The Night Before Christmas

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A while ago we discovered that many of the posh, all inclusive luxury safari lodges allow less financially well endowed customers (such as ourselves) to bring their own tents and camp for a small fee. This means you can stay somewhere absolutely beautiful, in a fantastic location complete with swimming pools and lovely things, for about $7. It also means you won’t be able to afford to eat in the restaurant, so will have to live on peanut butter and smuggle your own wine into the tastefully appointed riverside bar. This doesn’t bother us at all, because we have no shame.



We took this approach in South Luangwa National Park, a few days before Christmas. The place we chose, Track and Trail Safari Lodge, had a beautiful curvy swimming pool placed high on a wooden platform overlooking the river. I loved this place. You could lie in a hammock with a drink (smuggled, obviously) and watch families of elephants wade across the river. The other brilliant thing was that the campsite had treehouses, so with a little creativity you could pitch your tent on raised wooden platforms high above the ground (and elephants).



As we were making breakfast on the first morning, a troupe of something like 50 baboons appeared out of nowhere and came marauding through the campsite, plunging into sinks, swinging from taps and lanterns. I quickly flung all the food in the car and retreated up into our treehouse, grabbing a variety of projectiles on the way. A particularly ballsy one tried to follow me up the steps. Winging a can of Sure deodorant at a baboon was not something I ever envisioned myself doing in Africa, but sometimes you have to adapt to your environment. They left as quickly as they arrived, passing through without molesting the car or tent.



As soon as we arrived we signed up for a guided night drive. These kind of organised activities are very expensive, so mostly me and Sam just bumble around national parks in his car. Sometimes this works brilliantly, like the time in Kenya when the park guides saw no big cats all day but we found our very own lion. Alternatively it can go not so well, like the time we got stuck in a swamp. Mixed results, really. But we’d heard such good things about South Luangwa, we decided an official guide in a proper safari truck would be a worthy investment.



The wildlife in the park was ridiculously abundant. You could barely move without tripping over a warthog. Elephant herds formed full scale traffic jams. The landscape was strikingly beautiful. Even so, by the time the car turned around to head home, we’d found nothing we hadn’t see before. Bear in mind we’re hardly safari virgins at this point. I think Sam’s been to maybe 9 different national parks. I’m only on 7. Even so, awful as it sounds, some things do get a bit repetitive. I am starting to feel that if I’m told by yet another guide that each zebra’s stripe pattern is unique (like a human fingerprint!) I may struggle to maintain polite interest.



Now what I really wanted to see was a leopard. Up until this point, despite safaris in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya, they had eluded me. I was actually starting to suspect they were fictitious. I had about as much hope of spotting a leopard as unicorn. When we were nearly back to the lodge, after it was already dark and we could see nothing outside the bright circle highlighted by our guide’s lamp, someone spotted a pair of cat’s eyes. I couldn’t believe it. An actual leopard. They exist! And they’re amazingly beautiful. So beautiful that I instantly upgraded them to my new favourite animal. People in the car were so excited, our guide had to tell us to shut up. My disbelief escalated as we watched him stalk a baby impala through the undergrowth. He missed the first one then settled on another target, creeping forward as if he were being pulled slowly towards it on a string. I grabbed some binoculars and watched, fascinated and mildly horrified, as he pounced on the little impala, dragging it quickly out of the light. Suddenly without warning our car tore off the track and went crashing through the bush. Our guide knew leopards, he knew the leopard was going to take his kill up a tree, he guessed which tree and he positioned the car exactly so we would be there to watch. These guys, they’re good.



We were so close now, almost directly beneath the tree. The leopard hauled his kill further along the branch. I say kill, but the impala’s legs started moving, and we were all a little horrified to realise it was still alive. Writing about it now, it seems like a weirdly voyeuristic thing to watch an animal die, but at the time I felt a real sense of witnessing nature in action. By this point the leopard was, to put it bluntly, knackered. He was panting, exhausted from the effort of chasing and dragging. He didn’t even have the energy to start eating it. Or finish killing it. We watched for another few minutes, then the guide announced it was time to leave him in peace.



I didn’t manage to take a single photo during this whole scenario. These are all stolen from Sam. It never ever occurred to me to reach for my camera. The whole time I was watching him, no thoughts were going through my head aside from LEOPARD! It was great, I can’t remember the last time my inner monologue shut up and let me just observe something. For the rest of the evening, everyone who’d been in that truck was high on leopards.



We stayed another two days and did our usual safari activities, including getting the car stuck in mud and getting shouted at by elephants, but neither we nor anyone else saw anything that good again during the time we stayed.



We left and spent the next night in Lusaka, still thinking we wanted to go to Kasanka, a remote little nature reserve in the north, to see the bat migration (because nothing says Merry Christmas like 5 million fruitbats). Unfortunately, when we stopped to think about the distances involved, we were forced to conclude that the car’s little breakdown in Lilongwe meant that we didn’t have time for that. Instead, at the last minute, we changed our minds and picked Kafue, another national park situated 3 hours away in vaguely the right direction. This is where we headed when we left Lusaka early on Chrstmas eve…

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Photos

Wild dog!
Sam complained that my statement about finding nothing much when we went out driving by ourselves in South Luangwa wasn't true. We actually found this really cool, very rare WILD DOG! So there you go. Wild dog! (No one else found one that day).