In Livingstone’s footsteps with Sir Ranulph Fiennes

Our guest of honour and expedition figurehead, Sir Ranulph
Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, 3rd Baronet, OBE, the world’s greatest living
explorer according to the Guinness Book of Records and the nearest modern
equivalent we could find to David Livingstone, looked tense and ill at ease.
His leg twitched restlessly. He slapped viciously at a mosquito alighting on
his cheek and swung his stump-fingered left hand at a larger, leggier insect
flying towards his ear.

The ex-SAS man and veteran polar adventurer, who got those fingers frostbitten
at the North Pole and sawed off the dead fingertips when he got back to his
garden shed in Exmoor (going down to the village midway through the process
for a fretsaw blade that snagged less on the bone), confessed that
‘creepy-crawlies’ unnerved him and he disliked them intensely.

His wife, Louise, patted him reassuringly on the leg. ‘I’m the absolute
opposite,’ she said. ‘Snakes, spiders, I love them all. I want to pick them
up and get a good look at them.’ Louise was the only woman in our party,
which didn’t seem to bother her in the least. A tough, capable, no-nonsense
Cheshire countrywoman, devoted to Range Rovers and rescuing stray animals,
she trained horses for a living and her hobby was endurance horse-racing –
100 miles a day if the horse was up to it.

Britain’s greatest living explorer

She married Ran in the spring of 2005. She was 38, divorced with a 10-year-old
son. He was 61 and recently widowed. She couldn’t believe how cutting and
cruel the British press were about their marriage and Ran’s achievements in
general. ‘Female journalists in particular,’ she was sorry to say. ‘Quite
frankly, I think a lot of them have gone off their trolley.’

She spent her honeymoon at base camp on Everest – ‘a nasty, filthy, spooky
place’ – and returned to England while Ran tried and failed to make the
summit. Then they went climbing in the Alps and to a film festival in the
frozen Canadian Rockies. ‘This is the first hot place I’ve got him to take
me since we got married and it’s raining like bloody Exmoor,’ she said.

‘We met in the Garden of Eden,’ said Ran in his precisely enunciated Old
Etonian English, ‘which is Louise’s terminology for Cheshire.’ ‘It is
paradise compared to Exmoor,’ she retorted. Ran smiled. Their hands
entwined. Rain dripped through the grass-thatched roof.

Simon Wilde, our chief organiser, a white African who owns a luxury guest
lodge further down the Zambezi, apologised for the weather. We were here to
replicate Livingstone’s historic 1855 journey down the river and celebrate
the 150th anniversary of his ‘discovery’ of Victoria Falls – or
Mosi-oa-Tunya, Smoke that Thunders, as the locals had always called it. It
was perhaps unfortunate, offered Simon, that Livingstone had been here in
mid-November, when the hot dry season reaches its scorching crescendo and
the first big storms of the rainy season arrive.

He called on Russell Gammon, a burly, red-bearded Zimbabwean safari guide and
African history expert, to give us a safety briefing. ‘Do you all know what
a Jeep Cherokee looks like?’ said Russell. ‘A hippo is longer, taller and
weighs twice as much. They might look cute or even comical but as most of
you probably know hippos kill more people than any other animal in Africa.
We will be keeping our eyes peeled and giving them a wide berth because a
hippo could easily bite one of these canoes in half. In fact, a hippo can
bite a one-ton crocodile in half, which brings us to our other major danger.
You do not want to be in the water. Do not trail any limbs in the water.
Approach the water after dark with great caution. Crocs are nocturnal
predators that hunt from an ambush at the water’s edge.’

What should we do, I asked, if a hippo upended our canoe or bit it in half and
put us in the water? We would be croc bait. ‘You worry about the hippo,’
said Russell. ‘You want to drift away or swim away with as little commotion
as possible. If a croc comes for you, which is unlikely, you’ll hear stories
about jamming an arm down its throat to make it let go, but if it’s a big
croc in deep water, you’re basically buggered.’

Down by the river, waiting out the storm in a tent, talking softly in the Lozi
tongue, were the three men most responsible for our safety and our basic
locomotion on the river. The African dugout canoe, or mokoro, is not a very
stable craft and, like Livingstone, we would be travelling with experts who
had been paddling these hollowed-out logs up and down the Zambezi since
boyhood. It seemed odd to me that Lemmy Nyambe, Saad Mweemba and Victor
Sikushaba ate their dinner separately from the rest of us and called us boss
and bwana. But it was my first time in Africa.

