Far and Away: Reporting from the Brink of Change

Always, there was the dancing; it seemed that we were perpetually dancing, old and young alike. Some evenings we would go out to the small bars of the port villages and dance with the swashbuckling locals to music as old as the hills, our shoulders thrown back and our arms raised as we went in a ring. Tom was a champion Bodrum efe dancer, and he taught the men of our group these local traditional steps (“You have to make it look very high testosterone,” he explained encouragingly). In Kaş, some of us ventured to a provincial disco, where Turkish windsurfers and scuba divers were rocking to Rod Stewart while their women gyrated like latter-day Salomes high on Olivia Newton-John.

But most of all, there was the dancing on board. After breakfast, and again after lunch, some of us would nap while others, listening to music on a cassette player or imagining it in the sounds the wind made as it touched the cliffs, would twirl along the main deck. Susannah, wearing one of her trailing dresses, would laugh as someone dipped her over the bow so that her hair hung down toward the sea, and the crew would peek out from the main saloon. In this world of teak and sailcloth, we fancied ourselves bacchants.

During a sudden rainstorm one hot day, we all rushed out and stood with the water streaming down our faces, halfway between dancing and swimming, sliding on the deck while, on one of Tom’s tapes, a Turkish man sang in a throaty voice about his burning, burning love. It seemed that, though we had a concentration of that respect for irony that is the essence of English humor, we had somehow left ashore ironic distance from our immediate circumstances. This was the first and only odyssey, and everything we did on that boat seemed more real than our real lives, at least for the moment. And if we thought of the long trip back, we no more imagined that we might have stayed at home and contemplated Lycia than did Alexander the Great, who first touched these still-unspoiled shores in 333 BC.

ZAMBIA

Enchanting Zambia

Travel + Leisure, February 1998

I had first visited Zambia in 1992, and I returned in 1997. Zambia has since become a popular destination, but it was well off the beaten track in the 1990s, and though this safari was at the rough end of the spectrum, it allowed the photographer, two friends of mine, and me to see the fierce beauty that can inhere in feral wilderness.

A few years ago, I spent a month driving with a friend through southern Africa. Our plans were vague and our knowledge thin until one night in Botswana, when we eavesdropped on a bearded man with an air of sublime safari competence, solicited his advice, and rewrote our itinerary. But we had little opportunity to apply our new certainties. Two days later we overturned our car on a rough road in Zimbabwe, bringing our trip to an abrupt and ignominious end. For five years I fantasized about returning to southern Africa, and last July I finally set off to explore Zambia with two good friends, a photographer, and the bearded man himself, Gavin Blair.

We wanted a country that was challenging, obscure, and fresh; interesting, beautiful, and not dangerous. We wanted a place with good game viewing, as well as access to local culture. In Zambia, the former Northern Rhodesia, Gavin said we would feel as though we were discovering an Africa still unknown to the masses who have inundated the parks in Kenya, northern Tanzania, and South Africa. During two weeks there—aside from three days on what passes for a highway—we saw a total of eleven other vehicles.

A white Zimbabwean, Gavin Blair is licensed as a guide in three countries and is familiar with back roads and rare species in several others as well. He knows the Latin names for most plants you may see, the mating seasons of insects, and the spoor of every animal. He can fix a car, your binoculars, the broken wing of a bird, and the injured feelings of people bickering around the fire.

Gavin collected us at Mfuwe Airport, a small landing strip with good access to north-central Zambia’s parks, and drove us to South Luangwa National Park. His beautiful wife, Marjorie, was waiting for us in camp. An able cook, she can make a bed quickly, has a sharp eye for game, and is also a distinguished French-horn player who travels to Britain for three months each year to play with the Glyndebourne Touring Opera. She clearly prefers animals to all people except Gavin.