Life returns
This is a spectacular park and it could become one of the best in Africa with some assistance,’ wrote a visitor to Gorongosa National Park in the park’s guest book in 2004. Since then, that visitor has done more than his fair share to help make that vision a reality, donating more than US$20million to date to what many believed to be a lost cause, in what is one of the largest individual commitments in the history of African conservation.
Gorongosa is an Eden of savannah grassland, miombo forest, montane woodlands and floodplains in central Mozambique, protected as a hunting concession since 1921 and proclaimed a national park in 1960. During the ’60s and ’70s, Mozambique was a popular tourist destination, and the park was the jewel in its wildlife crown.
Whimsically known as ‘the place where Noah left his ark’, its 3,800 square kilometres were home to more predators than Kruger and denser herds of elephants and buffalo than the Serengeti. But that was before the country’s descent into several decades of brutal warfare.
The 11-year for struggle for liberation from Portugal, achieved in 1975, was followed by an even more savage civil war between the ruling Marxist FRELIMO and the Rhodesia-sponsored rebel RENAMO. By the time a peace treaty was finally signed in 1992, almost a million Mozambicans had been killed and the country was in ruins.
Gorongosa was one of the many battlegrounds for the two forces. Like the human population, the wildlife was decimated: thousands of buffalo, zebra and antelope were killed in skirmishes or to feed hungry solders; hundreds of elephants were slaughtered for ivory to buy arms. Professional hunters and commercial poachers took advantage of the post-war chaos to take out the remaining big game, while destitute villagers continued poaching to feed their families. By 1992, only 50 buffalo survived from a herd that once numbered 14,000, 108 elephants were left from a population of 2,200, and nothing remained of a herd of 5,500 wildebeest.
Fever trees
When the park reopened in 1995 with a new staff of 50 former soldiers, the government had scant resources to support it. The landscape was littered with landmines, Chitengo Safari Camp was in ruins and the tourists long gone.
Salvation came in the form of 50-year-old US IT multi-millionaire Greg Carr. He had resigned from all of his for-profit positions and founded the Carr Foundation to pursue philanthropy full-time when, in 2000, he was introduced to Carlos dos Santos, the Mozambican ambassador to the UN, who was trying to interest US investors in his country. Two years later, Carr visited Mozambique for the first time, and in 2004, after researching conservation projects in the country, he returned to tour six potential sites.
The greater Gorongosa region contains enormous biodiversity, representing five of Africa’s nine biomes. Yellow forests of fever trees stand next to spiked ilala and towering borassa palms; tangles of greenery twine next to golden savannah, while in the outer reaches of the park, granite outcrops rise out of the bush, a limestone gorge marks the southern end of the Great Rift Valley and Mount Gorongosa dominates the horizon. But it was when he flew over Lake Urema, the aquatic heart of the floodplain, that Carr knew where he wanted to invest.
That year, the Carr Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding with the Mozambican government, agreeing to manage the park on a provisional basis. This proved so successful that in December 2007, having put together a highly qualified team of environmental scientists and tourism experts, he signed a contract to manage the park for 20 years, with the aim of handing it back to the country as a sustainable entity.
‘The minimum amount that the contract obligates me to spend is US$24million,’ Carr tells me, ‘but I had already spent US$10 million before it was signed [2004 to 2007] and the overall estimate of how much I will spend is at least US$40 million, based on current projections.’ Not content with merely signing cheques, he’s very hands-on, visiting Gorongosa at least six times a year.
Low-impact options
When Carr took on the park, the remaining walls of Chitengo’s restaurant were pockmarked with bullet holes. Now, there’s a new bar and restaurant, and the camp’s nine rondavels, traditional round cabins, have been restored. And the visitors are returning, despite the global recession – from fewer than 1,000 in 2005 to around 5,000 last year.
While many safari destinations have become the preserve of the wealthy, Carr is taking an egalitarian approach. Explore Gorongosa, a luxury tented camp – the first of several low-impact options planned throughout the park – began operating last year, but you can still pitch your own tent in the campsite.
