Luangwa Valley

To anyone who has ever visited the Luangwa Valley, the following blog entry by PH Craig Doria with the headline "Puff Adders, Cobras and Floodwaters" will fascinate. Read the original posting - link at the end of this story.

"There is a huge wild valley in Zambia called the Luangwa Valley that just cannot be tamed. Of course, people have lived there since time immemorial, but they were unable to modify their world to any significant degree because the environment was just too tough for them.

In the 1790s chief Kazembe of the Lunda encouraged the first Europeans, the Portuguese, to open trade routes from Tete into Luangwa. The Portuguese found the place to be inhospitable and dangerous. They were plagued by malaria and troubled by wild animals.

In time, however, the Portuguese government granted estates throughout the Luangwa Valley, called Prazos, to families of mostly mixed Goan and African parentage. The Prazo owners formed their own bands of mercenaries and fought each other in this wild, lawless country. The ‘armies’ became known as the Chikunda, which is what the current inhabitants of the Luangwa Valley are often known as. By the 1890s Jose d’Araujo Lobo was the most powerful Prazo owner with an army of 12,000 men.

The strongest challenge to the Portuguese came from the Ngoni, an offshoot of the Zulu nation who were moving up from the south. The Arab traders from the coast also challenged them. But the British were the ones who finally forced the Portuguese to leave the valley, chased out the Arabs, and conquered the Ngoni.

What is particularly interesting about this rich history is that today one sees very little physical evidence of the Luangwa Valley’s past.

It has all been eaten by termites.

And things have not changed very much. We all built houses there, and lodges, and camps, and every so often the Valley (as it is affectionately known) reminds us that it is its own master. Every rainy season in fact.

I have never seen such active termites as in the Luangwa Valley. During the rains it seems that they go onto steroids and quite literally eat everything. We used to walk up to the bar at the nearby lodge in the evenings, and by the time we returned home the termites would have built a series of small towers coming up out of all the small cracks in the concrete floors. These humble beginnings of termite mounds could be four inches high when we caught them by surprise building away in our lounge. A colleague living nearby had a large personal library and kept each book in its own separate ziplock bag in order to keep them away from the busy jaws of the termites. They ate the back wall of our house and the thatch roof.

Snakes also come out aplenty during the rains. Big ones, small ones, medium-sized ones, up to five of them a day around the house and lodge. We had one particularly large cobra that seemed to live in a huge termite mound outside our house. Several evenings while we were drinking at the bar, our night watchman would come running up to tell us that this large snake was in the house and wreaking havoc. The snake was able to enter through the poorly crafted thatch roof, which was not good when our children were all tucked up sleeping in their beds. We would go down and usually find nothing. On one occasion, though, we found all the bottles on the bathroom shelf knocked to the ground. Then one day I found him in the roof of the outside long-drop and shot him from the inside with a 12-bore shotgun. It wasn’t very good for the roof.

Everyone tried to stay open year round and struggled through each rainy season with a dribble of wet tourists. Some new operators arrived, and one actually said to me in the bar late one night, “I’m going to show you guys how to run a proper safari business here.”

He sold his camp a couple of years later to an unsuspecting romantic.

There are a very small handful of safari operators and professional hunters who have lived in this valley for a long time. Adrian Carr is one of those people. Some readers might know Adrian due to a well-published, but unfortunate, accident with a fine Rigby rifle back in the 1970s. But that story has been documented elsewhere.

We had our small ramshackle collection of huts about 200 yards from Adrian’s house, and I apprenticed under him when I was doing my PH licence. So we got to spend a lot of time together in the bush.

We had a frightening encounter with a snake some years back. A buffalo had been wounded and we were following it. We spooked it twice, and each time we became a little more tense. Finally it entered the thicket along a dry, sand river. In we went and soon realized that its tracks were meandering back and forth and crossing themselves. We became even more tense. Eventually we found ourselves in a large stand of tall hyphereania. The two trackers were ahead of us and bent double, faces almost to the ground following the tiny drops of blood. We were behind, peering for all we were worth into the thick bush for any sign of the buffalo. Safety catches were probably off and fingers were probably curling ever so lightly around triggers. The buffalo just had to be close.

And then the two trackers turned into something molten and flowed back past us with such speed that we were slightly distracted by the sheer grace of it. My first conscious thought was, “OK, here it comes.” But there was no noise. No crashing of undergrowth and no heavy thumping of hooves.

And then Adrian leapt back, one nanosecond behind the trackers. That left me … brave … to face the music, and thinking, “That’s unlike Adrian.” And then I leapt back another nanosecond behind Adrian. And in that instant of us all leaping back we saw in front of us a spectre from every universal nightmare from every age of horror.

