The Accidental Coca Lord
Chapter 18 Part 1
Gorongosa - Mozambique’s new Eden
For previous chapters click here
It’s hard to write about protected areas in Africa without drawing criticism. Many remain controversial because they were generally created and managed, often through draconian means, by Western colonialists. Like Yellowstone, the world’s first national park, the MO of many of them was the removal of native peoples for the protection of wildlife. Old-school conservation ideals separated people from the landscape and erased their symbiotic history.
More progressive conservationists, however, understand the value of native communities to their ancestral lands – both as protectors and as part of the ecosystem. They see the connection between protected areas and colonialism, and want to reverse it, reintegrating humans and wildlife back into the same landscape. This would be a great idea if we lived in an ideal world. The unfortunate truth is that wildlife is rapidly ceasing to exist outside protected areas across Africa, as human populations grow and their exploitation of the landscape continues, with all that this entails. The legacy of colonialism is therefore forced to continue, because there is sometimes no other option.
As a result, there’s a struggle between wants, needs, sensibilities and differing moralities – cut by race and power – when attempts are made to establish more sensible conservation models. Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique provides a great example of the battle between progressive and old-fashioned models. War had broken down the perimeters of the national park, with the army, the right-wing RENAMO rebels and the local people decimating the park’s wildlife in a desperate scramble to survive, find some protein and make some money. By the turn of the millennium the park was a mess, almost completely denuded of its wildlife. From being one of the most impressive national parks in Africa in the 1960s, it had become a landscape wrecked and beaten. The growing population along the park’s edges and its place slap bang in the middle of a protracted civil war seemed to leave it little hope. Then Greg Carr – a tech multi-millionaire from Fucksville, Idaho (trust me, I’ve been there) – showed up. And he changed everything.
Perhaps it’s because Greg never answers his phone that he took it upon himself to pioneer voice mail. As a tech whizz in Boston, Greg was one of the key engineers behind phones and computers talking to each other. This made him incredibly wealthy – $800 million dollars wealthy – but he spent his fortune wisely and generously, buying Ernest Hemingway’s last house in Ketchum, Idaho, and gifting it to the town. Greg’s a Jack Mormon, which means he doesn’t believe but was raised that way, as with so many people in southern Idaho. He’s energised and enthusiastic, interested and distracted in equal measure, but ultimately a very cool, smart and charismatic human being.
Greg was invited to become the director of Gorongosa by Joaquim Chissano, the president of Mozambique, after he saw him speak at Harvard. Greg, an avid reader, had become increasingly influenced by the writings of both the legendary biologist E. O. Wilson and Nelson Mandela. At the time Mandela and Chissano had been discussing what they called ‘peace parks’ – national parks set up and maintained for the benefit of both humans and animals. Greg’s progressive views on conservation dovetailed completely with that idea, a union was formed and Gorongosa became a ‘human-rights park’.
Greg met me as I stepped off a tiny Cessna onto the grass airstrip that flanked the park headquarters, laughing at the sight of me dripping in cameras and bags. We’d met a few weeks earlier at a National Geographic function and I think I’d impressed him with my complete disregard of formal professionalism. We lunched in the restaurant adjacent to the airstrip, which formed the centre of a large ring-shaped array of cottages and a swimming pool – for the tourists and staff members, and Greg later introduced me to an endless parade of scientists and conservationists from all over the world.
We ate chips and drank Cokes, while watching the marauding vervet monkeys with amusement. They were handsome creatures with inquisitive black faces and smooth silver fur; evil little sneak thief bastards, of course, but the males had incredibly impressive turquoise blue nut sacks. This meant that you couldn’t get angry with them, even when they stole your entire meal when you were checking your mobile. I watched them as Greg chatted – they had the place wired and seemed to particularly love the pastries all laid out on the buffet counter in the middle of the restaurant. They’d scamper across and snatch them when nobody was looking, grabbing armfuls of the things and running away from the waiting staff on their hind legs before hopping into the ceiling beams, where they’d gorge themselves while sticking their fingers up at the waiters. Occasionally a waiter would appear with a catapult and pretend to fire it at the monkeys. They’d scatter up onto the roof, only to appear a few seconds later, prying eyes popping out from the roof edges, to watch again for any lapses in concentration down below.