More than 150 kilometres of game-drive roads have been opened, but to attract tourists – in its heyday, 20,000 people a year passed through its gates – the park needs wildlife. With this in mind, Carr has recruited Mozambique’s most experienced wildlife vet, Carlos Lopes Pereira, to lead a dedicated conservation team that is undertaking one of the most ambitious animal-reintroduction programmes on the continent.
In 2006, they fenced off a 60-square-kilometre sanctuary and began reintroducing big grazers and plains animals. By the end of the following year, wildlife numbers were rising – from zero in 1994, there were 200 blue wildebeest, 180 buffalo and 1,250 bushbuck, along with 200 more elephants. This year, the plan is to bring in more buffalo, wildebeest and zebra, as well as more hippos to deepen the gene pool.
When the park reopened after the war, intrepid birders were among the first to return, keen to sample its impressive collection of around 400 avian species. On a short game drive, I saw Burchell’s coucal, African fish eagle, lilac-breasted rollers and carmine bee-eaters, while grey-crowned cranes, black-headed herons and yellow-billed storks were among the throng foraging on an exposed riverbed. I was also treated to sightings of herds of impala and waterbuck, a stately sable antelope, diminutive oribi, a slumbering lion and vast numbers of baboons and warthogs.
People power
But for Carr, it isn’t just about reintroducing wildlife or the conservation of a unique environment. He wanted the project to have a humanitarian element, and believes that a restored park will help to lift the beleaguered region out of poverty. In fact, the park’s success is dependent on cultivating the support of the 250,000 people living in the buffer zone that surrounds it. ‘I want this to be the villagers’ project,’ he says. ‘It’s their national park, it’s their country.’
With this in mind, Carr and his team are working closely with surrounding subsistence farming communities to fight poaching, logging and wildfires, improve access to health care and education, and create a plan that will ensure that the communities will share in the benefits from the park while also taking on some of the burden of protecting it.
Mateus Mutemba, the park’s director of community relations, explains that from this year, the distribution of a fifth of the profits to these communities will be on the basis of their level of participation in conservation activities. ‘Those who work will receive more money, and those who take on less will have little reward,’ he says.
The project has already created around 450 new jobs, and the staff – 99 per cent of whom are Mozambican – are being trained for all of the park positions, including 130 park rangers and anti-poaching scouts, some of whom are themselves former poachers. ‘It’s exciting to see young Mozambicans on our team developing knowledge and skills so that someday they can take full responsibility for managing the park,’ says Carr.
More than 100 of the workers come from the nearby community of Vinho, located across the Pungue River from the park. By 6.30am, as I wait to cross the crocodile-infested waters, the morning rush hour is well underway, as dugouts are poled back and forth. I’m struck by the number of bicycles being used for the commute – a few years ago no-one could afford one, but now they’re commonplace.
In Vinho, villagers queue up outside the new health clinic, which has two examination rooms, a lab and a four-bed maternity ward, as well as housing for four nurses. Life expectancy in Mozambique is barely over 40, with one and half million people living with HIV/AIDS, and before the clinic was built, the villagers had to walk for a day to reach a doctor.
Carr’s investment has also resulted in a new brick schoolhouse. The previous school was an overcrowded twig-and-thatch shack shared by more than 500 children; now they have five classrooms, a well-stocked library and wireless internet. It’s the first of many computer centres planned for the region – Carr wants the children and their teachers to have the access to knowledge usually reserved for the those in the developed world.
Sacred mountain
The enthusiasm and determination of Carr and his team is palpable, but one of their greatest challenges is protecting Mount Gorongosa. Currently outside the park confines – although it’s believed that Mozambique’s Council of Ministers will shortly approve the incorporation of land above 700 metres into the park – it’s essential to its ecosystems, feeding rainwater through a network of streams and rivers into Lake Urema.
