African lodges tend to have a ‘one size fits all’ policy when it comes to the activities they offer. Morning and evening game drives. A visit to the local village. A day hike to the waterfall. But if you want something different, if you are persistent, you might luck out.
Gorongosa Mountain is a world-class birding area with at least a half-dozen endemic species. It’s presently off limits due to sporadic rebel activity, which accounts for the armed soldiers we have seen patrolling the area. An armistice may exist in impoverished countries … but the war is never over. So we settled for a trip to the Morrumbodzi waterfall instead. Eighty kilometers is a long way to go, especially when the first 20 are on bone-jarring washboard and the final ten can be negotiated only in 4WD. But we would get a chance to walk and we had Wilfred, the bird maven, all to ourselves.
Fire walking in the park
The area natives seemed to be from two different species, as different as grasshoppers and ants. The ‘grasshoppers’ of the village were drunkenly dancing to African music blaring from loudspeakers usually associated with air raid sirens and we had to walk for quite a while before it became quiet. Farther into the countryside the more industrious ‘ants’ were swinging heavy mattocks to till the fields for the new maize crop while the adjacent land burned untended. Fertilizer is unheard of so when the soil is depleted after a few seasons, they burn off the vegetation to create new fields. The smoke was thick and we sometimes had to step smartly to avoid being singed by the encroaching flames.
Lunch break
Wilfred seemed happy to be birding again, even though we had already seen most of the species he pointed out. We spent a lot of the time peering into thick bushes seeking out LBJs, those ‘little brown jobs’ like the colorful gray waxbill, that were new to us. We reached Morrumbodzi after about five kilometers, nothing special as waterfalls go, especially after Victoria Falls. But the setting was picturesque, shady and cool, the perfect spot for lunch. It was wonderful to be out on foot, interacting with nature and not just spectators. And for a while we felt we were actually in control.
Gray waxbill
