Zambia – Sweating on Safari

 October 15-18

 

Hello everyone!

 

Once you eventually get through the border, it is about a 2 hour drive to South Luangwa National Park (SLNP). It is one of the region’s most prolific safari parks, with plenty to see.

Playing 'Sleeping Lions' in the heat

 

A lilac-breasted roller

For a while, South Luangwa National Park (SLNP) was the premier safari park in the region. When I first arrived in Malawi, it was the only place for us to easily see many of the big cats. When I went in 2017, I had an exhilarating, up-close adventure with a pride of lions which were strolling alongside our open jeeps under the stars.

The park is about 2.5 hours from the Malawian border

Picture from our 2017 trip

That time I visited in April. This time we were coming in October. Visiting parks at different times of year can also result a very different experience. Different migrating birds, different areas for drinking water, different landscape. It looked particularly bleak in the park at times, owing to the fact that they haven’t had rain in months.

A beautiful carmine bee-eater

A parched park

One notable difference of coming in October was the heat. It was hot enough in April at the back-end of the wet ‘green’ season. Coming to the valley in October, you are welcomed by hot winds or still air which is about 40°C.

It averaged 39'C when we were in the park,
and didn't drop below 30'C at night

People still work in the heat - this man is fishing

The couple we travelled with came to SLNP last October. Their request this time was that we stay somewhere with air-conditioning. Not many places offer that, owing to the extra power needed. The place we found, Mopani Safari Lodge, had this in their luxury, over-sized circus tents.

Chai with a view

A room for two - the wires on the right
are to stop hippos saying hello

This was an excellent find. Copious amounts of delicious food. We learnt this the opulent way one evening when, having just finished feasting on the initial portion of chicken leg and nsima, an enormous steak was slapped onto the plate. Just about. It almost didn’t fit. Tasted beautiful so had to be eaten, resulting in a rather swollen belly on the way home.

The setting of our brilliant bush dinner

Food coma

One of the most interesting adventures ended with this feast. We were driving back from a night drive when we got a flat tyre quite close to the park. A workman at the lodge had not replaced the spanner in the jeep, meaning we had no way of getting the nuts off the tyre to replace it. About 20 minutes passed before another jeep passed by. It stopped and helped us get back on track, only for our jeep to then go fully off-road as they’d had a tip about lionesses. This was a ruse to get us to the dinner in the bush, though they didn’t factor in the giraffes who were keen to…make more giraffes.

Me being helpful

Me being less helpful

The male couldn't perform with us watching

The location didn’t seem ideal, as it was about 8km away from the park gate on a pothole-smeared road. Luckily for us, animals don’t feel the need to stick to our man-made boundaries. Particularly when there’s a cooling river in between…

Elephants cooling off in mud near our camp

Hippo in the Luangwa river which snaked past our lodge

We hadn’t come to sit around for three nights, of course. Five times we rattled along that potholed track and ventured across the river and into the park.

No one judges what you wear on safari!

A journey of giraffe - there were six in this group

The undoubted highlight last time was a pride of lions walking alongside our jeep. We didn’t have that exhilaration with the big cat this time but saw them a few times in a variety of sleeping poses.

Lioness - too many cars (ours included) woke her up

Male lion lying on the warm floor

We had many elephant encounters during our day drives. One time we got stuck in between a herd of them crossing towards the river. The only way out was to accelerate, which forced one of them to run away from us. Unfortunately it didn’t think of turning off the track for a while, leaving it quite far from the herd…

Elephants at sunset

I'll never get tired of seeing elephants

There was another, far calmer time when a group came to drink at a watering hole and cool themselves off with mud. Very much your ‘Circle of Life’ moment.

A stork preening in front of washing elephants

Baby elephant taking a much-needed drink

One of my favourites, the humble hippo, was seen often. We saw some in and around a body of water filled with water cabbage. Hippos swimming through this was quite funny as it seemed as if they were trying to be stealthy. The birds taking a free ride on their backs were a bit of a giveaway for their position, however…

Can't see anything in the water at this point...

...until you look a bit closer...

Animals of all shapes and sizes are in South Luangwa, each adding their own unique noise to create an atmosphere of vibrant, natural life which often contradicted the dry, desolate landscapes.

Dragonfly

A cheerful crocodile

Solo buffalo - at night we saw hundreds,
as you can see from the video below

We didn’t see any wild dogs (or the honey badger Hannah and I have been desperate to find for years) but saw some other lesser-spotted animals such as genet, porcupine and mongoose. Somehow a driver had also spotted a black mamba in a tree. See if you can pick it out amongst the branches. How they know it was a black mamba is beyond me. I’m happy it was up there and not near us…

Genet

The porcupine is in there!

Spot the mamba?

South Luangwa strikes me as a much more authentic place to safari when compared to other reserves such as Kruger. It just seems wilder. I had a wild time exploring and kept reminding myself in the intense heat (I was averaging between 3 and 4 cold showers a day) how lucky I was to witness so many special animals in their natural home. I haven’t even mentioned the leopards yet…

Love you all,

 

Matt