January 16th: Zanzibar to Livingstone
The flight from Zanzibar to Livingstone reveals once again the sprawling emptiness of this continent, or at least what we have seen of it so far. We fly for more than four hours to Lilongwe, Malawi where we stop for fuel, and then another three and a half hours to Livingstone, passing only Lusaka and isolated villages and huts like the scattered debris of some behemoth fallen from the sky and strewn across the high landscape of central Africa.
I’ve seen a lot of the world from the cockpit of a Twin Otter. It’s different than looking out the window of an airliner from thirty-five thousand feet. Ten thousand feet below, the ground scrolls past slowly enough and close enough that you can really see it. You have time to absorb it. Whether it is the barren and conical slopes of Kamchatka’s snow-covered volcanoes with their wispy ash plumes, or the pristine tropical archipelagos of Palau and the Philippines, or now, the vast landmass of the African continent, navigating them in a Twin Otter still feels like exploration, even with all the modern technology at our disposal in the cockpit. The miles are not easy. Ferrying a Twin Otter to a customer can often be an eight or nine thousand nautical mile journey. That is at least a week of long days in the cockpit, some of it the monotony of the open ocean reaching from horizon to horizon, some of it the stress of staring at massive storms blooming in purple and red pixels on the weather radar while boring through cloud, hammered by rain and battered by turbulence and requesting headings from a very busy controller, trying to get a word in amid the chaotic clamour of the HF radio. Some of it is utterly spectacular and worth the stress and fatigue that is inherent to most ferry flights.
In Africa, without the ferry fuel system installed, our flights are much shorter, typically about three to four hours. It is incredible being able to see these countries from this perspective. But I also feel that it is too fleeting. We are covering ground fast and for the next few days we will be skipping from place to place with scarcely enough time to see anything but the drive between the airport and the hotel.
Since the advent of steam power, over the course of a mere two hundred years, the engines of progress have rapidly shrunk the globe. The jungle that clings to these high plateaus and mountains, the rivers and lakes sliding by below our churning propellers and the people living along their banks and under the sweeping canopy, all this would have been a world that could swallow a man a century or two ago. Here is where Livingstone vanished. This is where he died, his heart cut out and planted like a seed beneath a baobab tree, his ghost lost and roaming with the mosquitoes and malaria that hang in the still air above the river, stranded in the land that devoured him with dysentery and disease.
We have gained so much since then, but how often do we contemplate what we may have lost? Perhaps nothing, if all we want is an all-inclusive vacation at a resort in a tropical country. But what have we sacrificed in the way of mystery? As the world shrinks, what happens to the Dreamtime of the Australian aborigines? When Raven, the trickster, speaks to the Haida and the Kwakwaka'wakw peoples of Canada’s west coast, will he remember a world before the ready explanations of science?
Imagination is what drives exploration. It’s what makes the question, “Dr. Livingston, I presume?” so iconic. What happens when these questions are already answered for us, when dispatchers watch our progress minute by minute, and satellites gazing down dispassionately from space show us exactly where on the planet we are and tell us where to go?
Descending through cloud into Livingstone we break off the approach when we are visual at a couple thousand feet and get permission from the controller to fly low over Victoria falls. Following the river, our first glimpse of them is the crenelations of mist that loom above the abyss as we approach from the back side of the falls. I bank the aircraft in tight turns above them. The waters of the Zambezi gather flat and turbid at the precipice and spread out, pockmarked by the green backs of low rocks in the water, before the water is swept over the rim of a crevasse straight as the blade of a knife, falling in streaming tendrils white and alive, and at the center of the falls a solid veil of water covers the stone face of some granite African goddess slumbering beneath the torrent. The water disappears into a rift in the earth before funneling through a narrow gorge spanned by a slender bridge and then winding through a ravine into the distance, vanishing into Africa beneath gravid clouds gray and low above it all.
(Photo Credits: Konstantin Barabash)
After we land and deal with the formalities of entering a new country, we pass through town, now peering out the windows of a rickety van which clatters over the rough dusty road. Despite the tourism that sustains it, Livingstone retains the aspect of an outpost. Its flat concrete storefronts and single main drag echo the frontier character of the bush from which it was carved.
On the banks of the Zambezi we stay in outrageously cheap luxury at the Livingstone Safari resort, our nightly ritual of beers, gin and tonics, and bullshitting carried out on the humid patio by the river. We don long sleeves and bug spray as the sun sets and the mosquitoes rise from the grass and trees that stand silhouetted thin and spectral from the water along the banks. Beyond, unseen beneath the flat water, the crocodiles lurk.
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