Day 14 – South Luangwa: A Guest in Their World

We were up at five, a light breakfast at half five, out before six into the cold on an open vehicle, the last stars going out. The first safari of the trip was not a drive but a walk. Malama, our guide, took us into the park on foot, with an armed man alongside him, and the whole speed of things changed. A walking safari is not about covering ground or ticking off big predators; it is about being down at their level, reading the tracks in the dust, the smells, the birds, the work of termites. It was pioneered here, in the Luangwa valley, by Norman Carr around the late 1950s and early 1960s, back when a safari mostly meant shooting things, and the valley is still particularly associated with it. On foot, you are no longer looking down from a seat. You are in it.

Malama is from here, trained as a ranger, and he read the bush to us as we walked. We saw termite mounds, zebras, and giraffes. He showed us a plant with fruit shaped like little marrows that the animals love, and pointed out trees that fake being sick, going dry and two-coloured in the leaf so nothing will eat them, except that the elephants eat those too. He told us what South Luangwa has and has not: not quite the big five, because the rhino has been gone about twenty years, and a reintroduction, he said, takes an enormous amount of time, and he does not know if he will ever see one here again. He said it plainly, without drama, a man describing an absence he has made his peace with.

Then the park reminded us whose place it is.

At lunch, back at camp, we were eating outside when an elephant came through. Not near, exactly, but on its own business, working along the edge of the camp, pulling at shrubs and trees. We were moved indoors and told to wait, and we waited about forty minutes while this enormous animal ate its way past, in no hurry at all, entirely indifferent to our lunch. You do not shoo an elephant off. You go inside, wait, and eat when it has decided to leave.

Flatdogs sits on an elephant corridor, and that is the whole texture of staying here. It is very close to the park gate, right in the savannah, and the animals move through it as if it were not there, which of course to them it is not. The comfort is real: the tent is large and clean and beautifully kept, free water bottles, laundry done free every day, a fine view of the river. But at night the elephants come to drink from the water in the WC in our open-air bathroom. That is not a figure of speech. Elephants drank from our toilet.

While I wandered the camp between drives, there was a big monitor lizard near the tent and elephants moving beyond it. Lorena spent the gap between the morning and evening outings by the pool in the sun. She is a cat person, and later, out on the drive, watching the big cats, she was in a kind of ecstasy, because to her they are simply enormous versions of Luna, her cat at home.

The afternoon drive brought the cats. We came on lions resting a few centimetres from the vehicle, so close you could have leaned out. One of them, a lioness, wore a collar and had no tail, lost in a fight. Malama told us her name was Daisy. He said she had lost her cubs to hyenas some years earlier, and that afterwards the guides had watched what looked to them like a long period of mourning. We saw a family of elephants, and Thornicroft’s giraffe, a subspecies found only in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley. The one thing we did not see that day was a leopard, the animal this park is most associated with.

At sunset we stopped by the Luangwa and watched fishermen working their way up the river in the traditional boats, and we had a sundowner gin and tonic. Even Lorena had one, single for her, double for me, which for a woman who does not really drink was its own small event.

The drives here end after dark, which means the night safari, the spotlight sweeping the black bush and finding eyes in it: civets, bush babies, chameleons, and a dozen other things caught in the beam. At night the whole thing changes. Your senses widen, everything goes muffled and close, and you move through the narrow tracks of the park as if through a maze, a surprise and a small enchantment at every bend.

Dinner was in the boma, in the open, under the stars. For us, Flatdogs was a comfortable base, and what made it worth it was where it stood, a few metres from a world that does not belong to us and does not pretend to.

You come to a place like this expecting to watch animals. What you are not ready for is how completely the arrangement is reversed: that you will be moved indoors for your own lunch, that you will wait on an elephant’s schedule, that the wildlife will drink from your bathroom in the dark and think nothing of it. For four days we were the ones being tolerated.

Practical Notes

Where I stayed

Flatdogs Camp, Mfuwe, on the Luangwa River (booking details in Day 13). Large, clean, well-kept tents, free water bottles, free daily laundry, a pool, and river views. Very close to the South Luangwa gate, set right in the bush.
My take: genuinely comfortable, but its real value is location: you are inside the ecosystem, not beside it. The flip side is that wildlife moves through camp freely. Elephants use the corridor it sits on, walk between the tents, hold up lunch, and at night drink from the water in the open-air bathrooms. Follow the staff’s instructions when an elephant is in camp; you wait for it, not the other way round.

What I did

Walking safari (morning), with an armed guide, led by our guide Malama. On foot you learn to read tracks, plants and signs rather than chase big sightings. Walking safaris were pioneered in the Luangwa Valley by Norman Carr around the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the valley is still particularly associated with them.
Afternoon and night game drive, ending after dark with a spotlight: lions (very close), a family of elephants, Thornicroft’s giraffe (a subspecies found only in Zambia’s Luangwa Valley), and by night civets, bush babies and chameleons. Sundowner gin and tonic by the river at dusk.
Note: the rhino is locally extinct (about 20 years ago), so the “big five” is not complete here; the park is strongly associated with leopards, though we did not see one on this day. We did four game activities over our stay (two per day), all guided by Malama.