We slept in puddled tents and crawled out of them at 5am. The rain had stopped
and our mighty expedition kettle was on the fire for tea and coffee. The
first grey light revealed a huge sky filled with high storm clouds, and
shortly afterwards our small flotilla cast out into the wide Zambezi.

Replicating a historic journey is always a tricky business. You want to be
authentic but you don’t want an 1855 medicine kit or weevils in your
porridge, and would it really spoil the experience to bring along some
folding camp chairs? Our canoes were rigorously authentic. We would be
trying to camp in the same places on the same days of the year as
Livingstone, and if all went to plan, we would arrive at Victoria Falls for
the 150th anniversary of Livingstone discovering them. On the other hand, we
had mobile telephones, GPS navigating systems, coolers full of ice, beer and
Cokes, and a support motorboat carrying our food and camping supplies.

The boatmen stood on the back of the mokoros with long wooden paddles that
doubled as punt-poles. We sat on low chairs – one at the front, one in the
middle – and used short modern paddles. I was in the narrowest, wobbliest
mokoro with Guy Hammond, the expedition artist, and Saad paddling silently
at the back. It was alarmingly easy to lose your balance in those chairs.
The mokoro was always tipping one way or the other, often in quick
succession, and if you failed to counterbalance it, you would start to
topple over. Soon after we started I had one horrible, heart-pounding lurch
to the right which nearly put all three of us in the river. An hour later,
despite vigilant concentration, it happened again. ‘Third time lucky, eh
sport?’ said Guy with his usual blunt sarcasm.

When I first heard there was an artist coming along, I envisioned a sensitive,
refined type, but Guy was an ex-army Zimbabwean tobacco farmer with a hyena
grin and a way of calling a spade a shovel. He was fiercely right-wing,
bitterly funny about losing his farm to Mugabe’s comrades and glad that it
had turned him into a professional painter. He specialised in African
wildlife scenes and was planning to make a series of paintings from our
trip. ‘To commemorate the commemoration?’ I asked. ‘To make some f***ing
money,’ he replied.

The river was entering a flat treeless floodplain now, and the sky grew even
bigger and more epic with shafts of light piercing the storm clouds.
Silhouetted against the sky on the riverbank, two oxen pulled a cart made
from the back end of an old Datsun pick-up truck. We passed fishermen in
mokoros and cattle-herders on the banks who called out, ‘Hello, how are
you?’ and then, ‘How is your family?’ The river was low after a long
drought, and on the exposed islands and sandbanks there was a dizzying
multitude of birds – skimmers, waders, herons, storks, kingfishers,
cormorants, ibis, fish eagles soaring overhead and gyres of vultures
wheeling over the plains.

Ran Fiennes seemed largely oblivious to his surroundings. Head down, a look of
steely determination on his face, he paddled away like a machine all day.
Louise sat behind him and did no paddling. She leant back in her chair,
smiling and relaxed, pointing at birds and waterlilies and saying things
like, ‘Ooh, look at that lilac one. Isn’t that lovely.’

Late in the morning Saad uttered his first word from the back of our mokoro.
The word was ‘hippo’, pronounced with a silent ‘h’. Two dark heads were
visible a hundred yards downriver. Then two more heads surfaced and
swivelled their little round ears to get the water out. They looked at us
suspiciously and then submerged. We hugged the bank, paddling fast and
smooth, wondering where they would surface and hoping it wouldn’t be under
our mokoro, but we never saw them again.

‘Do you all know what a Jeep Cherokee looks like?’ said Russell. ‘A hippo
is longer, taller and weighs twice as much’

We pulled up on a sandbar and ate sandwiches made of some dubious Zambian
pressed-meat product. Simon called out to one of the paddlers:

‘Hey, Victor, is it going to rain?’ ‘Ah, no boss. No rain today.’ Ninety
seconds later the heavens opened and Ran coined the nickname Victor Fish – a
reference to Michael Fish, the BBC weatherman – that took some explaining to
the paddlers. For the rest of the trip, Victor’s weather forecasting was
absolutely dependable. If he predicted rain, it would stay dry. If he
suggested more wind, it would calm.