I tend to hit the ground running when I arrive on a new assignment, so after a quick shower we jumped in Greg’s red and black JetRanger helicopter and took her for a spin. Mike Pingo, a veteran chopper pilot from Zimbabwe, flew us first across the vast acacia savanna to the north. The land was dry but pricked here and there by lush green thickets and swamps. These gave way to small grassy plains speckled with rare sable antelope and buffalo herds and dotted white with caravans of egrets. We passed over rivers and canyons, traversing the ridgeline of an impressive series of rock faces that thrust out of steep, heavily wooded hillsides, eventually setting down on the edge of a large, crescent-shaped cliff that towered above an expansive forested valley.
Greg leapt from the helicopter, which Pingo had skilfully landed on a small patch of bare rock, and enthused about the vastness of the place, the number of species it held, how many there must be that hadn’t yet been discovered, the number of endemics, and how it was a scientist’s heaven because of its diverse landscape and remote ecosystems. I shot images of Greg as he waved his arms and chatted enthusiastically along the cliff edge, looking down in awe into the forest below. The light was awful, though, the sun burning hot and blinding, so the pictures were just records.
A small pool had formed among the giant rock slabs next to where Pingo had parked the chopper, so I stripped off, jumped in and swam around for a bit, while my assistant Jen took embarrassing photos of me on my phone. Jen was a mammalian ecologist completing her doctorate. She lived in Gorongosa and, along with her research work, had become the designated photographer for the park. She was already accomplished, having completed a Fulbright scholarship, and had been assigned to me by National Geographic to help me out. I liked Jen a lot. She was very reserved and guarded at first, but she relaxed after a while. The water was a bit murky, almost green, and it had a dead snake in it, but the dip was heavenly. I’d needed to wake myself up, cool down and take a break from the heat and dust.
We soon took off again and hopped along the forested cliffs for a while until Pingo set us down in a small forest clearing. We jumped out of the chopper and followed Greg as he excitedly led us down to a river, scrambling on our butts through leaf litter and climbing down boulders the last few feet to the beach. The river had dried up to form a small stream and exposed its golden sandy edges, thick with elephant and monkey prints that we followed until a bend, which forced us to wade through the water – Jen and I holding our shoes, with Greg completely oblivious in his trainers. We followed the stream down into a steep, high canyon, overgrown with epiphytes and trees that clung to its sheer face. It wound tight corners and we rounded them carefully, looking for elephants – relieved when we didn’t meet one and slightly disappointed too.
Greg became increasingly animated as we arrived at a small cave, and he led us in. ‘This is a bat cave,’ he enthused, ‘keep your shoes on.’
I chose to ignore him and left mine on the beach as we crouched low and headed into the darkness, shining the small light from our phones to see the way. ‘Is this bat shit I’m walking in?’ I asked, realising my feet were squelching deeper and deeper into sloppy, foul-smelling mud.
‘Oh, most certainly,’ Greg replied. ‘Be careful you don’t cut your feet. Who knows what diseases there are in here.’
I realised that Greg wasn’t saying this as a joke, but was in fact genuinely excited by the idea of disease diversity. ‘Well, let’s hope it’s only Marburg and Ebola,’ I muttered to myself.
The cave opened up after a while and we climbed out into the sunlight that streamed in from above. My feet were thick with black grossness but there was nowhere to clean them, so I followed Greg up a rock face on my hands and knees, then through a tight slot canyon until the cave system ended. There, Greg – utterly happy, utterly childlike – pointed out bats hanging in the ceiling crevices and ran off the names of a few species, while I shot pictures of him.
