Safari Christmas in Kafue National Park


Advertisement
Zambia's flag
Africa » Zambia » Lusaka » Kafue
December 25th 2013
Published: January 4th 2014
Edit Blog Post

So we rocked up to Kafue on Christmas Eve without any reservation or plan. The place we really wanted to stay was three hours into the park on roads we weren’t even sure were passable in the rainy season, so we compromised with something a little more accessible. Right away we signed up to do a night drive, hoping we could replicate the luck we’d had in South Luangwa.

Kafue is weird. The park is huge, with a decent sized tarmac road running directly through the centre which sees a reasonable amount of traffic. It feels like cheating to do a game drive on what is essentially a highway by African standards, but a lot of animals like to hang around by the road at this time of year because it’s a firm dry surface, easier to walk on than the boggy ground. The rest of the park, away from the road, is really very wild and sometime during wet season, quite impassable. Our guide stuck almost exclusively to the main road. The wildlife was nowhere near as abundant as South Luangwa. Kafue makes you work much harder. But it is famous for big cats, leopards and lions, even cheetahs. Maybe one of the best places in Africa to spot a leopard, according to the Lonely Planet, a book which is reliably wrong about most things.

So I was initially mildly confused and disappointed by our highway night safari. This changed right at the last minute, when we were nearly home, as a sweep of the torch caught the glinting eyes of a lion prowling alongside the main road. She was moving slowly but purposefully through the undergrowth, unconcerned by our presence. Unfortunately we’d scared away the puku she’d been eying up. I felt guilty, like we’d ruined her dinner. The guide commented that it was strange to see her hunting alone. We followed her at a respectful distance for a while, until our guide seemingly got bored and decided to swerve off onto a side road and intercept her. We parked up in the dark to await her arrival. She crossed just behind the car, ignoring us completely, determined and focused. I’ve seen lions before, but always resting, never active. Watching her on the hunt was something else completely. After she passed by the car our guide told us we had to leave her now because we’re disturbing things and with us here she might not make a kill. This seems totally fair enough.



Just as we pulled back out onto the highway, a small group of unsuspecting puku tottered across the road right into her path. This was too much for the guide. He swung the car back around and pulled over. The puku clearly knew that something wasn’t right, but they couldn’t see her. The guide quietly explained that our car had distracted them, which might help her make a kill. I couldn’t help but feel like we were no longer passive observers in this scenario. Though I suppose humans never are, really. Watching the interplay between the wildlife and the road was interesting. More than once we saw our lion line up to attack, only to have her prey scared off at the last moment by a speeding lorry. Eventually she just hid and waited. The puku wandered ever closer. They were so cute, but I was totally rooting for the lion. Our guide picked out one with his light. “This one is going to die… this one”. He stated it confidently, like some kind of khaki clad grim reaper. He wasn’t wrong.

He turned the torch off for a brief moment to stop the light disturbing her, so I didn’t see it happen, but I heard. When the light flickered on again there were lions all around us, on every side of the car. One, two, three, four. She hadn’t been hunting alone. We’d missed the others that were hiding in the dark all around us. The guide slowly crept the car up close to them, closer that I would have dared. All four lions were now taking bites out of the little creature, but somehow it was still moving. I’m a doctor, grim things are my specialty, but even to me this was pretty dark. I instinctively wanted to run up and give the puku some morphine and midazolam. But nature doesn’t work that way. Eventually the twitching stopped.

On the way home we spotted more shapes at the side of the road, but they turned out to be humans. My least favourite animal. Four people, torchless, wandering along in the opposite direction. Our guide stopped the car abruptly and delivered a swift bollocking in the local language. There was a lot of gesturing and pointing back down the road. The guide raised up four fingers. I catch the words “lion” and “puku”. The pedestrians looked suitably alarmed. It turned out they were a group police officers, a little tipsy after a few celebratory Christmas eve drinks. We stayed with them until they flagged down a lift heading their way. The guide insisted they would ‘probably’ have been fine, so long as they’d stayed together and stuck to the road.