We paddled 28 miles that first day and most of it into a headwind. When
finally we found a sandbar to camp on we were tired and hungry, and Victor
said his arms were ready to fall off. We put up the tents in a whipping wind
by tying Coke bottles to the guy ropes and burying them in the sand as
anchors. Then the wind died away suddenly, the storm clouds lifted slightly
on the western horizon and a narrow strip of purple sunset appeared. A hippo
rose and grunted, and Russell handed me his binoculars. ‘The biggest mistake
people make on safari is to buy a brand-new expensive camera,’ he said. The
hippo opened his enormous jaws in a territorial display, then sank down
backwards into the purple river. ‘They get so focused on trying to get that
photograph that they miss half of what’s going on. I always tell people to
buy expensive binoculars instead.’

We ate pre-cooked curry and rice around the campfire and then the talk turned
to Livingstone. What drove this pious Scot to spend his life tramping around
Africa? He called himself a missionary and yet in 30 years of trying he
converted only one African to Christianity, and the convert later backslid.
‘Livingstone never grew disheartened by this because he loved being in
Africa and the company of Africans, especially when it involved a long,
arduous journey to some remote place where no white man had been before,’
said Russell. ‘More than anything I think he liked the sheer animal pleasure
of moving through wild, unexplored country.’

Livingstone called himself a missionary and yet in 30 years of trying he
converted only one African to Christianity, and the convert later backslid

It was a short step to questioning Ran Fiennes about his motivations. What
compelled him to drag a 485lb sled across 1,350 miles of Antarctica, for
example? He gave his usual answer: ‘It’s my job. I was thrown out of the SAS
for trying to blow up the film set for Doctor Dolittle, which was an
environmental eyesore, and I started doing expeditions because I could get
paid to do them and it was the only sort of thing I was trained to do. I
enjoyed solving the problems, I suppose, and beating the competition, which
was usually the Norwegians.’

Was it true that the Norwegians spread a rumour that he and Charlie Burton had
hauled prostitutes on their sleds to the North Pole in 1979? ‘Absolutely
true and absolutely ridiculous,’ Ran replied crisply. ‘At 48 below zero what
possible use could you have for a prostitute and why on earth would you want
to pull the extra weight? We didn’t give them a hard time about it because
one of the Norwegians had to have his foot amputated that year.’

The next day trees started to appear on the riverbank, isolated acacias and
fat-trunked baobabs at first, and then a lush green forest studded with
palms. The sun came out for the first time and tried to sear holes in my
skin. I’ve spent most of my life in hot places but nowhere had my white skin
ever felt so worthless, so fundamentally impractical, as under that African
sun.

We turned up a side channel lined with papyrus reeds, and a man poled his
mokoro towards us, wearing a shirt with David Beckham’s face badly
reproduced on the front. The temperature was now 40C and like so many
African men along the river he was wearing a thick woollen ski cap. ‘It is
the fashion,’ explained Saad.

We heard rapids ahead and then saw the white water rushing and tumbling
through a maze of jagged black rocks. The boatmen told us to put away our
paddles; they could steer more accurately by themselves. We gripped the
sides with white knuckles, got splashed and jolted and thrilled, and all
made it through safely. Villagers cheered from the riverbank. A topless
woman washed a blue plastic chair. Soon afterwards we pulled into shore, put
up our tents at the Mambova Safari Camp and spent the rest of the day
compromising our authenticity.

There was an outhouse with showers, an open-walled thatched bar and a small
round shaded swimming-pool well populated with biting water beetles. Ran and
Louise waged a campaign against them – she pointed, he squashed and scooped
– and then stayed in there for much of the afternoon. Ran in his
swimming-trunks was taut and lean with well-defined stomach muscles, in
superb shape for a man of 62. He runs for two and a half hours every other
day and lifts weights on his off-days. He has trained like this all his life
(‘not much choice in my profession’) and even more rigorously when preparing
for expeditions.

The puzzling thing is the long white vertical scar down his chest. In June
2003, at the age of 59, he suffered a major heart attack while boarding a
plane, lost consciousness for three days and had double-bypass surgery. He
has often been described as the fittest man on the planet, so how was it
possible for him to have heart disease?

‘Chocolate,’ answered Louise bluntly. ‘Ran used to eat a family-size bar of
Cadbury’s Whole Nut every day and sometimes more than one.’

‘I had 2,600 of them left over from an expedition and I do have a terrible
sweet tooth,’ said Ran. ‘I used to smoke a pipe and roll-up
cigarettes, too, and I don’t suppose that helped.’