At the mountain’s base, plantations of pineapples and bananas give way to fields of wheat and cotton, then an undulating grassland plateau populated with mud-and-thatch homesteads and small cultivated plots. Higher still is Mozambique’s only rainforest, which biologists list in the highest category of conservation urgency. This patch of forest is Carr’s top priority. ‘Reintroducing zebras can be this year or next, but once the rainforest is gone, it’s gone,’ he says.
Locals consider the mountain to be sacred, but that hasn’t prevented logging and slash-and-burn agriculture from pushing steadily up its slopes, bringing a serious threat of erosion. Scientists working for Carr’s project estimate that unless something is done, within five years the mountain’s ecosystem will degrade to a point from which it won’t recover.
In response, Carr is implementing a multi-pronged attack, in cooperation with the mountain communities. It includes educational programmes, the creation of alternative sources of income, such as a dried-fruit factory, and establishing 32 tree nurseries, which provide more than 60,000 trees for planting on denuded areas of the mountain every year.
Hippo hooray
Before I leave Gorongosa, I pay a visit to the derelict Hippo House, where sundowners are served overlooking Lake Urema. Grass grows from the long-deserted bar now, and a dip in the iron balcony marks the spot where a rocket launcher once rested, but the view is unchanged: the silver-flat lake, its banks lined with enormous Nile crocodiles; pods of hippos wallowing in the shallows.
Head guide Adolfo Macadona, whose father worked in the park before the war, believes that in 20 years’ time, it will be the finest in Africa once more. Until then, there’s plenty of opportunity to relish the wildness, the solitude and the chance encounters.
Mozambique - co-ordinates
When to go
The dry season (Apr–Nov), when temperatures are around 20–25°C, is the best time to visit. During the wet season (Nov–Mar), temperatures and humidity
can be uncomfortably high, and getting around can be problematic.
Getting there
Lisbon is the only European city from which it’s possible to fly directly to Maputo in Mozambique, with TAP and LAM flying several times a week. You then need to fly to Beira, where you can hire a car to drive to the park. Alternatively, there’s an airstrip at Chitengo Safari Camp for charter flights.
Further information
Sarah Gilbert stayed at Chitengo Safari Camp (www.gorongosa.net) and travelled to Mozambique with Audley Travel (www.audleytravel.com). For more about visiting the park, go to www.gorongosa.net.
Gorongosa is an Eden of savannah grassland, miombo forest, montane woodlands and floodplains in central Mozambique, protected as a hunting concession since 1921 and proclaimed a national park in 1960. During the ’60s and ’70s, Mozambique was a popular tourist destination, and the park was the jewel in its wildlife crown.
Whimsically known as ‘the place where Noah left his ark’, its 3,800 square kilometres were home to more predators than Kruger and denser herds of elephants and buffalo than the Serengeti. But that was before the country’s descent into several decades of brutal warfare.
The 11-year for struggle for liberation from Portugal, achieved in 1975, was followed by an even more savage civil war between the ruling Marxist FRELIMO and the Rhodesia-sponsored rebel RENAMO. By the time a peace treaty was finally signed in 1992, almost a million Mozambicans had been killed and the country was in ruins.
Gorongosa was one of the many battlegrounds for the two forces. Like the human population, the wildlife was decimated: thousands of buffalo, zebra and antelope were killed in skirmishes or to feed hungry solders; hundreds of elephants were slaughtered for ivory to buy arms. Professional hunters and commercial poachers took advantage of the post-war chaos to take out the remaining big game, while destitute villagers continued poaching to feed their families. By 1992, only 50 buffalo survived from a herd that once numbered 14,000, 108 elephants were left from a population of 2,200, and nothing remained of a herd of 5,500 wildebeest.
Fever trees
When the park reopened in 1995 with a new staff of 50 former soldiers, the government had scant resources to support it. The landscape was littered with landmines, Chitengo Safari Camp was in ruins and the tourists long gone.
Salvation came in the form of 50-year-old US IT multi-millionaire Greg Carr. He had resigned from all of his for-profit positions and founded the Carr Foundation to pursue philanthropy full-time when, in 2000, he was introduced to Carlos dos Santos, the Mozambican ambassador to the UN, who was trying to interest US investors in his country. Two years later, Carr visited Mozambique for the first time, and in 2004, after researching conservation projects in the country, he returned to tour six potential sites.
