Elephant at sunset, South Luangwa park.
I've just come across this entirely by accident, and I don't know if I've seen it since I wrote it. I pass it on as it is, with a photo or two, and I'll see if I can find any more notes from this trip.
26 May, 2002, Kapani Lodge, Zambia: Sure the getting here was miserable. Thirteen thousand one hundred four kilometers was the first plane ride - leave shore over Charleston, South Carolina and don't see it again until Cape Town. On the map it was as if the continents were mountain peaks and we slid down the valley called the Atlantic.
That got us to Cape Town where it never dawned but rather the distinct gray of winter merely brightened up. Nine more hours of airports, and these were the difficult hours, hours 18 - 26 straight in public places, but finally, Lusaka.
Familiar traits of the developing world that once made us uneasy - only because of their familiarity - flooded back and this time were welcoming: The scent of wood fires, a banner marking independence (37 years ago) over the airport road, dust, pedestrians, desultory construction, and then the Holiday Inn and our room, where the air conditioning worked.
It would shortly be dark and after thirty-plus hours now we threw off our travel clothes and immediately went to find dinner. We never planned to see more of Lusaka than the view of a few concrete high rise blocks from the third floor elevator landing.
There was an Irish pub in the hotel - I think they called it McGinty's - and we downed a number of the local brew, called Mosi after the indigenous name for Victoria Falls, Mosi O Tunya, or the smoke that thunders. By now we'd drunk beer and napped and flown and done all that over again a few times. A buffet opened at 6:30 and we gorged and then slept twelve hours straight.
Then it was Saturday and a man named Webby delivered us back to the same airport and after hunting we found a woman named Beatrice from the copper belt (up by Lubumbashi, Congo where everybody's an expat in the mine trade and therefore a place that needs a travel agent, which Beatrice was). Beatrice was going where we were going. Nobody else seemed to be until finally we hunted down Ryan, a boy pilot from Durban, and finally we rounded up Kitty and Meva who were also thoroughly lost, and we loaded up the Cessna and left.
An hour and 45 minutes was a long time in a Cessna with six, bags in my lap and at my feet because the hold was full. We cruised at 9500 feet northeast along an escarpment until we met the Luangwa River, then down to an airfield at Mfuwe.
I had the co-pilot's chair (because I was the biggest and that's the way they load small planes - heavier folks in the front so they won't be tail-heavy) so I also had the co-pilot's headphones and after Lusaka I only heard two more planes - a Martinair cargo jet and a South African Airways flight bound for Johannesburg, as they passed from Mfuwe air traffic control to Lusaka.
Abraham met Mirja and Meva and Kitty and me, Beatrice was off to the Robin Pope Safari compound (Ryan said it was Robin Pope's wife's plane) and the ladies and I commandeered Abraham into the bar for a cold beer before leaving the airport.
Kitty, it seems, was living in London, had been for years, and both she and Meva were directly off the Helsinki-London Heathrow-Johannesburg-Lusaka-Mfuwe run. Had it been me, I'd have been irascible and crabby and impossible by now, but they were both so excited it was astounding. First time in Africa.
Forty minutes in an open safari jeep to Kapani Lodge to be greeted by Denis and Georgina, staff introductions and off to our room. Georgina had given Mirja and me a suite and it was just remarkable - a larger-than-king bed, 24 hour power, minibar full of Mosis, working hot water, ensuite toilet, a porch and separate sitting area down by the lagoon. Roomy and astounding.
Off to a night drive. Cocktails on the bridge, hippos and impala mostly. Find the Southern Cross and back to a steak dinner and bed. A hyena serenaded the camp at bedtime. Denis says it wants their chickens.
5:30 wake-up call and we got out in the Land Cruiser by minutes past six. It was disconcerting seeing people on the tarmac and giraffes alongside. Disconcerting, too, seeing power lines. Our last safari was fly-in fly-out to a bush strip but Ryan says they don't want them in the park, so most people stay on the outside of the Luangwa River and drive in, and for the first few days so did we.
We spied no hunting in the early period before the sun established itself, so it was chill and uneventful for a long while and we spent a lot of time with impala and hippos, and I began to wonder what was up here. No herds like in the Ngorongoro Crater in Tanzania. There was a great photo-op of a fish eagle snatching a talapia from a hippo pond and another at a funny, colorful scene where a hippo stood with his back covered with a vegetation called water lettuce, but nothing much was happening and Abraham even had to reassure, "you will see zebras," which Kitty and Meva especially wanted to see (everything was new to them and they just sat in wide-eyed in wonder).
We stopped for a cup of coffee maybe ten o'clock and Mirja first spied two giraffes. Then there was a warthog. It took a little coaxing but suddenly the savannah was alive and before the morning was out we saw more warthogs, buffalo, elephants, zebras, leopard tracks, a former impala (now dinner for huge vultures), baboons, cranes - a huge kind of crane called saddle-bill - waterbucks, puku, monitor lizards and crocs down by the river.
Bush camp in the South Luangwa park, with lodging made of reeds.
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Some more photos in the Zambia Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.
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