At the time of his heart attack, Ran and Mike Stroud, his partner from the
1993 crossing of Antarctica, were getting ready to run seven marathons in
seven consecutive days on seven different continents. Ran wasn’t the sort of
chap to let a double-bypass disrupt their plans. Five months after his
surgery, he completed the seven marathons with Stroud running alongside him
with a defibrillator. A year later he finished second in the North Pole
marathon, running in snowshoes at -25C, and decided he had finally had
enough of the poles. What next?

He had always been afraid of heights so he decided to climb Everest. Training
on Kilimanjaro, he felt a worrisome tightening in his chest and turned back
down. He had bad luck with weather on Everest but he was also concerned
about the way his heart felt high on the mountain. I wondered if he was
planning to scale back his exertions now and take more pleasure trips like
this one. ‘That’s certainly the right term for it,’ he said. ‘I don’t know
if this qualifies as an expedition. It’s far too pleasant and relaxing.’

Louise later explained this remark: ‘Ran’s never done anything like this
before. He’s either doing an endurance event or an expedition in some
godforsaken frozen wasteland or he’s on the lecture circuit getting
interviewed left and right. This is not easy for him. He finds it very hard
to relax.’

Like Livingstone we left our dug-outs at the beginning of the Katambora rapids
and went on a two-day walk around them. Unlike Livingstone we had a support
truck which carried our supplies and many plastic bottles of water. The
truck drove ahead and stopped every few kilometres. We would lean against
it, guzzling water and Coke, panting, sweating and pink-faced. The heat was
now up to 42C. Then the truck would drive off and we would start walking
again. To the villagers watching this, it must have been puzzling to say the
least. Why would anyone walk through the hottest part of the afternoon when
they had a perfectly good truck?

At first glance – conical thatched huts, bare packed reddish earth, chickens
and goats, no electricity or running water, a man binding together a
stone-age axe with a strip of rawhide – the riverbank villages looked much
as Livingstone would have seen them. Then a man would ride past on a bicycle
wearing a football shirt or you’d catch an earful of fuzzed-out African pop
music coming from the blown speakers of a boombox. The villages were poor
but people didn’t look hungry, grim or troubled. They asked after the health
of our families. They shook our hands and wished us a good journey. They
invited us to sit down in the shade and talk, but for some mysterious reason
we had to keep marching after our truck.

‘The locals threw stones at us during the Reading canoe race,’ said Ran.
‘They’ve got better manners here, haven’t they?’ said Louise. The decline of
morals, manners and character in modern Britain is a favourite topic for
both of them, and Louise thinks the first step should be to bring back
corporal punishment in the schools. Ran is often called eccentric in the
British media and this is partly because his belief system – patriotism,
decency, self-reliance, pluck and perseverance, a stiff upper lip, disdain
for the nanny state and pampering in general – has fallen by the wayside of
modern British culture.

He wouldn’t have been called eccentric in Victorian England. The Empire would
have made good use of a man like Fiennes, plucked him from the regiment,
dispatched him to its remotest frontiers and made a hero out of him at home.
Livingstone was admired for his fortitude in sewing up his own wounds after
being attacked by a lion. When Fiennes sawed off his frostbitten fingertips,
modern Britain wondered what was wrong with him. Surely the man must be mad.

On the second day of our trek we left the roads and villages behind and struck
out through the bush. We were joined by Isaac Sitali, one of Simon’s
employees who used to be a poacher and knew the land and its wildlife very
well. He took Ran, Louise, Guy and Ian (the expedition photographer) ahead.
Simon, Russell and I were about 15 minutes behind, following their tracks in
the sandy ochre soil. It was the hottest day yet – ‘hotter than a snake’s
arse in a wagon’s rut,’ in Russell’s phrase. ‘A merry heat doeth like a good
medicine,’ I said, quoting Livingstone. Maybe it was all the steak I ate the
night before, but I was coursing with energy, senses peeled and alert,
feeling chock-full of life.

We lost their tracks, fanned out looking for them and found them overlaid on
big round footprints the size of dustbin lids. They were tracking elephants,
and both sets of tracks looked very fresh. When we caught up with them they
were gawping at an enormous bull elephant tearing branches off a tree and
stuffing them into his mouth. He was looking right back at us, about 50
yards away, and we could hear what sounded like many more elephants behind
him.

It turned out to be two herds of about 50, moving parallel to each other so
the males wouldn’t have a confrontation. They seemed to walk in slow motion,
with each raised foot taking a long time to descend, although the babies
sometimes had to hurry. Then the sound of an engine on a nearby road set off
an alarm of trumpeting and both herds thundered off at speed.

