LAST DAYS ON THE ZAMBEZI: A Remarkable Journey Down Africa's Wildest River

Book Synopsis: “A survivor's adventure of the highest order, it makes a compelling plea for saving one of the last watery treasures on earth. A page-turner...” “Steve Chapple has the curiosity of a 19th-century member of the Royal Geographical Society, uses language like a bard, and has assembled an intrepid mosaic of a book drawn from his own explorations of the river that thwarted David Livingstone when seeking God’s Highway to the interior of Africa. Steve possesses a novelist’s eye for the telling details, and a reporter’s knack for the revealing quote. In Last Days, there is no hiding under the hull. Instead, we list and lunge and purl along, drenched in a magical coil of water, rock, sky, and empyrean domains. In a way, these journeys are like Chopin’s nocturnes: timeless, transcendent, universal. One does not so much read the accounts of Steve’s unquenchable quest as fall under his bravura spell.” -Richard Bangs

Hold on to ride the biggest whitewater on the planet. Learn why hippos are the most dangerous animals in Africa, not crocodiles, and how to warn them with the slap of a paddle. Glide by the camps of elephant poachers in silent mode. Find out up close what real lions sound like when they gather the pride at night (not like the MGM lion.) Make it to the headwaters of the Zambezi along the horrendous Old Slave Trail, and back down-river through war-torn Mozambique where the cocaine-fueled proxy-armies of Russia and America not so long ago fought pitiless battles in the savannah, butchering what were once endless herds of elephant, buffalo, zebra, and wildebeest for meat. LAST DAYS is a survivor's adventure of the highest order, and at bottom it makes a compelling plea for saving one of the last watery treasures on earth. A page-turner.

Adventurer and author Steve Chapple takes readers on a wild and wet ride from the Zambezi's source through Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Mozambique where the river meets the Indian Ocean. The people, the culture, the history, the dangers and triumphs of the journey are explored with an environmentalist’s eye to the spectacular African wildlife that Chapple--a writer for National Geographic and the New York Times--encounters.

CHAPPLE is the author of KAYAKING THE FULL MOON: A Journey Down the Yellowstone River to the Soul of Montana (a New York Times Notable,) LET THE MOUNTAINS TALK, LET THE RIVERS RUN: A Call to Those Who Would Save the Earth by David Brower with Steve Chapple, OUTLAWS IN BABYLON, and BREAKPOINT: Reckoning with America’s Environmental Crises (co-author Jeremy B.C. Jackson, Yale Univ. Press.) He is a Visiting Scholar at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and writes the popular Substack column, HOT GLOBE.

RICHARD BANGS is the co-founder of the world’s leading adventure company, MT-SOBEK, the author of many award-winning books, and a producer for American Public Broadcasting. He made the first descent of the Zambezi (after David Livingstone.)

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