The greater Gorongosa region contains enormous biodiversity, representing five of Africa’s nine biomes. Yellow forests of fever trees stand next to spiked ilala and towering borassa palms; tangles of greenery twine next to golden savannah, while in the outer reaches of the park, granite outcrops rise out of the bush, a limestone gorge marks the southern end of the Great Rift Valley and Mount Gorongosa dominates the horizon. But it was when he flew over Lake Urema, the aquatic heart of the floodplain, that Carr knew where he wanted to invest.
That year, the Carr Foundation signed a memorandum of understanding with the Mozambican government, agreeing to manage the park on a provisional basis. This proved so successful that in December 2007, having put together a highly qualified team of environmental scientists and tourism experts, he signed a contract to manage the park for 20 years, with the aim of handing it back to the country as a sustainable entity.
‘The minimum amount that the contract obligates me to spend is US$24million,’ Carr tells me, ‘but I had already spent US$10 million before it was signed [2004 to 2007] and the overall estimate of how much I will spend is at least US$40 million, based on current projections.’ Not content with merely signing cheques, he’s very hands-on, visiting Gorongosa at least six times a year.
Low-impact options
When Carr took on the park, the remaining walls of Chitengo’s restaurant were pockmarked with bullet holes. Now, there’s a new bar and restaurant, and the camp’s nine rondavels, traditional round cabins, have been restored. And the visitors are returning, despite the global recession – from fewer than 1,000 in 2005 to around 5,000 last year.
While many safari destinations have become the preserve of the wealthy, Carr is taking an egalitarian approach. Explore Gorongosa, a luxury tented camp – the first of several low-impact options planned throughout the park – began operating last year, but you can still pitch your own tent in the campsite.
More than 150 kilometres of game-drive roads have been opened, but to attract tourists – in its heyday, 20,000 people a year passed through its gates – the park needs wildlife. With this in mind, Carr has recruited Mozambique’s most experienced wildlife vet, Carlos Lopes Pereira, to lead a dedicated conservation team that is undertaking one of the most ambitious animal-reintroduction programmes on the continent.
In 2006, they fenced off a 60-square-kilometre sanctuary and began reintroducing big grazers and plains animals. By the end of the following year, wildlife numbers were rising – from zero in 1994, there were 200 blue wildebeest, 180 buffalo and 1,250 bushbuck, along with 200 more elephants. This year, the plan is to bring in more buffalo, wildebeest and zebra, as well as more hippos to deepen the gene pool.
When the park reopened after the war, intrepid birders were among the first to return, keen to sample its impressive collection of around 400 avian species. On a short game drive, I saw Burchell’s coucal, African fish eagle, lilac-breasted rollers and carmine bee-eaters, while grey-crowned cranes, black-headed herons and yellow-billed storks were among the throng foraging on an exposed riverbed. I was also treated to sightings of herds of impala and waterbuck, a stately sable antelope, diminutive oribi, a slumbering lion and vast numbers of baboons and warthogs.
People power
But for Carr, it isn’t just about reintroducing wildlife or the conservation of a unique environment. He wanted the project to have a humanitarian element, and believes that a restored park will help to lift the beleaguered region out of poverty. In fact, the park’s success is dependent on cultivating the support of the 250,000 people living in the buffer zone that surrounds it. ‘I want this to be the villagers’ project,’ he says. ‘It’s their national park, it’s their country.’
With this in mind, Carr and his team are working closely with surrounding subsistence farming communities to fight poaching, logging and wildfires, improve access to health care and education, and create a plan that will ensure that the communities will share in the benefits from the park while also taking on some of the burden of protecting it.
Mateus Mutemba, the park’s director of community relations, explains that from this year, the distribution of a fifth of the profits to these communities will be on the basis of their level of participation in conservation activities. ‘Those who work will receive more money, and those who take on less will have little reward,’ he says.