After that, we saw a leopard. Another bloody leopard. I’d only just seen my first leopard in South Luangwa, days before. You wait four months for a leopard, then two come along at once. He was just sitting by the side of the road, maybe two meters away, happily licking his paws. His mannerisms were so similar to those of my pet cats back home, if we’d have been any closer I probably would have instinctively reached my hand out to stroke him, and lost some fingers. The guide explained that this was Tom, the resident leopard around the camp area. They spot him a few times a week, he’s pretty accustomed to visitors and happy to pose for photos. But that night he was extra tolerant, letting us stay much closer for much longer than he ever has before.

So the night drive was ridiculous, basically. Both of the guides were leaning out of the truck taking photos of the leopard and the lions. When even the guides want photos, you know you’ve been a very lucky girl.

After our crazy safari we went back to the campsite by the river, cooked dinner over a gas stove, drank a bottle of wine that cost more than our accommodation, made a fire and toasted marshmallows. It was a lovely, if slightly non-traditional, way to spent Christmas eve. The sky was clear and there was no light aside from our fire. I made wishes on shooting stars (and satellites, and glow worms… I didn’t have my glasses on).

The campsite is quite separate from the rest of the lodge, and we had the place to ourselves. It was completely peaceful and calm. A silent night. Until we heard the lion. It wasn’t a classical ROAR exactly, and at first Sam tried to claim that it might be just a hippo with a sore throat, but when it happened for a second time we were forced to admit that there wasn’t really anything else it could be. What the lion was doing I can’t imagine, because it sounded like the soundtrack to some kind of safari porn film. The third time was much louder, closer maybe. It made me jump. In fact, it made me jump up from my position next to the fire into the safety of the car. I moved so fast I lost my flipflops, but did manage to keep hold of my glass of wine.

Sam, calmly continuing to toast marshmallows, confidently announced that the lion was at least 500 meters away and probably over the other side of the river. I demanded to know on what evidence he was basing this estimate, as I strongly suspected it to be total bollocks. Sam admitted that he basically just pulled the number from thin air, but continued to insist that it was fine because the lion was probably quite far away. I remained unconvinced, mainly because we had just seen three lions silently appear out of nowhere. Even when tracking them with two guides and a spotlight, it’s impossible to know where they are. Lions are stealthy. It’s kind of their thing. And even assuming this particular lion wasn’t in the campsite, lions hunt in groups.

Where are the other lions? The quiet lions?

They do come through this camp occasionally, that I knew for sure. Just the week before a pride of 10 or so was found resting right where we pitched our tent. Anyway, in Lilongwe we had camped just over the river from a wildlife sanctuary where a one-eyed lioness called Bella (repatriated from a neglectful Russian zoo) used to wake us up every morning with her roaring. This lion sounded closer than one-eyed Bella, and she wasn’t 500 meters away. I refused to get back out of the car. Sam fed me toasted marshmallows through the window and tried to reassure me that he wasn’t going to get mauled. After a while we heard a second lion answer the first one’s call, from a different direction, the other side of camp. At this point we decided we’d had enough marshmallows and it was time for bed. From the safety of our tent, it felt surreal and amazing listening to them calling to each other as we drifted off to sleep.

Don’t ask me why tents are safe by the way, I have no idea. I was dubious at first, but I’ve now camped in six or seven national parks in Africa and I’ve never heard of anything bad happening to anyone INSIDE a tent. Someone at a campsite we stayed at in Kenya had been mildly tramped by a buffalo a few weeks previously, but that happened when he crawled out of his tent in the night with no torch. Perhaps animals just view tents as some kind of inert rock-like object of no particular significance. Maybe they think the tent is some mysterious large animal that shouldn’t be messed with (this is the explanation always offered when you ask why lions don’t attack open sided safari trucks full of tourists… because really, they should be just a giant selection box on wheels). Whatever the reason, tents must be relatively safe because you just don’t see reports of thousands of tourists a year being devoured or squashed by wild African animals, which would surely be the inevitable outcome otherwise.

