National parks in Zambia (by Mel)

Hello readers,
We had an amazing time in 2 of the national parks in Zambia: the south Luangwa National park and the Lower Zambezi National Park.
Last time we blogged it was Friday the 2nd of May and it was our last full day in Lusaka. We went to watch a movie (the Minecraft movie that the kids loved!) When we got back to our room, it rained!!! I mention it because we hardly saw rain since the beginning of the trip!! It was nice to feel some rain!
Anyway, the next day, we went to pick up the car that we are going to drive with for the next 11 days. It is not in perfect condition and not everything from the list that was send by email is in it, but hopefully it’ll be alright. It also has less space that we thought for our bags. We’ll work it out! After that, we did some shopping to try to get enough for the 11 days. It was hard to decide what to get: we don’t want to buy to much as we don’t want to waste, but we also need to have enough as we don’t know if we’ll find shops on the way or not.
The shop we went is called Shoprite. It has a lot in it, pretty similar to a Woolworth in Australia, plus it has beer and wine! Great! We did our shopping and find almost everything we wanted.
I found a business who sell board games, so off we go. We have several games, but we have played them a lot, so a few new ones will be good! We find the place and they have lots of games. We can’t buy them all and it is hard to control myself! We only bought 4! But they are good one: Uno show no mercy, Dragonwood, spot it minion version and Exploding minions. We tested them since, and they are pretty fun and entertaining.
When everything is crammed in the car, we are on our way to our first camp. It is not far from Lusaka, but it took us ages to get there. On the road was either an accident or something broken down, we are not sure, but we got stucked in a pretty big traffic jam. At some point, we got directed to a side road and google map took us to who knows where! One the map were roads which didn’t exist in real life. We have an old gps that came with the car and the way seems longer but made more senses, so we used that and finally arrive at the first campsite, Pioneer lodge. It is a lovely campsite, we set up for the night, cook dinner (well Kev does), test some of the games we just bought and slept.
Early start the next day as we have around 9 hours in the car to get to South Luangwa National Park which is located in the west of Zambia. On the way, there is amazing landscapes, not unlike some we can find in Queensland in Australia. Some landscape felt familiar. We also see a lot of people walking. All along the road (again 9-10 hours) there were people walking pretty much all the time. Even when it looked like there was no village around or even houses, there was someone walking to go somewhere. That is another thing that we need to be grateful for: transportation. Where we are from almost everyone has a car, or a bike or buses or train to go around. Here a lot of people rely on their feet to take them places. It makes going anywhere a lot longer.
We pass villages with small houses made of bricks and huts, people carrying things on their head, women with little children on their back wrapped in very colourful fabrics, a lot of small shop selling fruits and vegetables. We will try some of those later and they are absolutely delicious!!! Tomatoes like we haven’t had for a very long time! Juicy, tasty, truly amazing.
It took us around 10 hours to drive here and a big part of it was driving around pothole! A lot of them. The road quality is not the best here, but we got there.
We arrived at Track and trails campsite around 7.30pm, tired and happy to get out of the car. Again, the kids amazed me. They did not complain once. They entertained themselves and took the 10 hours drive like champion.
We arrived, set up, ate dinner and bed as we wanted to have an early start the next day.
Monday the 5th of May which was the first day of our fifth month of traveling, was truly an amazing experience. We got up around 5.30am and got ready.
The Luangwa national park is 9050 square kilometres. We drove in not knowing what to expect. During that first day, we saw so many animals: Zebras, elephants, impalas, warthogs, monkeys, crocodiles, buffalos, plenty of different birds... and I probably forgot some. It was amazing to see the animals in the wild and free. I’ll never go to a zoo again. Animals in the wild, is how it is supposed to be.
It was magical to drive around and suddenly spot some zebras, or a big pack of impalas eating grass, their heads popping up to look at us, assess if we were dangerous, and go back to eating when they realised we weren’t, or move a bit away if we were too close.
