Original Story Published by: Lisa Grainger, www.cntraveller.com
Photo Source: Crookes and Jackson
(Above) Yellow-billed storks in the Zambezi
The elephants can’t see me peeking through a slit in a game hide. But I can certainly see them; I’m so close I can see the crackled gold of their irises glinting in the fading evening sunlight. Just in front of me, a young female gloops forward in the knee-high mud, reaching out with her trunk to rip up fresh shoots of grass to munch. At the edge of the waterhole, a nursing mother drinks nervously, watching out for crocodiles as her calf demandingly pulls at her teats. A line of matriarchs slooshes their dusty hides with water. Then suddenly, they’re gone: sated, hydrated, washed and in search of a more protected place to continue their nocturnal feasting.
I could hang about for longer, listening to doves coo and ibises caw as the rose skies darken to lavender. But the mosquitoes have started to buzz, and it is time to ward them off with a quinine rich cocktail and a slathering of citronella oil.
Half a century ago, when South Luangwa National Park was formally set up to protect a 3,494 square-mile game reserve in the east of Zambia, visitors who survived the potholed dirt road from Lusaka, the capital, would be put up in tents or simple rondavels. The area was inhabited by only the hardy: men such as the conservationist Norman Carr, who worked with local Chief Nsefu to set land aside for the country’s first safari camp in 1950, so villagers would be paid by tourists to view creatures through a camera rather than rifle sights. Or Robin Pope, the legendary gentleman guide, who, with Carr, mentored villagers to become conservationists – today among the finest on the continent.
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