The problem with Africa is that it gets in our blood from the very first minute. It´s a feeling that I had heard or read about a thousand times, but I did not think that I could feel firsthand.
Now, leaning over my computer, thousands of miles away, I think of Africa.
When I left the house this morning, the yellow leaves of the ash trees covered the sidewalk, a sign that announces the fall in Buenos Aires; and yet my thoughts were still in the endless savannah covered by grass and the African woods that were saturated in colors.
Each fishing trip gives us something special but the first time we felt an elephant scratching against the tent poles during the night, every cell of our body was awakened by very deep feelings that are not easy to share or explain.
Through the window of the small aircraft that took us from Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, to our campsite, the land was covered by dry trees and burned grass which immediately gave path to more pronounced hills; and one of the sharp ends of the extensive valley of Gran Rift started to slide below us while we overflew the Luanwa river.
The extremity of the valley gets lost in the steep elevation that precedes the majestic Zambezi River.It was only a couple of months since the last drops had fallen on the land and the valley was still all green.
From the air, the Zambezi River looked like a giant snake moving slowly in lazy curves, the yellow sandbars formed the spots in the body of the imaginary reptile.
I turned around in my seat looking again at the pilot´s back that was lowering the speed while looking for the runway. Small turbulences of warm air let us know that we were getting close to the ground, welcoming us to the past of the planet.
We could see huge baobabs with its strange crowns like roots pointing to the sky, as if someone had planted them upside down. The tales say that the baobab was condemned to live like that for its arrogance; however, they continue to look magnificent.The aircraft made a tilt of the left wing in a pronounced way, quickly losing altitude at the time that it made a wide circle.
In a few minutes, the tires touched the ground, and after a few bounces the aircraft stopped near the truck that was waiting for us under the shade of a few acacias trees.
Finally, we stepped on African land, in Zambia, meters away from the majestic Zambezi River, a river that forms the impressive Victoria waterfalls hundreds of kilometers upstream.
Stepping out, we could feel the hot breath of Africa while a group of baboon monkeys took advantage of the shadow given by the trucks, our presence didn´t seem to alter them too much in their searching for roots and tender stem.
During a long time we had dreamed of Africa, its flatland covered of high grass, its forests and animals. We were scared that too much time had gone by and the changes that take the world to an uncertain destiny had erased great part of the charm that we expected to find.
Zambia could not escape its turbulent past of wars and destruction of the wildlife but today it has an unrecognizable serenity. The capital, Lusaka, with almost two million inhabitants already has shopping centers and fast food. A growing middle class drives luxury cars that have stopped being an exclusive privilege for the politics on duty. However, everybody greets each other as if the atmosphere of the ancient town still was around.
Getting off the plane, I also thought of the eternal conflict in Africa between the animals and the people. Would we find the ancient safaris feeling or just people with the cell phone stuck to their ears?
The purists still like to dream with the good old times, with a territory of pioneer old hunters that reacted fast before the dangers or the boring clients.
These good old times when cell phones were not yet invented, the telephone lines hardly reached outside of the towns, and one or two calls by radio were enough to solve the needs of the day.Luckily the camping site in the Chongwe River showed us a truly wild place were civilization still has no right to interfere.
Arriving to Chongwe by plane is not the best way to notice the remoteness of the location but it’s a hard place to get to by driving, all the tracks are just soil, and if it rains it turns into something impossible to deal with, even with the most well prepared truck.
Our store was meters away from the outlet of the Chongwe River into the great Zambezi, the same site were Livingstone camped in his trips by the river.
For a moment we felt as if the ghosts of the old explorers and Livingston welcomed us to tell us that we were going into a different world.
The Tiger Fish were an excuse to get there, but at that moment while turning our faces towards the breeze that came from the river with vegetation and animal smell, we felt that a layer of skin came off our bodies, a layer that reflected civilization and society values that transform us into something that we never wanted to be, a number in the machine of somebody else.