The elephants were here because this was the last piece of untouched,
unpoached forest on this stretch of the river. Part of it was owned,
unfenced, by a burly white Zimbabwean former park ranger called Doug Evans.
He showed us to some tents by the river and told us to be extremely careful.
Not only were there ‘ellies’ around but hippos came up here to graze and
there were a lot of big crocodiles, plus the usual array of venomous snakes
and scorpions.

I found it hard to sleep that night, not because I was nervous. I felt too
excited and exhilarated. I went down to the river in the moonlight, treading
very slowly and carefully, stopping short of the water because of
crocodiles, and listened to the hippos grunt and the distant whooping of a
hyena. Coming back to camp I stopped in my tracks. There was a large animal
of some kind making a long, drawn-out grunting noise. Was it a hippo? An
elephant? A warthog? No, it was Russell snoring.

For the rest of the trip we were back in the mokoros, paddling and camping in
protected National Park land with a super-abundance of wildlife – hippos and
crocs by the dozen, elephant herds on the banks, warthogs, kudus,
waterbucks. We were treated to one particularly rare sighting: Sir Ranulph
Fiennes in the act of relaxation and enjoyment, sitting back with his paddle
across his knees and a smile on his face, pointing at elephants and saying
how marvellous it all was. ‘Nearly all my travels have been in places with
no living things except polar bears which wanted to eat you,’ he said later,
pouring himself a rum and Coke at our last campsite on Kilai Island.

Huck Finn was right. There’s something mighty free and easy about floating
down a river, even if the river is full of hippos and crocodiles. We had one
tense moment with a lone male hippo when we encountered him in a narrow
channel, but otherwise it was straightforward to paddle around them. A
closer call, perhaps, was the hippo that waddled through our last camp while
we slept, well sedated by rum and beer, and revealed itself by its
footprints in the morning.

The annoying whine of a sightseeing plane flying upriver from Victoria Falls
reminded us of our upcoming appointment with civilisation. We wanted to see
the falls but none of us wanted the trip to end, except maybe to get out of
the heat. It was 48C, or 119F, when we paddled through the last rapids and
around the last hippos and came into view of Livingstone Island with the
smoky spray of the falls behind.

We had been sleeping in tents for six nights. We were grubby and greasy, dizzy
from the heat, and we smelt of sweat, wood smoke and mosquito repellent.
Waiting for us on the shore were guitarists and crooners in traditional
African costumes, a man holding a silver salver with glasses of fruit punch,
journalists, photographers, dignitaries and the British High Commissioner,
Alistair Harrison, standing under a golf umbrella and wearing a suit, tie
and panama hat.

We shook a lot of hands and were led up a trail to a furnace-like marquee laid
out with white tablecloths, silverware and finger foods. We could hear the
falls but we weren’t allowed to see them yet. There were pleasantries to be
exchanged, photographs, introductions, interviews and costume changes. The
British High Commissioner changed into red swimming-trunks but kept on his
white shirt and hat because of the sun. Then swimming guides and native
towel-bearers appeared and led us over the rocks towards the Smoke that
Thunders, ‘the most wonderful sight’ Livingstone ever saw in Africa. ‘Very
impressive,’ said Ran. ‘That’s a lovely rainbow in the spray,’ said Louise.

The falls were astounding, but in my heat-dizzied state I kept getting
distracted by photographers and the surreal formality that surrounded us.
Our towel-bearers waited patiently on the banks while the swimming guides
took our hands and led us into the river and through some rocks to Devil’s
Pool, a deep roiling pocket of water on the very lip of the falls that
filled Ran with boyish delight. ‘This is absolutely brilliant,’ he shouted
over the roar of the water. ‘I can’t imagine a better place in the world to
go swimming. Louise, over here!’

Then there were speeches, and a plaque of Livingstone to unveil. Ran said how
proud we were to commemorate such a great explorer. Russell pointed out the
sad irony that Livingstone, who devoted so much of his career to trying to
end slavery, died of dysentery in a remote African village, 18 years after
seeing and naming Victoria Falls, and never learnt that the slave markets
had been closed down.

We all stood there dutifully in the scalding, blinding sun. The British High
Commissioner had put on a tie, black socks and lace-up shoes but was still
wearing his red swimming-trunks. Guy, whose ancestors came to Africa from
Scotland, had donned a kilt and sporran. He played Amazing Grace on the
bagpipes, and then we all scurried off like stricken moles to find some
shade.

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