Recent Stories

A cousin of mine and her husband, Olga and Jack Skow, were in Gorongosa in September, 2004. They think they might have seen this same lion back then. Here's their story (as told by Jack):

I was visiting Olga, who had several more months of Peace Corps teaching to do. We had rented a Toyota front-wheel drive pickup ( into the bed of which, whenever we started out, three or four local boys would have climbed, not to go anywhere in particular, just for the fun of going somewhere).
Anyway, we unloaded the boys one day, apologized and headed for the Gorongosa National Park. Almost no tourists were coming in those days. There was a headquarters area with a few usuable rooms for rent, a bar and a
one-dish restaurant. We had the extensive back roads to ourselves. Most of these were passable, though occasionally a two-track would dissolve into a swamp, and we would backtrack for several miles.
The park was still recovering from the very long war period, which by the time exhaustion brought peace in '92, had left most of the animals dead from mines, poaching, or -- in the case of elephants -- ivory-hunting from
helicopters, with machine guns.
Birds had come back in large and gaudy numbers, and so had warthogs, baboons, and many varieties of antelopes. A few elephants remained, we were told, but these hid away from the roads (fooling the tourists, I guess) and
we did not see them. There were no rhinos, I believe, and no zebras.
Anyway, returning to headquarters one day, just before nightfall, we saw our gentleman lion, resting in grassland about 150 meters from our road. He watched us, but did not move. We drove on. (If the photo Vasco sent us [SEE ALSO, ABOVE] is not of our lion, it is his twin brother!)
The next day at about 2 p.m., I managed to get our truck stuck in a sandpit. We had seen no other tourists that day, and waiting for help was not a promising idea. So we started walking.
And after an hour or so, passed the same patch of grassland were we had seen the lion. This time we did not see him. Did he see us? It was mid-afternoon, and he may still have been sleeping off lunch (always fixed
by lionesses, I am told). That's what we hoped.
We walked on by, not knowing whether we should sing 99 bottles of beer, as you are told to do to warn off grizzlies in Gracier National Park. We decided on stealth, and the lion stayed out of sight, maybe waiting for a
younger and tastier pair of human potroasts.
It was about seven or eight kilometers back to headquarters. The park director heard our story, politely not rolling his eyes, and detailed a fellow with a very large tractor to retrieve our truck. Olga and I rode back
with him, one of us on each fender.
That is our lion story, except for one recommendation: when visiting Gorongosa, one of the world's great, little-known places, rent a four-wheel drive truck, although park roads doubtless are better now.

- Jack Skow