South Luangwa National Park, Zambia - Its safari time!!!

This weekend, with the soundtrack of The Lion King playing in our heads throughout, my guesthouse-mate Miriam and I went to Zambia! The journey to Mfuwe, Zambia was a pretty exhausting 8-hour trip from Lilongwe, complete with border-crossing frustration and ineptitude (some things are the same in EVERY COUNTRY) and incredibly bumpy roads. Fortunately our bus did not shake apart and we made it to the lodge late in the evening, only to discover all of Zambia had been without power all day. Which made things a little trixy, as our lodge is located right on the edge of the (fenceless) park and the animals were well-known to hang out there at night.

I can't fully describe (or imitate) the sounds hippos make, its something like a roar. But I wish I had a soundtrack of the sounds we went to sleep and woke up to in the morning - hippos splashing, strange bird calls, elephants trumpeting, monkeys wreaking havoc...pretty incredible. This was mine and Miriam's little chalet - very safari chic!

We woke up at 5:30 am and were in our safari vehicle, headed to the park entrance, by 6am! There were ten others in our group - two just-graduated university students from England, three Dutch medical students, and five other Dutch students. It was nice to have a young group, pretty much up for anything, and I learned to count to ten in Dutch.

Sunrise over the Luangwa River, which divides the National Park (left bank) from the Game Management Area (where we stayed, to the right.) The park is almost 10,000 square km in area - and no, after almost 9 weeks here kilometers still mean nothing to me. But that's a big park.

South Luangwa is not as well known as some other parks in Tanzania or Kenya, or Krueger in South Africa, but the game is more or less the same, minus rhinos. This meant the park simply wasn't as crowded; although we would see several other safari vehicles each day, in some of the more famous parks there are literally lines of vehicles trolling through, which I imagine would be a bit of a distraction.

I'm pretty sure the animals are conspiring on this point - they don't want to show you too much, too fast. So for a while, all we saw were impala - which are these gorgeous little dip-dyed creatures a little smaller than American deer. And they're so graceful to watch, I never got tired of seeing them.
Lily-pad laden lagoon complete with crocodile sunning himself and hippos in the background. As I've mentioned, its the dry season here, so the landscape of the park was really pretty desolate. We still saw an incredible amount of wildlife for things being so barren and dusty!

Yellow baboons doing what baboons do.

We saw LOTS of elephants, several too close for comfort.

Hyenas are really kinda creepy.

Finally, a giraffe! (Or "und heeraff!" as the charming Dutch liked to say.) This big guy was standing in the middle of the road when we happened upon him -he moved off to the side to chomp some trees and pose for photographs.

Speaking of posing - I think zebras are really quite vain animals that love being photographed. I took about a thousand zebra photos, in all of which the zebra seems to be saying, "Oh yes, i'm SOOOO pretty, just look at all my STRIPES!"

I don't think I'd ever seen a zebra before in real life, actually. They don't survive well in captivity, their hooves turn inward and they go lame, so there are very few zebras in zoos. They're about the size I would have expected, a little bit smaller than horses and pretty stocky. Some of them were downright fat. And they all have the coolest mohawks!

Mother and child hippo crossing the Luangwa River at dusk.

Our eagle-eyed Dutch compatriot Yelnik (totally incorrect spelling.) spotted this leopard on the morning of our second safari day. We're pretty sure he/she had his eye on the small herd of impala grazing nearby - unfortunately after we stared at him for half an hour, eventually he decided he'd just lie down and wait us out.


We had a very lucky safari in terms of seeing the big cats. Our guide told us at the outset that the likelihood of seeing lions and leopards was around 50% - and during our two days in the park we saw three leopards and 15 lions, including males, females, and cubs. I hope that means the animals are thriving in the park.

I didn't get any pictures of our two night safaris, for obvious reasons. Our first night drive was less than enjoyable - just us driving around in the dark with a guy panning a floodlight back and forth, back and forth, for two hours. We didn't see anything new except civet cats (picture a creepy combination of a cat and a raccoon.) And it was unnerving just to catch the same animals in the dark that we'd seen in the day - hippos and elephants and impala mostly, all settling into sleep or nighttime grazing. It felt very intrusive - I couldn't help thinking how I'd feel if the monkeys outside my chalet insisted on shining bright lights in my face while I was brushing my teeth, putting on my pajamas, etc.

But I have to say the second night drive was truly spectacular - while driving along the riverbank we happened on a pride of lions - a male, several females and three small cubs. A hippo had been killed nearby, although we didn't see it. Hyenas had been trying to get at the meat, tearing off small chunks, and we watched as the male lion let out this big roar and chased several of them down. There's nothing like hearing that sound in real life, 20 feet away.

The safari was fantastic - although I couldn't ever really shake the feeling of "we're-really-not-supposed-to-be-here." It was nice, though, to see the occasional vehicle full of Zambians or Malawians, and not just white tourists - if touring the park helps people who live here appreciate their natural spaces, maybe they'll be less likely to cut/burn it all down for the more immediate gains of lumber and agriculture profit.

Home in six days! I've got my work cut out for me here, better get to it!

Thanks for reading.