Day 15 – South Luangwa: Learning to Look

On the second morning I brought the camera. The day before, I had gone out with binoculars and a phone, the way you do when you are still just gawping at everything. Today I took the proper kit, a Sony ZV-E10 with a 70–350mm telephoto lens, the camera I mostly use for my video podcasts, and something shifted. I spent the day actually trying to photograph what I was seeing, and by the end of it I had decided to do a photography course when I got home to Dublin, to stop wasting the birds.

Because it was the birds, in the end. They say you start caring about birds after forty, and I am some way past fifty, so I am overdue. All day I kept asking Malama the name of each new one, and trying to get a sharper frame than the last.

He took us closer to the river this time. Lions and leopards, he told us, divide the territory between them, and today we were in the leopard’s half. Yesterday the leopard was the one thing we had missed. Today we found it, imperious in a tree, and then it came down and walked beneath the jeep, close enough to touch, entirely unbothered by us. We saw buffalo, which the day before we had only caught at night, and hippos strung along the Luangwa.

Lorena asked Malama whether the guides did not worry about malaria. We had been on Malarone since the start of the trip, though we had met surprisingly few mosquitoes. Did they take it their whole lives? Malama laughed. He has had malaria several times, he said, and here he still is; they live with it. What the guides do worry about is the elephants. There are many of them here, and if you get too close they can turn, which is why, on the first day, we were called inside to wait while one fed past the camp.

Before we crossed the river, Malama threw a handful of maize flour into the water. It was an offering to the guardian of the river, he told us, from a Kunda tradition: before crossing or fishing, you ask the guardian’s permission with a little maize flour or tobacco, and when the river floods and shifts its course in the rains, the elders say it is a great crocodile turning in its bed. It is, I thought, a good name for this camp to sit beside: Flatdogs is named for the crocodiles themselves, which the locals call flat dogs, the flat dogs lining the Luangwa the camp looks out on.

We drove through a beautiful stand of dense ebony. South Luangwa holds very different habitats close together, and an astonishing quantity of animals, above all birds, hundreds of species of them, which is exactly the wrong place to be if you are trying not to become a birdwatcher.

In the jeep with us was a couple, she American, he Swedish and long since moved to the States, joined for the evening drive by Swedish friends of his. They had been here a week and were staying another; two drives a day, every day, and had been the year before for ten days as well. By now they knew every corner of the park; the man had grown tired of the sundowner gin and tonic and switched to a beer at the end of the evening drive. It was interesting to watch people live a place that intensely. And it set me thinking. It seems right to me to stop somewhere for a few days rather than the single night most tour operators sell, but two weeks and twenty-eight consecutive game drives is perhaps the other extreme; they had only ever been here and to Kruger. There is a compromise to be found in travelling, between the depth you get from staying and the pull of seeing somewhere new. Africa and the world are enormous, and life is short. You have to find the point between going too fast to see anything and staying so long you stop moving at all.

The camp itself, in the hours between drives, keeps you honest about where you are. From sunset to dawn you cannot move around unescorted; there is a button in each tent to call someone to walk you to the bar and restaurant. We were in tent number two, close in, and still you call for the escort every time. While Lorena lay by the pool one afternoon, I walked the edges of the camp and found a colony of Nile monitors, big lizards up to two metres long with huge, menacing heads. I knew perfectly well I only had to keep my distance, and when I came face to face with one I froze on the spot in pure terror anyway.

And at lunch, a vervet monkey stole my cheesecake. They work as a team: three of them came in, two to distract me and a third to take the plate while I watched the other two, and it was gone, to my alarm and the delight of the whole camp. Lorena laughed like a lunatic and had them bring me another cheesecake, which I then ate under guard, the man who walks us to our tent standing watch to prevent a second robbery. The afternoon we spent in Mfuwe, raiding the craft shops, where we bought cushion covers, throws, and an apron for our cat sitter back in Dublin.

The evening drive ran into the night, the spotlight sweeping the black bush and pulling animals out of it: chameleons, hyenas, civets, a pangolin, bush babies leaping between branches, and the hippos, which lie in the Luangwa all day to keep out of the sun and come out after dark to graze. Watching one of those huge animals walk on dry land a few metres from the jeep is a genuinely startling thing.

Two days in, I noticed I was no longer just seeing animals and moving on. I was looking for the bird in the tree, the shape in the grass, the eye-shine in the dark, asking their names, framing them. The park had not changed. My eye had.

Practical Notes

Where I stayed

Flatdogs Camp, Mfuwe (booking details in Day 13). The name comes from the local term for the crocodiles along the Luangwa, “flat dogs”.
Worth knowing: from sunset to dawn you cannot walk around camp unescorted. Each tent has a button to call someone to walk you to the bar and restaurant, and you use it every time, even from a close-in tent. Elephants and Nile monitor lizards move through the camp; keep your distance and don’t leave food unguarded (vervet monkeys work in teams and will take it off your plate).

What I did

Morning and evening/night game drives with our ranger Malama; the third and fourth of the four drives included on our stay. Closer to the river today: a leopard (up a tree, then down and under the vehicle), buffalo, hippos, and by night chameleons, hyenas, civets, a pangolin and bush babies.
Photography: I used a Sony ZV-E10 with a Sony E 70–350mm f/4.5–6.3 G OSS. On the APS-C camera, it gave me the reach I needed for wildlife and, especially, birds. This was the day I began trying to photograph rather than simply record what I was seeing.