The project has already created around 450 new jobs, and the staff – 99 per cent of whom are Mozambican – are being trained for all of the park positions, including 130 park rangers and anti-poaching scouts, some of whom are themselves former poachers. ‘It’s exciting to see young Mozambicans on our team developing knowledge and skills so that someday they can take full responsibility for managing the park,’ says Carr.
More than 100 of the workers come from the nearby community of Vinho, located across the Pungue River from the park. By 6.30am, as I wait to cross the crocodile-infested waters, the morning rush hour is well underway, as dugouts are poled back and forth. I’m struck by the number of bicycles being used for the commute – a few years ago no-one could afford one, but now they’re commonplace.
In Vinho, villagers queue up outside the new health clinic, which has two examination rooms, a lab and a four-bed maternity ward, as well as housing for four nurses. Life expectancy in Mozambique is barely over 40, with one and half million people living with HIV/AIDS, and before the clinic was built, the villagers had to walk for a day to reach a doctor.
Carr’s investment has also resulted in a new brick schoolhouse. The previous school was an overcrowded twig-and-thatch shack shared by more than 500 children; now they have five classrooms, a well-stocked library and wireless internet. It’s the first of many computer centres planned for the region – Carr wants the children and their teachers to have the access to knowledge usually reserved for the those in the developed world.
Sacred mountain
The enthusiasm and determination of Carr and his team is palpable, but one of their greatest challenges is protecting Mount Gorongosa. Currently outside the park confines – although it’s believed that Mozambique’s Council of Ministers will shortly approve the incorporation of land above 700 metres into the park – it’s essential to its ecosystems, feeding rainwater through a network of streams and rivers into Lake Urema.
At the mountain’s base, plantations of pineapples and bananas give way to fields of wheat and cotton, then an undulating grassland plateau populated with mud-and-thatch homesteads and small cultivated plots. Higher still is Mozambique’s only rainforest, which biologists list in the highest category of conservation urgency. This patch of forest is Carr’s top priority. ‘Reintroducing zebras can be this year or next, but once the rainforest is gone, it’s gone,’ he says.
Locals consider the mountain to be sacred, but that hasn’t prevented logging and slash-and-burn agriculture from pushing steadily up its slopes, bringing a serious threat of erosion. Scientists working for Carr’s project estimate that unless something is done, within five years the mountain’s ecosystem will degrade to a point from which it won’t recover.
In response, Carr is implementing a multi-pronged attack, in cooperation with the mountain communities. It includes educational programmes, the creation of alternative sources of income, such as a dried-fruit factory, and establishing 32 tree nurseries, which provide more than 60,000 trees for planting on denuded areas of the mountain every year.
Hippo hooray
Before I leave Gorongosa, I pay a visit to the derelict Hippo House, where sundowners are served overlooking Lake Urema. Grass grows from the long-deserted bar now, and a dip in the iron balcony marks the spot where a rocket launcher once rested, but the view is unchanged: the silver-flat lake, its banks lined with enormous Nile crocodiles; pods of hippos wallowing in the shallows.
Head guide Adolfo Macadona, whose father worked in the park before the war, believes that in 20 years’ time, it will be the finest in Africa once more. Until then, there’s plenty of opportunity to relish the wildness, the solitude and the chance encounters.
Mozambique - co-ordinates
When to go
The dry season (Apr–Nov), when temperatures are around 20–25°C, is the best time to visit. During the wet season (Nov–Mar), temperatures and humidity
can be uncomfortably high, and getting around can be problematic.
Getting there
Lisbon is the only European city from which it’s possible to fly directly to Maputo in Mozambique, with TAP and LAM flying several times a week. You then need to fly to Beira, where you can hire a car to drive to the park. Alternatively, there’s an airstrip at Chitengo Safari Camp for charter flights.
Further information
Sarah Gilbert stayed at Chitengo Safari Camp (www.gorongosa.net) and travelled to Mozambique with Audley Travel (www.audleytravel.com). For more about visiting the park, go to www.gorongosa.net.
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