Anyway. The mystery noise was confirmed to be 100% genuine lion. We played the recording we’d made on Sam’s phone to one of the guides the next day. He refused to offer an estimate of how close it was, so that argument remains unresolved.

On Christmas day we went out in Sam’s car to explore some of the smaller dirt tracks that our guide had categorically told us not to go near. Turns out he was right and they were mostly impassable, though we never got thoroughly, worryingly stuck like in South Luangwa.

At one point we hit an elephant turd of such enormous proportions that it actually dislodged some of the armour plating from beneath the car. We heard the ominous sound of metal scraping along the road and had to get out to have a look. The metal plate was still hanging on by its one remaining bolt, having lost the other three, so Sam got out some tools and crawled under the car to remove it. I obviously thought this was hilarious and started taking photos. Later, some American tourists who had stopped a little way behind told us two lions emerged from the bushes just a minute after we left. I checked the photos I’d taken to see if I could identify any predators creeping up on us in the background, but nothing.

After dark on Christmas day, we tried to drive from the campsite to the lodge restaurant. We’d been instructed that it wasn’t safe to walk alone at night, so driving around the place was necessary. Unfortunately on this occasion, a single male elephant was blocking our path. Like any species, single males are the troublemakers. As we’ve already established, elephants hate our car. I’m wondering if maybe bright white cars make them angry, and that’s why all the Safari trucks are beige. Whatever the reason, as soon as they take one look at Niko they kick off. In South Luangwa alone, despite our best attempts to be careful, we enraged no less than 3 elephants on separate occasions in one day.

We stopped a little distance away from the invader in the camp, and watched him for a while. He looked edgy, but continued munching away on a nearby tree. No stamping, no trumpeting, no warning signs. When he turned his back to the road and moved a little way into the bush, we thought it might be safe to pass. As soon as we edged forwards, he spun around (you wouldn’t think elephants could spin, but believe me) and charged head on at the front of the car. Just a few feet away from us he stopped abruptly, then backed off as we retreated. I was pretty startled. Of all the many elephants we’ve bothered, this was the first to actually go for us. And he gave no warning either, which probably means everything every safari guide has ever told me has been a lie. We drove around the campsite for a few minutes to give him time to calm down, or hopefully just bugger off, then tried our luck again. I wound my window up, which Sam said was ridiculous and would offer no protection from a charging elephant, but I insisted that at least this way he couldn’t just reach in and stick his trunk in my ear. He was still there, resolutely in the same place. He didn’t look happy. We gave up and walked, taking a shortcut through another part of camp.

We’d had beans cooked on a camping stove for Christmas lunch, so we decided to treat ourselves to dinner in the restaurant. This was a mistake since it cost $20 and turned out to closely resemble the kind of Christmas dinner you might get at the hospital canteen. These safari lodges usually have great food, so I can only assume that the chef must have gone home for the holidays, leaving his assistant with nothing but a chicken and a can of soup. Just as the main course arrived, Sam pointed at something on the floor and issued the confusing instruction “Jen look… OH NO WAIT DON’T LOOK”. Inevitably, I looked. I briefly caught a glimpse of something the size of a large hamster disappearing under the table. At first (like Sam) I thought maybe it was a lizard, but then I realised it had too many legs to be a lizard. Like twice as many legs. Sam said it was nothing and calmly continued eating, but I couldn’t help but notice that his feet had shot up onto his chair. I tried to think of something else, anything else, that it could possibly have been aside from the fattest hairiest nastiest spider imaginable. I came up blank. We couldn’t see where it went, but I reassured myself that since it appeared to be travelling at about 40 miles per hour it was probably quite a long way away already. Sam eventually put his legs back down, but I ate the rest of the meal balanced on the chair in the foetal position.

One of my more memorable Christmases, anyway.

Advertisement



Tot: 0.19s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 19; qc: 87; dbt: 0.1115s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1; ; mem: 1.3mb