Feeling the Zambezi breeze and watching the free hippopotamus for the first time one feels like a kid again, eager to scream loudly and audibly.
For an instant we left civilization behind, as well as ages of comfortable, civilized and secure life in the city, to take a new step and absorb everything that this new and strange world wanted to show us.
We quickly decided how our days in the Livigstone land were going to be: foot safaris or by truck, and Tiger fishing during the afternoon, when the action was more violent.
Despite being in central Africa the mornings were cool, ideal for the wildlife that walk around but not so convenient for good fishing. In mid-morning, the animals start to look for shade to lay down and it was the moment in which we returned to the camping.
Lunch was early and, after a nap, we used to travel across the Zambezi looking for Tiger Fish and other fishes that we could tempt with a fly.
The Zambezi is one of the biggest rivers in Africa and it goes for several thousand kilometers. The river goes across the low land that is completely flooded in the rain season, thereby forming hundreds of islands, sandbanks, curves and all types of formations. Lots of tributary rivers feed the river in the humid season, making it grow. Unlike the Golden Dorados, the Tigers prefer slower waters and they don’t place themselves so much in the end and in front of the logs but behind them in the zones were the water loses speed and settles.
Armed with a mouth and teeth that have no comparison, the Tigers have a fast and violent bite. Certain sizes of these fish give a fight that has no relation with its size.
They are not easy to keep in the hook because of the disproportionate teeth that they carry. There is not much skin in the mouth for the hook to be set, and soon we noticed that a finer hook gave better results than the normal ones we used for the Dorados.
Since three in the afternoon till nightfall they show themselves very active, but we always had to look for them downstream with sinking lines.
There are so many fishing eagles in the trees of the riverbank looking for a prey, that the fish has learned that it is really dangerous to swim close to the surface.
The eagles went with us as we fished, checking if they could steal something from us, they were of large sizes and very capable of lifting a Tiger of several kilos through the air.
Seeing a Tiger makes you realize that there is no doubt that they have a distant relationship with our Dorado, the marks in their body look like the colors in the fins but the teeth of a tiger, like the crown of the baobab, looks like something born from a great fantasy. 
The truth is that seeing the size of the teeth of the tigers we immediately think of the stress that the other fish must go through in those waters.
The tigers do not pay attention to the leader so we chose for a stretch of fluorocarbon of 25 pounds of a couple of meters, with a steel cable of 40 pounds before the fly.
The craft fur flies, like the ones we use for the golden dorados or tarpon, worked very well but sometimes did not go down fast enough behind the logs, so the Clouser type really were unbeatable, especially one we baptized Zambezi Ripper that I would like to test with golden dorados, since it was a killer with tigers of all sizes.
The encounter with wild animals is constant on the river bank. As we were in dry season the majority of the internal ponds disappeared and the animals came down during the morning and night to the river.
Casting a fly with a male elephant of some tons agitating the water meters of distance away brings us strong echoes that come directly from the white explorers that stepped in the African coast. Groups of hippos, big and loud, appear in every low sections of the river and because they can remain submerged, we have to navigate being careful. The adult males are very bad tempered and don’t lose the opportunity to prove that they are the owners of the river. Not even the big crocodiles that sunbathe in the edge are willing to be measured by enraged hippopotamus. An adult hippo is capable of splitting apart a crocodile with only one movement of his jaws, armed with important fangs.
The animals are the main event here, so please forgive me if fishing takes a secondary place in this tale; they are the ones that add another dimension to the strange mixture of the place.
In those now preserved lands, the line between reality and fantasy is very thin and both the scientific and the dreamer find their place, and many times the same answer to their questions.
The magic is obvious and does not hide under the surface, we don´t have to look for it as she covers us completely from the first moment that we put a foot down on this special land, making us experience Nature in depth.
In the brief break between the afternoon and the evening, when everything seems quiet and the tall grass and trees acquire a blue tone before going to black, the sounds of the day gradually stop and an interval occurs, until the night announces its total possession and the singing frogs seem to give a starting signal for an entire orchestra of sounds, screams and drama.