A seven-foot-long, two-headed puff adder was striking at us with both its hideous mouths agape and all four hideous fangs dripping with yellow venom. After leaping we staggered backwards, tripping over each other and stumbling to a rest several yards back. The buffalo was forgotten.

It took some time and a lot of confused chattering between all four of us:
“Huge snake!”
“Two heads!”
“Striking!”
“Both heads!”
“Let’s have a cigarette.”
But finally we went back to see the two-headed beast. By now, being a snake, and not very smart, it had settled down to doing what it had been doing before we had stalked so quietly onto it.

There, in an excited state of sexual bliss, and still joined at the vent, were two extremely large mating puff adders. With a long stick we hooked one up and it came with its partner attached. Inseparable they were.

But back to the story at hand.

Everyone with any sense knew that sooner or later the Luangwa River would flood properly. But we all built camps on the river. Of course!

Then in the rains of 2007 the river came up. Then it came up some more. “Oh it’s not too bad,” everyone said, “It’s good to have a proper rainy season for a change. This is just how the river should look at this time of year.”

And then overnight it rose even higher, and all the camps along the river were flooded. Water came up high enough that it flowed through windows and into well-decorated chalets. The lodges were all abandoned while everyone waited for the water to drop. And while everyone felt sorry for the lodge owners who lost a lot, it was really the local villagers who lost everything. These descendents of the Chikunda fighters had houses built of mud mostly along the banks of the Luangwa River’s tributaries. They all disappeared and people were left, standing on the edge of the one raised road that runs to the airport, with pathetic collections of what they had managed to salvage.

After a time the water started to go down, and the safari operators slowly started to move cautiously back in. The buildings were all awash with mud and slush. Adrian came back early and waded through what was normally dry land but was now a flooding Luangwa River, to get to his house that was on a slightly raised piece of land and thus almost dry. The water had receded enough to be lapping at the kitchen step.

Adrian and his partner Christina waded through flowing floodwater to their house and climbed the back step to survey the disaster. The inside of the house was, of course, a muddy mess, as they sloshed disconsolately from one room to the next. And in the main bedroom they found a large, black-necked spitting cobra.

One has to have seen a big black-necked spitting cobra to really know what a powerful presence it has. They are often over six-feet-long, and jet black. So jet black that they shine the deepest blue in sunlight. The scales seem as large as bathroom tiles, and they can be as thick as your wrist. And then they always turn to look at you when you approach. This is the most disconcerting. When a snake turns its head to watch you and fixes those dark eyes on you, you stop to think. The head is thick, rounded, blunt, muscular and … scary. The venom is a powerful cocktail of cytotoxins and neurotoxins and, of course, it not only bites but will also spit this venom into your eyes. I would think that after the black mamba it must be the most awe-inspiring African snake. So, of course, everyone is scared of them.

It is easy to imagine then, the fright they must have got when they walked into their bedroom and encountered the cobra. Adrian had a .22 rifle with him, and so he shot the snake. Then he shot it again, as you do with a large cobra in your bedroom. Then he carried the corpse through the muddy house draped over a muddy broom and left it on the kitchen step. He and Christina continued their house survey.

A few minutes later they returned and the snake had gone. They still had to wade back through the water where the snake had disappeared, so Adrian decided he had to find it. So he stood on the kitchen step, leaning out and hooking into the muddy water with the broom. About three metres away a single black coil of cobra rose slowly out of the water and disappeared in a gentle swirl as the current took it further away.

In every situation like this, there is a moment at which one could have backed off and saved oneself a useful place in the theory which Darwin propounds. But all too often we show that, indeed, we could easily be removed from the gene pool with no detrimental effect to the human race.

So into the water Adrian went to go and hook the snake and remove it from where he and Christina had to wade. And then a little deeper, above the knees fishing with the broom until, “Bugger me if I don’t feel it coiling around my leg … a couple of full, tight coils. So, like a Dinka warrior I lift my leg … slowly … stork-like from the water … and all six feet of shiny black snake is around my leg.” And if that wasn’t bad enough to send one to never-ending therapy, he continues: “The mouth is partially open, right up against my calf.”

Adrian had visions of dying cobras that we have seen bite pieces of wood or even themselves, but he somehow managed “to reach down ever so slowly and grab it just behind the head, all the while expecting a full bite.”

And his story ends thus “… I was shaking like a leaf. We then had a nice cup of tea (with lots of rum).”

http://russelhunter.wordpress.com/2009/03/26/puff-adders-cobras-and-floodwaters/