Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

The next day, the sun was dipping by the time we reached northern Kafue National Park. We collected firewood in a low gorge and arrived at our campsite in near darkness. Gavin asked us politely not to help set up camp, as we would only be in the way, so we took a bottle of wine down to the river and watched the stars come out. If I had to choose one favorite Zambian park, it would be Kafue. The animals were not so different from the animals elsewhere, nor were the trees, but things were somehow especially elegant, as though nature had been in a landscaping mood when she put it all together. We saw our first leopard there, as sensual and spotted and diffident as we’d anticipated. We saw cheetahs. For three more days we drove through Kafue’s hills and took long afternoons for walking, reading, and writing postcards. Then we drove south half the length of Kafue, arriving at twenty-five-mile-long Lake Iteshi-Teshi. We climbed onto the boulders, where the rock hyraxes, or dassies, little mammals with rodent-like features, gathered to sun themselves. Lake Iteshi-Teshi was primeval, like the world’s inaugural day, with hippos, zebras, and one boat: a little canoe making its way across the middle ground like a detail added by a sentimental painter.

The next day we headed into the nearly abandoned southern part of Kafue. The herds of animals—five hundred buffalo together, even more impalas, troops of wildebeests—looked surprised to see us. We saw a hundred pelicans roosting in an acacia tree, its leaves completely white from their droppings. We followed the turquoise flight of a lilac-breasted roller. Finally we came to a clearing in which the sun focused itself bright, an enchanted place. Beneath a spreading mopani tree, Gavin and Marjorie pitched camp. We watched the moon rise and had honest talks while the fire burned down to firefly embers.

In the morning we drove through more wilds, stopped in Livingstone to shop, and then crossed into Zimbabwe at Victoria Falls. At our hotel there, I found my wallet waiting for me. A worker in Luangwa had found it and managed to reach American Express, which had obtained my itinerary and facilitated delivery. My cash was all there.

That night we put on whatever crumpled but presentable clothes we found in the bottom of our suitcases and headed off to the Victoria Falls Hotel for supper. There was a band; there was dancing; we ordered from menus and drank champagne toasts to the bush. When, in the morning, we said good-bye to Gavin and Marjorie, we had that slight pang of an intensity ended, the same feeling I had had when I left college—that things might be otherwise and fine but would never be quite like this again.

One of the liabilities of writing about places off the beaten track is that in doing so you help beat new tracks. Tourism in Zambia has reached unprecedented highs in the twenty-first century. But this seems like a social good: the only effective defense against poachers, logging, and everything else that destroys big game is an infrastructure that supports animal protection, and tourism is often the engine of such safeguards. Since my visit, falling copper prices have made Zambia more reliant on tourism; the elimination of yellow fever has made the country more attractive to visitors. It’s easy to romanticize neglected places, but that neglect is often deadly for the people who live there.

CAMBODIA

Phaly Nuon’s Three Steps

The Noonday Demon, 2001

I did not go to Cambodia to learn about mental illness, but to study the architecture of Angkor Wat. My first night in Phnom Penh, I sat next to someone to whom I mentioned my depression research, and he mentioned Phaly Nuon. I told him that I’d love to interview her, even if it meant losing a day touring up north. During the interview he helped set up, I realized that I couldn’t write about depression without the cross-cultural perspective that subsequently became a defining theme of my book. The following passage from The Noonday Demon is slightly expanded to stand on its own.