Animals Send the Safari Invitations

“If the big fellow comes close in the night, you must dial 37 and shout: ‘He’s outside my door. . . . Come and get me!’ ”

That’s what the receptionist told a British woman as he handed her a room key at this luxurious safari lodge overlooking Lake Kariba in northwestern Zimbabwe.

“What big fellow?” she asked in awe.

The receptionist meant a three-ton bull elephant “who eats the bougainvillea off your veranda.” So if you open your door to find yourself looking up a six-foot shaft of ivory, “don’t take a step in case he does.”

Resident Animals

A sign on the bulletin board next to the front desk advises guests: “Walking is not permitted in any areas adjacent to the lodge. Wild animals are dangerous, especially elephant and buffalo. (They’re unpredictable.) Both species are resident and frequently encountered on the Bumi Peninsula.”

Visitors to Africa do hear of charges by lions, hippos, elephants and the mean black rhinos. But few tourists are endangered on safari if they stay in their vehicles.

In reserves especially, animals are familiar with Land Rovers and cars and don’t anticipate harm from them. But even in an open Land Cruiser on a night safari, our guide warned as we passed within 10 feet of a pair of seemingly lethargic, reclining lions: “Don’t move or make a sound. They can spring in two seconds if alarmed!”

We were a bit bushy-eyed but Craig Dewar, assistant manager and guide, had urged us the night before, “You’ve got to go. . . . The whole world comes alive then.” Dewar, who had picked us up on the veldt where our small plane from Kariba Airport landed, was talking about the safari that left at dawn.

‘At Their Invitation’

“Remember,” he said, “we’re here at their invitation. If the animals don’t want to see us, they don’t come out.”

But they do come out in the early morning, and at 6:37 a.m. we saw the other reason why Dewar had prodded us to rise at 5:45: a fabulous sunrise over the lake--waterbuck, elephants, duikers and baboons shared Kariba’s cool water with guinea fowl, tiny green bee eaters and a lone fish eagle overhead as we drove along the shore.

A harem herd of breeding impalas, one male and about 80 does, wandered easily beside the lake. Elsewhere around the water and along the shore of neighboring Matusadona National Park roamed buffalo, white rhinos, lions, zebra, roan, kudus and eland, largest of the antelope.

The Land Rover, carrying a pair of British Airways flight attendants and us, was chugging over normally submerged red clay at less than 10 m.p.h. Our mustachioed driver/guide, who looked more like an English squire than a bush ranger, pointed to trees 60 feet away uphill. “Those are usually the high water mark,” he said, “but the lake hasn’t been that high in nearly four years because of the drought that much of Africa has been suffering.”

Swinging toward a herd of sable antelope, the guide explained that they were all female with one dominant male antelope that called the tune on where they traveled and slept.

As we approached to within 35 feet, a male impala that was thrashing (“marking”) a bush to stake out his territory, snorted, instructing the dozen members of his smaller harem to move on. “You have to be a pretty fit guy to keep that many women under control,” commented the guide.

We slowed to photograph a lone bull elephant, the second we’d seen with part of his trunk cut away. Wire traps set by poachers seeking ivory catch and cut off their trunks in traps set for smaller animals. A pair of cattle egrets were flying above this bull waiting for him to flush out insects they could grab.

Slowly moving in on an elephant that was kicking up a dusty fuss and spreading his ears like a hang glider, another group was advised by their guide: “He won’t turn the vehicle over if we don’t upset him.”

Fallen Trees

Ahead, two lilac-breasted rollers (named for their aerobatics) roamed the sky. Inland, a mopane tree had been bowled over the road. Elephants knock down the trees to eat the tender top leaves. Another tree, a wingpod, blocked us down the trail. Elephants scratch themselves on wingpods and lions sharpen their claws on them.

In the lowest of its 15 gears a Land Rover will go anywhere a tank will go, we sensed, as ours crashed through brush and dodged trees heading into the bush. But at Bumi Hills four wheels are not the only means of travel. Safaris are conducted in canoes, on foot and aboard motorized pontoon boats.

For our water safari we were awarded a quietly puttering pontoon craft that looked like a Huck Finn Mississippi River reject. Guide Andy Webb steered it with his feet, moving a pipe attached to the rudder.

With six passengers aboard, our version of the African Queen, called Nakapakapa (kingfisher), dodged the gaunt tops of dead trees buried underwater yet reaching skyward like gnarled limbs of prehistoric monsters. These remains of forests drowned by Kariba Dam provided ideal perches for cormorants, egrets, open-billed storks and African darters or snake birds.