Back in the air, we carried on north from the canyon over palm forests and savannahs until we reached a forest that seemed to stretch on forever. Three large cone-shaped hills stuck out of the limitless canopy.
‘The Bunga Inselbergs!’ Greg shouted over the helicopter mic, pointing them out.
Pingo took us down to get a closer look and I shot pictures. We’d taken one of the doors off the chopper so I could lean out and shoot as we recce’d around, and we circled the closest inselberg, a tall peak of steep, gullied rock overgrown with trees and shrubs.
‘These are biodiversity hotspots,’ shouted Greg. ‘They need more examination but they seem to have their own species.’
I frantically fired off images of the landscape with the inselbergs standing proud of it. Greg then pointed out the distant ridgeline of Gorongosa mountain just visible through a haze of smoke to the west. The mountain looked huge and imposed itself impressively upon the landscape.
‘It’s where the Vinduzi River is born,’ he continued. ‘The river that feeds Lake Urema.’
We headed south-east and Greg pointed out the Vinduzi snaking lazily through the forest below us. We followed it for a while across a dynamic kaleidoscope of lush deep green canopy and parched brown savannahs. Eventually the landscape opened out, releasing the river into a vast mudflat, veneered with bright green algae and inscribed with a thousand black lines where animals had tracked across it. Beyond, the lake shimmered silver blue to the horizon, where it merged in the heat haze with the sky. Huge flocks of snow white pelicans erupted beneath us, scattered by the helicopter. I photographed them flapping then gliding in a huge arc out over the lake. As Pingo lowered us over the water, we saw hippos cutting through the middle of the lake and crocodiles lurking along the edges, vanishing gently and effortlessly as we flew over them.
We turned west over a shelled-out concrete building that stood close to the lake’s swampy edge.
‘That’s Hippo House. It used to be accommodation,’ Greg shouted, ‘but it was all shot up and destroyed during the war.’
The roofless concrete shell pockmarked with bullet holes looked interesting. Part of my brief was to try and find relics of the colonial-era, pre-war Gorongosa, from the time that ‘whitey’ might consider to be its heyday. Bookending the southern end of the Great Rift Valley, Gorongosa had been a mecca for adventurous European tourists and hunters throughout most of the twentieth century, and I could tell that Hippo House, despite being now reduced to a forlorn cadaver, would have seen a lot of G&Ts in its day.
A herd of elephants appeared as we flew inland across areas of taller woodland, which soon broke into fever tree forests, whose bright green canopy set off a beautiful pattern against the lime green bark of their trunks. Elephants ran for cover beneath the fever trees, bunching tight as we passed over them, the young sheltered by the larger animals around them.
On our way back to base we headed out over the floodplain that sits at the heart of the park. It seemed to go on forever, a great sheet of short, lush grass, neatly bisected by the dried-out course of the Mussicadzi River. This had completely ceased to flow, reduced by the dry season to a series of stagnating pools filled with flocks of birds as we buzzed over it. The floodplain was thick with waterbuck, which dotted the land as far as the eye could see.
‘We’ve got the largest waterbuck herd in Africa,’ Greg shouted as I leant out to shoot pictures of them. ‘About 58,000.’
The waterbucks ran as we passed over them, their large, powerful bodies dwarfing the more delicate oribis and bushbucks that ran with them. The photos were hopeless but the scene incredible, like a jigsaw-puzzle vision of Africa, an Edenesque landscape teeming with wildlife. It didn’t quite seem real.
That evening Greg drove us out to the lake for sundowners, and we drank G&Ts with coolbox ice on the bonnet of his Jeep while watching crocodiles with our binoculars. One of us spotted an apparently rare herd of wildebeest dotting a far ridgeline. By the time the lingering sun finally set, I’d fallen in love with the place.
I ended my marriage the following morning.
In the next instalment I unravel again (what a twat). And we dart an elephant and everything goes spectacularly wrong.