Elephants!!!! The first one we saw was on a small path, with bush on both side pretty close to the car, and suddenly we saw the bush moving and a trunk popping out, follow by the beautiful face of an elephant, just a few meters away from us. Incredible!
Later, we saw a family of elephants with a brand new little one, which was still wobbly on its legs! That was one of the many highlights of that day.
Warthogs running around (all I could think about was: “Pumba is here!!” Bloody Disney!)
In the river, hippopotamus and crocodile floating peacefully, then disappearing under the water and you wonder if they spotted a prey around (hopefully not us!).
The hippos are huge!!! I knew that, but seeing it is a different story! They are so huge. Some of them, have a head bigger than Emma! The fun thing is, apparently, they come into our camp at night time to eat some grass. Okay…
After 6 hours in the park, we came back to our camp, which is not far from the entrance to have a snack.
Kev was making sandwiches when a bunch of baboons came around and stole our bread. It was right next to Kev and a little baboon came a grab the bag. It was so quick that nothing could be done about it! Then Kev got our second bag of bread, put it even closer to himself and a big baboon run toward us and show his teeth to Emma. I grabbed her and pulled her behind me and told both kids to get into the car. Kev tried to scare it with a stick, but it didn’t work. It managed to get more bread and left. It was terrifying I have to admit. So now we are worried about baboons and hippos in our camp (Yeah for wildlife!!!)! The rest of the afternoon was more relaxed and we played some games, did some laundry (it was necessary!) and rest a bit. We also watch the hippos in the river in front of our camps. Andrew loved playing with the fire in the evening.
Just before going to bed, one of the guy taking care of the lodge come and tell us “Look over there”: one massive hippo is right there, several meters from us, eating grass, no caring about us at all. They come out at night to eat. It is so impressive!!!
The second day in the park was as amazing as the first. We got to add new animals to the list: giraffes, wild dogs and goanna.
We arrived in a big plain area with some wild dogs laying around and having a snooze. Then we kept going and what did we see coming: a graceful giraffe, and another, and another, and more!!! We started counted them but there were too many! It was amazing and then we looked back and a whole family of elephants were there.
The photographer in me didn’t know what to focus on! So many opportunities.
Another thing that I loved was the trees, especially the baobab tree. Some were really big and you wonder how old they are, how many lives they saw and how much longer they will stay around.
And the birds! Some very colourful, some pretty big, some tiny one. All amazing.
What strikes me is how perfect nature is. All the animal we saw, from the small squirrel to the mighty lions, are incredibly beautiful and perfect.
We went out of the park to have lunch at the small village near the lodge. We found a small café attached to a shop selling artisan creations from local people, called Project Luangwa. This is a non-profit organisation which was created by owners of lodge in the area to make sure some of the money from tourism come back into the community. They have lots of different projects which help with education, gender equality, living wages for the artisans… and more. If you want to support them, you can find information on www.projectluangwa.org.
After lunch (amazing delicious sandwich with blue cheese on mine!!! Happy!) we got back into the park. We saw a group of around 10 lionesses laying around. Again, just amazing to watch.
The third day in the park, was a little bit different.
We started like the other two. We wanted to try to spot a leopard as this is on the only animal we have not seen. I save you the surprised, we didn’t see one!
We got bogged for a couple of hours instead! We drove far into the park, looking up at trees to try to spot a leopard, as it is where they usually are during the day according to some documentaries we saw.
At some point, we drove through a path with some mud on it. It didn’t look bad at all, not deep at all. And yet, we got bogged! The mud was very thick, clay like, and grabbed the diff under the car and nothing moved after that! We tried digging, putting sticks to drive on, going backward… nothing helped. You have to remember that we were in a national park, with wild lions and other wonderful animals around! As a self-drive, you are normally not allowed to get out of your car. But we obviously had to! We had Emma inside the car and Andrew on top of the car, on animal and other car watch. We got stuck for 2 hours!!! No car passed us for a while. When we were starting to worry a bit, 2 cars came our ways and got us out of the mud! Yeah. As Kev and I were covered in mud, we got back to camp to take a shower. We were done for the day after that!
