thinking on my feet
EXCLUSIVELY FOR TRAVEL AFRICA, MANA MEADOWS SHARES HER EXPERIENCE
Within the first twenty minutes of The Walk (in my mind it was always capitalised), most of my fears had already surfaced – weakness, injury, wildlife encounters… and needing my husband Matt’s help. I hadn’t yet mastered my new backpack, and superfluous khaki straps danced in the breeze. I felt like a walking wind chime: cameras, lenses, water bottle and even a folded photographic reflector swung offme like a giant cat’s toy.
I once watched donkeys ferrying tourists up steep hills on the Greek island of Santorini, and I felt just like one of those pitiful creatures right now: overladen, over decorated, jingling, and prime steak destined for one of the lions which may well appear on this very game trail.
But bumping into lions was the least of my worries (a thought I never imagined would cross my mind). My shoulders were screaming. The previous six weeks of upper-body strength-building had melted into meaninglessness. Where had the press-ups, planks and the day-long practice hikes hauling around 15 kilograms of rice in my backpack got me?
There were lion, elephant and black rhino spoor everywhere. In the first ten minutes we had already seen two sets of rhino tracks. And in the twelfth minute Matt glimpsed a lioness and cub just thirty metres from us. Exciting, yes, but also slightly disconcerting when the surrounding combretum felt more like a tunnel than a woodland.
Luckily, I had my throbbing shoulders to distract me. If I could withstand the ache, I could not endure the sciatic pain — an old injury which had unexpectedly reared its head. The fast pace, uneven ground and the 20kg weight on my bottom-heavy (rookie error) backpack was creating the perfect storm in my lower back. The pain was piercing, but the foreboding twinge was devastating – I knew that warning well. I needed to do the magic stretch soon before my back seized and it really was Walk Over, almost before it had begun.
Just to get to the start line it had taken 23 hours of driving, one six-week-long application of endless red tape to get across Zimbabwe’s border into Zambia (this was at the height of the pandemic lockdown), four weeks’ quarantine and a large portion of our dwindling funds… and I feared I wouldn’t make lunch on the first day.
We were only two kilometres in and even I could tell from the botanical disarray and frequent dung piles that we were sharing a trail with a black rhino. And although our inscrutable lead scout Paimolo Bwalya gave little away, I thought I spied a spark of excitement in his eye every time he spotted a freshly chewed red-leaved medlar bush.
North Luangwa National Park was already living up to its reputation. But it was not always like this. In 1998, the black rhino was declared presumably extinct in Zambia – a tragedy considering that in the mid-1970s they were estimated to number 4000 in the Luangwa Valley, with Zambia home to the continent’s third largest population. But by the late 1980s they had all but gone.
It’s hard to infuse hope into statistics that grim, but here, in a half-chewed stump of medlar – candy floss for black rhinos – was tangible proof they had returned.
In 2003 Frankfurt Zoological Society (FZS) and Zambia’s Department of National Parks and Wildlife (DNPW) partnered in the North Luangwa Conservation Programme (NLCP) to relocate black rhino from South Africa and Zimbabwe to North Luangwa. Seventeen years later, thanks to intensive protection, strong community buy-in and innovative technology and strategies, the park now has a viable black rhino breeding population. Once again, it is possible to feel the thrill of standing in a rhino’s footsteps in the Luangwa Valley.
And here we were, walking with two of the men instrumental in keeping these giants safe: NLCP Rhino and Elephant Protection Unit
