife encounters - leopard on a kill, lions mating, elephants crossing the river, wild dogs playing - unsullied by the heavy tourist presence of more popular parks.

Above all, there is the incommunicable thrill attached to canoeing through the Zambezi's ever-mutating network of islands and channels. This, quite simply, is one of Africa's most memorable wilderness experiences: less so, ultimately, for those brief flashes of hippo-dodging terror than for the exhilarating immediacy of being right there, in the bush, on the river, exposed, without an engine in earshot, without a window frame in sight. And yet this charismatic slice of primal Africa, superficially so timeless and permanent, also impressed on my consciousness - more perhaps than any other game reserve I've visited - its desperate fragility in the face of a litany of escalating human pressures. Lower Zambezi could so easily be lost to us, and once lost, would be gone forever.

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