Photography by Ingo Barenschee
Feature: Driver's Notebook: Unlimited Adventure
October 1, 2006
"Lion tracks," Kiki Phiri said, as he stopped the Jeep and craned his head out the driver’s side window. Phiri, manager of Nkwali Camp for Robin Pope Safaris, is also an experienced game guide and tracker. But after an entire morning of scouting, this was the first time he had even mentioned the elusive big cat by name. "They’re fresh," he added with a big smile. "She’s hunting."
And so the hunter became the hunted. It was our last day on safari in Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park—the living, breathing, big game–teeming heart of Africa—where we had come to test-drive the Jeep Wrangler Unlimited in its natural habitat: the bush. But after extended, intense driving over some of the most treacherous terrain ever devised by Mother Nature—down the Mchinga Escarpment, through thick mopani woodlands, and literally through the Mutinondo River—it was a distinct luxury to be driven for once, and to reflect on the previous week’s adventure.
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A Thornicroft’s giraffe, endemic to the South
Luangwa Valley, is distinguishable by its spots, which extend only to its
knees. (Click image to enlarge)Luxury is a relative concept, but compared to other modes of transportation in this remote part of the Zambian countryside—which consist mostly of bicycles and ox-drawn carts—a convoy of air-conditioned Jeeps may as well be a presidential motorcade. With the exception of vintage Land Rovers brandishing safari company logos and a few dark green, government-issued Toyota pickup trucks brimming with laborers, privately owned vehicles simply do not exist in this part of the world.
The bush is, however, the perfect venue in which to test four-wheel-drive, go-anywhere, do-anything SUVs. Upon our arrival at Mpika’s hard-packed dirt airstrip, an entire fleet of shiny (except for one inexplicably scratched and crumpled fender and hood) 2007 Wranglers awaited us, and in an effort to avoid the tsetse flies, it did not take long to get down to the business of driving.
Navigating narrow left-lane driving roads is not the easiest way to transition to an exotic landscape after 24 hours of mostly airborne travel. The experience would have been less nerve-racking had both sides of the dirt path not been bordered by claustrophobia-inducing walls of elephant grass: the sub-Saharan African version of a luge run.
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Hippos. (Click image to enlarge)Jim Misner, chief engineer for the Wrangler, joined me for the first leg of the journey to go over the basics. "This is the first four-door Wrangler we’ve ever built," he explained. "We’ve made it longer, and a bit wider." To add that extra set of doors, the Wrangler’s wheelbase grew 20.6 inches in length, an expansion that also provides more shoulder-, hip-, and legroom for passengers. Misner noted that the Wrangler Unlimited offers more cargo space—at 83 cubic feet—than either the Hummer H3 or the Toyota FJ Cruiser. Perfect, in other words, for carrying groceries, piles of firewood, or bags of grain from one village to another.
Zambia, formerly known as Northern Rhodesia, appears relatively small on the map when compared to neighbors like the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), Namibia (formerly South West Africa), and Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika). But at more than 290,000 square miles, it covers an area roughly 10 percent larger than Texas. Home to more than 11 million human inhabitants, the country is also a haven for nearly 25,000 elephants, along with countless herds of Cape buffalo, zebra, impala, kudu, and puku, or what Misner termed "DLTs," for deer-like things.
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