Live Things Too

But not all the protrusions in the bay were dead tree trunks. Some were submerged live hippos, others crocodiles. One hippo, the guide told us, attacked a small yacht, and bit into its stern. But crocs, he added, attack people. We remembered what a croc farmer had said: “What horrifies us is that crocodiles have a brain only the size of a man’s little finger, but all of it is intent on its survival and its victim’s death.”

“A 16-footer met in the dark,” one guide had warned, “can bite the top off your spotlight.”

As a wind whipped across the lake and the sky darkened, we could see the lights of other pontoon craft called kapenta , manned by African fishermen. Red rigging lights attract to their nets kapenta sardines, for which the boats are named.

When the huge Kariba Dam was being built in the late 1950s to block the waters of the 1,700-mile Zambezi River, one of Africa’s largest, the Batonka people predicted it would never be finished. Their river god Nyaminyami, half-serpent and half-man, lived in the waters and wouldn’t permit the dam’s completion. The dam would force the people to be transplanted to new homes.

With Knowing Nods

Early in 1957 the Zambezi burst into flood and the tribespeople nodded knowingly: “Nyaminyami is angry. Nyaminyami wants to be free.” The builders figured the odds were 100,000 to one against such floods recurring in 1958 and ignored the Batonkas’ warnings.

But the floods came again, with waters engulfing buildings and snatching construction workers from footholds. Then the god relented, work continued; animals and people were displaced, many creatures marooned on hilltops.

To save the wildlife, naturalist Rupert Fothergill organized Operation Noah and rescued 5,000 frightened animals ranging from elephants to snakes. They were released in what have become the Chete Safari Area and Matusadona National Park along the lake.

The lake covers 2,000 square miles. The Kariba Gorge hydroelectric plant and the dam are among the world’s largest, supplying most of the power to Zimbabwe’s 7 million people and to much of Zambia across the lake. Land and water meet to sustain a wild animal kingdom equal to any in Africa.

But the Batonka insist that their river god was not defeated. Nyaminyami simply agreed to become an ally of the builders. “It is he who runs along your wires,” they say, “but only because he wishes to.”

We were hardly roughing it at this most luxurious of the half-dozen safari camps set up by Gametrackers International for us in four countries during our month in southern Africa.

For Comfort Seekers

For those who want to visit the African wild without sacrificing a single comfort, Bumi Hills Lodge accommodates 46 guests in the main lodge and in high cliff-hanging cottages named after animals.

Ours was called Kudu. Breakfast and lunch are served buffet-style poolside in a garden overlooking the lake, a view hard to beat in any country on any continent.

The lodge also maintains four houseboats on the lake, each for a couple. The one-room boats are complete with double beds, cabinets, bathroom (including shower) and a veranda on the stern. Houseboaters paddle canoes to a dining craft for meals. After breakfast a ranger or guide, carrying an elephant gun, leads foot and canoe safaris for bird watchers into the lake’s estuaries and marshes.

From the veranda of our hillside chalet we watched kudus and impala drinking at a water hole below. Two elephants were swimming the two miles to Starvation Island, named for the hundreds of starving animals rescued from the flood a quarter-century earlier. Still living there are 250 antelope and their visiting elephant friends.

Other elephants, not tame but unconcerned, roamed the grassy shore a few hundred feet from us. Buffalo broke through the scrub line to feed and drink, as startled waterbuck loped away and Goliath heron flapped silently across the water.

You can travel to Bumi Hills independently: $100 a night for dinner, bed and breakfast each, plus $45 for the 20-minute flight from Kariba and $73 for your flight from Harari (formerly Salisbury), Zimbabwe’s capital, or considerably more from Johannesburg.

It’s safer and cheaper to buy a package, as we did, from a safari outfit such as Gametrackers International, one of the largest, with U.S. headquarters in Glendale, Calif., phone (213) 622-8130. Gametrackers provides two weeks of safaris in Botswana and Zimbabwe, with two days at Victoria Falls, including round trip from Los Angeles, for $3,750.

Whichever way you go, pack clothes that you can peel off--undershirt, shirt, sweater, jacket. It’s cool during early morning and evening safaris when the animals are out feeding and watering, but warm during the day even in winter. Summers are warm, but not unbearably hot and humid, as more than half the nation is above 3,000 feet. Mean annual temperatures are close to those in Los Angeles, with summer and winter reversed.

As a small prop plane lifted us out over the quiet of the bush to return us to nuclear-age civilization, we looked down on the free-roaming giraffes, lions and antelopes and wondered whether the only really endangered species left on earth was us, mankind.