Making tracks

The South Luangwa National Park in Zambia is one of the last great tracts of African wilderness. Juliet Clough explores this pristine land on foot

Turn down the volume and it might have sounded reassuringly agricultural: the rustle-tug-scrunch of a grazing animal screened somewhere in the vegetation close by. But our guide's terse whisper, freezing us in our tracks, allowed for a few seconds' reality check. We were here on sufferance, guests on foot in others' territory, and we needed to watch our step.

Turn down the volume and it might have sounded reassuringly agricultural: the rustle-tug-scrunch of a grazing animal screened somewhere in the vegetation close by. But our guide's terse whisper, freezing us in our tracks, allowed for a few seconds' reality check. We were here on sufferance, guests on foot in others' territory, and we needed to watch our step.

A few heart-stopping moments later, the bushes parted and a young bull elephant emerged directly onto our path. He gave us a level stare and a warning thrash of his ears before turning around and ambling away across the plain. Perhaps his was the trunk whose tip had drawn that faint trail through the dust, spotted an hour or so back, its serpentine progress framed by footprints the size of dinner plates.

Walking safaris, pioneered more than 30 years ago here in Zambia's South Luangwa National Park by the legendary game ranger Norman Carr, are less about searching for the big five than scanning the bigger picture. Out there on foot, without either the protective carapace of a vehicle or the limitation of its routes, you feel at once more exposed and more free, more a part of the landscape and open to its chance encounters.

Zambia's game parks, wilder and less commercialised than any of their neighbours, did not immediately benefit from the collapse of tourism in Mugabe's Zimbabwe next door. "Just another 'Z' country, that's how the travelling world saw us," says John Coppinger of Remote Africa Safaris who, with his wife Carol, founded Tafika lodge in 1995.

But the safari holiday business is increasingly recognising what old hands have always known, that the South Luangwa can more than hold its own among Africa's top game parks. As Sunvil Africa director Chris McIntyre, author of Zambia: The Bradt Travel Guide maintains, though the Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater, Etosha, Kruger and a handful of others might match the South Luangwa's spectacular quantities of game, few can offer such remarkable wildlife spectacles, day and night, against a true wilderness backdrop.

That South Luangwa currently attracts only a small number of visitors is another compelling argument in its favour. There is no chance of spotting a clutch of Land Rovers as a prelude to anything more interesting here. In four days we saw just one other vehicle, and that a mere smudge of headlights on the horizon.

This feeling of isolation intensifies when you are on foot. Tafika's dreamy river-side setting offered every inducement to stay at home, put our feet up and go for game drives; night drives are another Zambian speciality and many guests do just that. But the chance of walking through varied African terrain, coupled with the quality of guiding for which this lodge is widely recognised, provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Chikoko and Crocodile bush camps are alone in the national park in being accessible only on foot. Walking for three days, from one to another and back to Tafika, my husband John and I could share with our host companions - guide, armed scout and tea-bearer - the illusion of having the valley all to ourselves.

We crossed the river as the sun rose to the bubbling wake-up calls of Cape turtle doves and Senegal coucal, the pearly light glistening on the backs of dozing hippos. The Luangwa is the only virtually pristine river of its size in Central and Southern Africa, and is untouched by dams, industries or major human pressures. The result for the river, freedom to flood, to meander, to change course as it pleases, ensures a variety of different habitats and unusually high densities of game.

For humans, it also makes for dynamic walking territory. We strolled by abandoned water courses where tall groves of mahogany and ebony trees opened onto grassland dotted with grazing antelope, zebra and buffalo, a scene as serene as any park surrounding an English stately home. We sat by lagoons and oxbow lakes, watching the herons and storks that patrolled the banks, admiring the sheen on an ibis's wing and the flocks of lovebirds exploding like fireworks out of the trees. We scanned cathedral aisles of mopane woodland hoping for an elegantly white-stockinged Thornicroft's giraffe, one of the park's endemic celebrities, to emerge.

We also learnt to narrow our focus so that we might appreciate details impossible to spot from a vehicle. "Like a shorthand story of the night before," said our guide, Stephen Banda, as we pored over the tracks of a leopard and two cubs, one of them overprinted by a squirrel's tiny paw. These perfect spheres marked a dung beetle's nest; this pool of urine, barely sunk into the river's sandy bank, meant that a lion had passed by moments earlier.

Moments? I looked nervously over my shoulder. Animals definitely call the shots here. However, it would not come to that. While you wait for an elephant or a herd of buffalo to decide how you will fit into their day, placing complete faith in your guide seems the only sensible option. Zambia is unique in making a scout with a gun a mandatory accompaniment to safari groups. But John told me that in 20 years in the South Luangwa, he could recall no more than half a dozen occasions where warning shots had had to be fired and only one death, that of a hippo.

