Sipping Sundowners on Safari

 Sipping Sundowners

  By K. Bellows

When someone says Sundowners, I think of bad British soap operas, fast food, cheesy lounge acts, and that really lame band that played at our dances back in the Sixties. But, in Africa, Sundowners take on a whole new meaning.

My wife and I are at the Matetsi Game Lodges, in Zimbabwe, only 25 miles from Victoria Falls. We’d come in by commuter plane from Johannesburg and dropped onto a small airstrip near the falls. Now we’re jouncing along with a couple from Australia in a Land Rover, guns racked, guides wisecracking, the sun dropping.

For the last few hours we’ve watched elephants force-march across the dry grasslands and giraffes undulate gracefully as they strip leaves off high treetops. Somewhere, the lions lurk but we never see them.

The sun ribbons the sky with red as it hovers ever lower above the Zambezi River. Our guides park the vehicle, spring open lockers, set out bowls of nuts and potato chips on tables.

“A martini?” one asks. “A beer?”

These are the Sundowners, ubiquitous at most African safari lodges—civilized cocktails downed at dusk. I choose the local Zambezi beer.

As we drink, the water ripples with unseen creatures—mostly crocs and hippos—and the land echoes with the grunts and whoops of animal and bird life. That evening, swathed in blankets against plummeting temperatures, still sipping the last of our drinks, we return to camp, searchlights strafing the bush, picking up the reddish flicker of eyes, revealing the hulking presence of massed Cape buffalo crowded around huge bilbao trees, sending a civet or a warthog scampering into the bush.

To me, the essence of Africa is after hours. When the land sings and the light dips and the Sundowners make one convivial. This is an activity worthy of a verb: to sundown. It conjures up what my parents thought was so transporting about Africa when they lived in what was, in the late Forties, the Belgian Congo. Even then, they were taking Sundowners outside their tents, after a day of driving through bush carpeted with creatures as far as the eye could see in an era when you almost always saw lions.

Sundowners are a tradition that recognizes the rhythms of the land, the cadence set by the sunrises and sunsets that govern the life of the wild. And that, in Africa, govern us, too.