Several times, when hearing a special sound we imagine what some animals can feel when they are being stalked by something that they hardly see, and we feel something similar along our spine when we get close to a group of lions or a leopard walks a few steps from us.
Nighttime comes fast, and dinner by the fire allows us to share some experiences of the afternoon. The hippos, as soon as the light extinguishes come out of the river looking for tender grass. Some like to browse near our stores or tents, we saw them every night through the open windows and the mosquito net.
During the nights, the walls of our tents took life with night sounds and movements of lizards and frogs that looked for moths and other insects that had abandoned their daytime hiding places. There are all sizes of frogs, some small like a bean and others the size of a fist. You have to be careful not to squash one of them in the tent while walking during the night despite that most of them prefer to stay in the curtains, mosquito nets or any other vertical thing.
The open windows are a reminder of how vulnerable we are in these regions. So out of place we felt at least the first night when the first big animals appeared walking stealthily through the campsite.After a few days, not even an elephant leaning against our tent could stop us from falling asleep.To watch the animals you have to get up early. Around five in the morning, to have breakfast and then jump fast to the trucks.
Vervet monkeys wander peacefully between impalas, pukus, zebras and giraffes. Slippery bushbuck and kudus get lost immediately between the scrubland because of the marks in their skin, at the same time huge herds of buffalos walk looking for shade. Thousands of elephants once traveled across this land, today there are only a few thousand, but the number is slowly growing.
Nearly all animals tolerate well our proximity but we have to be very alert to the body language messages that they send us, especially when we are meters away from the elephants and their breed. The big females and the young males that normally walk with them don´t have much patient and they immediately let you know when they start to lose it with movements with their ears, sharp sounds and strong shaking of the trunk.
In the water the show is amazing and one prays so that the engine of the boat does not stop suddenly or get stuck in a sandbank.
When we got closer, by foot, the adrenalin circulated through our system with no restrictions, activating every pore of our body.
The shooting of the camera sounds like a Gatling machine gun. We calculate each step at the same time heavy sweat drops go down all our body.
Through the lens of the camera, the eyes of the animals penetrate directly ours and all of the African mystery appears to condense in an instant as if there was something else there, indefinable to the eye. A hidden secret, an invitation to a world which we have turned our backs to and, maybe, a piece of advice that warns us that in our path to a civilized world we have completely lost the ability to recognize the true essence of life.
In Africa, the magic is everywhere, in the wind that comes from the river and makes the branches of the acacias trees, lifting whirlwinds of red dust during the dry season; in the fragrance of the vegetation mixed with the strong sharp smell from different animals; in the mysterious calls of the hyena during the moon nights; and the singing of the lions from the other side of the river. In the baboon or the impala sounds to announce a leopards’ proximity or in the simple silhouette of a termite bear seen through the blood-colored evening light. 
The last day, nobody was up when I headed for the Chongwe River inlet. The high-pitched call of the fishing eagle sounded like a violin while the usual family of hippopotamus that was returning from their evening meadows got together, rehearsing all type of growls and blows.
As I mentioned, nobody was up and I had broken the rules of waiting for the helpers that came with the flashlights, but I was already feeling comfortable with the African risks and I accepted them. A baboon was sitting at the breakfast table. A big male with a serious and thoughtful look. For a moment, we looked at each other while I tried to get closer and then he jumped and disappeared towards the crown of the acacias trees that formed a green vault on the campsite.
I thought that our leap to civilization, as humans, is not as big and we are not that far away from the times when we got together near a fire, fearful of the sounds of the night. Africa makes us suspect that our existence has more than one layer, that there is a dimension that we have isolated from thanks to our education, manners and the environment that make us to play the part of consumers in society.
The problem with Africa is that once it gets into you, it’s like malaria: it does not kill you, but you cannot get cured of it. One ends up a prisoner of the freedom felt in Africa and, at the same time, responsible for a bond with lots of things, that never should have been broken.