We walked on. These reeds were good for thatching; this indigo a noted aphrodisiac; this fibrous elephant dung an excellent fire-lighter - particularly for those equipped, like our patient tea bearer, Brighton Zulu, with the right kind of stick and skill with which to twirl it. At the end of each four-hour hike lay a small and transient oasis; both Chikoko and Crocodile camps are dismantled at the end of the season, leaving the bush to renew itself uninterrupted during the rains.

At Chikoko, three tented huts stood on stilts, their reed balconies open to a view of wide grasslands stretching away from a bend in the stream to merge with stands of leadwood and winter thorn. Crocodile's huts are arranged along the banks of a dry watercourse among a grove of African ebony trees, where a gorgeous lilac-breasted roller enlivened every mealtime, doing what rollers do best.

With much of the raw material coming from the lodge's own vegetable garden, Tafika's culinary achievements far outstripped anything we had encountered in the tourist hotels round Victoria Falls. Mediterranean salads, fillet steak and home baking at the lodge made returning from a game drive something to look forward to. At each of the satellite camps, the staff of two performed culinary miracles, conjuring crusty bread, treacle sponge and flawless profiteroles from a hole in the ground filled with hot stones.

"Thank you for introducing us to the real Africa," read one entry in the Tafika visitors' book, a sentiment echoed in such pages all over the safari world but which appears to assume that the "real" Africa is somehow devoid of people. People play a significant role in both the history and the present running of the South Luangwa National Park; its friendliness, say the Coppingers, is one of Zambia's chief tourism assets.

Though one of the smallest of the South Luangwa game lodges, Tafika employs more than 100 people, from senior guides to maintenance staff. "We have always taken the importance of community involvement for granted," Carol told me. "But tourists are asking much more about it than they used to." A fund set up for the neighbouring village by Remote Africa Safaris with the help of guests and a Swiss charity, supports a wide range of projects from school scholarships and teacher training to the setting up of a clinic and the acquisition of sewing machines.

John Coppinger says he has little time for "Western guilt-trippers". "A camp like this is a community godsend," he says. Its presence also creates a real deterrent to poachers. We stopped on our walk to read the graffiti scrawled on the walls of a derelict government camp. "Why are you guarding animals as if you produce them?", one poacher had written, only to be countered by a whole wall of threats from the other side. "We are ready to die or to win the war against poaching." Today, thanks largely to the ban on ivory trading, poaching has dwindled from the dire problem it became in the 1980s. These days, animals are more likely to be killed for the pot than the pocket.

After our walk there was still time for a couple of game drives, so we readjusted our gaze from the minutiae of the bush to focus on the moving panorama. The lovely clarity of morning brought us magical vignettes, from a hippo dozing in a pond full of Nile cabbage with a herd of zebras providing a backdrop, to baboons keeping watch above a herd of grazing puku whose coppery flanks reflected the colours of the sun. We saw nothing of the 14 leopards tantalisingly sighted by other guests over the past 12 days, but this, somehow, ceased to matter. We had been part of it all. We had a bigger picture to remember.

SURVIVAL KIT

GETTING THERE

Juliet Clough travelled with Sunvil Africa (020-8232 9777; www.sunvil.co.uk/africa), which offers an 11-day trip including stays in Tafika, Chikoko and their sister camps, Crocodile and Mwaleshi, in Zambia's North and South Luangwa national parks from £2,340 per person, based on two sharing. This price includes scheduled return flights with British Airways, all transfers, meals, drinks and activities. British Airways (0870 850 9850; www.ba.com) flies direct from Heathrow to the Zambian capital Lusaka three times a week. Alternatively, connecting flights can be made in Johannesburg with South African Airways (0870 747 1111; www.flysaa.com).

STAYING THERE

In addition to Chikoko and Crocodile, Tafika runs Mwaleshi camp in the North Luangwa National Park, an even wilder and more remote area, that is reserved solely for walkers. All three temporary camps have reed and thatch chalets, hot water and en-suite bathrooms with modern facilities.

FURTHER INFORMATION

British tourists require a visa to enter Zambia. These cost £33 and are available at the High Commission for the Republic of Zambia (020-7589 6655; www.zhcl.org.uk) at 2 Palace Gate, Kensington, London W8 5NG. Tourists must fill out an application form, provide their passport, two photos, a photocopy of their holiday confirmation and the fee in cash. Visas can also be obtained by post, with a postal order (no cheques, cash or cards) and a self-addressed envelope. Application forms can be downloaded from the website.

Visitors to Zambia should take anti-malarial prophylactics and have jabs for Hepatitis A and Yellow Fever, depending on the area visited. Up-to-date information should be obtained from your GP; advice is available from the Department of Health ( www.dh.gov.uk).

Recommended reading : Zambia: The Bradt Travel Guide, £15.95