AARDVARK TO ZEBR A
My hunch that Mfuwe Lodge would suit a first-timer of a
certain age is proving correct. Famous for the elephants
that, in mango season, parade through reception to feast
beneath the tree beyond, it’s also highly professional,
with thoughtful staff, a beautiful, unfussy spa and
comfortable vehicles — invaluable for anyone with
creaky joints or a bad back.
After a couple of days of superb wildlife-watching,
we agree we’d like to learn more about life outside the
park. Bushcamp’s imaginative approach to community
engagement earned it a National Geographic World
Legacy Award in 2016, but it’s the villagers who are the
real winners.
Operations manager Mtimba Zulu guides us around
the scattered settlement of Mfuwe, home to secondhand
clothes traders — their wares spread on the ground
— and businesses with colourful names: Captain Biggie
General Dealers, God Is Able Phone Accessories, Pillar
of Cloud Restaurant. On a back lane, we chat to women
using a borehole funded by the Luangwa Conservation
and Community Fund, created by Bushcamp’s director,
Andy Hogg. “The pump is a big time-saver, as well as a
life-saver,” says Martha Njobvu. “It used to take me three
hours a day to bring water from the river.”
As we prepare to visit Mfuwe Secondary School, I check
how my mother’s holding up, but she’s not flagging. A
retired university dental school administrator, she enjoys
the company of young people, and smiles with approval as
scholarship pupils discuss their favourite subjects.
On another day, we get creative at Mfuwe’s successful
social enterprise Tribal Textiles. Workshop manager
Moses Musa gives us a guided tour of the batik and sewing
studios, then we settle down with paints and brushes to
spend a blissful couple of hours decorating cushion covers.
“By creating jobs for local men and women, we’re helping
conservation,” says Moses. “With money coming in, people
are less inclined to set snares to trap wildlife. But tourism
in Zambia dropped last year, and that hit us hard.”
As our trip unfolds, my mother delights in the little
surprises that safari companies love to spring on their
guests, from brunches in the bush to sundowners on
the banks of the Kapamba River, a shallow tributary
of the Luangwa — its crocodile-free water cooling our
feet. Meanwhile, the wildlife continues to wow her.
Familiar with Africa from a lifetime of watching nature
documentaries, she’s fascinated by the subtleties that
film-makers rarely show — tiny harvester termite mounds,
for example, and the abstract patterns traced by larvae
onto rain tree leaves. Some phenomena are definitely best
appreciated in 3D — how an elephant can disappear into
a wall of green foliage, why zebra stripes provide perfect
camouflage and how similar South Luangwa looks, at
certain times of day, to an English pastoral scene.
Encountering everything from excitable hornbills to
endangered wild dogs on the prowl, her beginner’s luck is
soon proving something of a lucky streak. One evening,
near Chindeni — one of the seasonal hideaways that give
The Bushcamp Company its name — we spot an aardvark
in plain view, a sighting so rare that afterwards we all laugh
at the magic of it. It’s as if we’re ticking off the entire safari
alphabet, from A to Z.
To continue our trip, we fly south to the Lower Zambezi
National Park, swooping along the Zambezi itself on our
descent. Below, the purple-brown, Paisley-shaped outlines
of hippos pattern the shallows. If protected, hippos can
live to 50 years of age and on this stretch of river, flanked by
national parks, they’re prolific. At our first stop, Chongwe
River Camp, they make their presence felt through a
round-the-clock chorus of chuckles and honks, like louche
old men telling jokes in the bar.
Our other neighbours, to our delight, are a colony of
white-fronted bee-eaters, whose aerial ballet plays out
over the bank near our glamorous tented suite. Even they
deliver something unexpected — when a monitor lizard
appears, they switch into battle formation, mobbing it so
fiercely it buries its head in an old burrow to escape.
With freshwater at its feet, graceful mahogany and
winter thorn trees shading its banks and russet hills at its
back, Lower Zambezi is one of the most beautiful swathes
of wilderness in the region and indeed in Africa. Once
the private hunting reserve of Zambia’s first president,
Kenneth Kaunda, it’s now a conservation powerhouse;
as of 2016, it’s also Africa’s first carbon neutral national
park. The engine behind its success is Conservation Lower
Zambezi (CLZ), which runs educational workshops for local
schoolchildren and helps villagers tackle the challenges
of living alongside elephants and predators. CEO IanOPPOSITE: Lions in front
of a safari vehicle, Lower
Zambezi National ParkBELOW, CLOCKWISE:
Hippo at the confluence
of the Chongwe River
and the Zambezi, Lower
Zambezi National
Park; afternoon snacks
at Chiawa Camp;
Conservation Lower
Zambezi anti-poaching
patrol dog handler
with tracker dog; red
dragonfly on the bank of
Chongwe River, near the
Zambezi RiverNovember 2016 109ZAMBIA