So we blogged a bit, wash the car which was covered in mud, Emma did some drawing of the animals we saw.
We had to fight more baboons which were raiding another camp near ours! Baboons, we don’t like them too much!
Then board games and dinner, then early bed as we have another early start tomorrow to go back toward Lusaka before going south.
Thursday the 8th was another long day in the car. We drove back to Pioneer Lodge near Lusaka. Another 9 hours ish: lucky we like to read!!! We got to the Lodge, grab a drink and dinner, set up the camp and went to bed!
This is one the annoying thing with the car we have, as the tents are on the top of the car, we constantly have to set them up and pack them up, which we did the next morning, to drive south to Mvuu Lodge near low Zambezi national park this time. It was a shorter drive, only 6 hours (I think as everything is blurring into one long week in the car!!!) We arrive to the lodge, set up, and rest the rest of the afternoon.
Mvuu means hippopotamus in the language of the area and there are plenty!!
The following day we went into the national park. It is a bit different than the South Luangwa park: it is a bit more wild. The vegetation is also a bit different. At the beginning of the day, we didn’t see much animals apart for the many impalas. We also saw some massive herbivore type of animal with huge twisted horns on their head: we saw one easily higher than our car, magnificent. We learnt the name of it but none of us can remember it now!!! That will have to be some research later on.
After a fair bit of driving, we cross path with a tour vehicle, and they asked us if we saw the lions. No we didn’t! Where are they? The guide gave us a vague direction (they are never keen on giving information to self-drive people it seems), so we took off. And we find them; 3 lioness laying under some low trees. We could only see one very well as the other 2 were hiding more. We were only 4 or 5 meters away from her. She was laying there, moving around a bit, changing position, she even started snoozing, with us just a few meters away! Not a care in the world! That was so awesome to watch.
Of course, we saw other animals; elephants, zebras, Pumbas.. sorry warthogs and more. No giraffe though as there is none in this park. We came back at the lodge around 3pm as we booked a night safari for that evening. At the entrance of the lodge was a hippo! In the middle of the day! They normally come out at night. But here it was. Massive and in the way, we were a bit worried; we waited for a bit, as it slowly made its way to the side of the road eating plants as it goes. We were really not comfortable driving next to it, but we had to, so we did. It looked at us passing while we looked at it… We pass with no issue, but it was intense!
We ate a bit and when we were doing the dishes, we hear some noise and there it was again in the middle of a grass area near our campsite. The people working here had their eyes on it obviously. We talk to one of them and he explained to us that this hippo had a wound the fish in the river keep nibbling on, hence why it was out of the water right now. As it was hurt, it was more aggressive, so we had to be careful! Don’t worry, we will!!! Saying that, we are still more scared of baboons than hippo.
We started our night safari by going up the hills to see the beautiful view from up there toward the Zambesi river (one of the main river in Zambia, which is also the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe). The view was amazing, the colours of the sunset stunning.
After that we came back down the hills and started looking for animals: one of the guide is driving the car while the other one has a powerful lamp which he kept swiping from left to right and back to try to see the light reflecting in the eyes of animals and that is how they find them. We didn’t see much (apart from impalas of course as they are EVERYWHERE!) at the beginning. As the night got darker, we saw more and more hippo walking around eating plants. I know I said it already, but they are so big! They are formidable animals. We were starting to think we wouldn’t see any big cats, when we finally spotted one: a male lion stalking some prey. We were on a small plane strip made from the small planes which land here. It was a big open space and the lion was on the side of it, close to the tree line. The most exciting part was that a family of elephants was trying to cross the strip. The guide told us that elephants have a great sense of smell and they know there is a lion nearby. We could hear the family of elephant on one side and one single elephant on the other side ‘trumping’ at each other. Suddenly we heard the elephant crashing through the trees toward the lion. The sound was so loud! The lion very soon run back under the cover of trees where he stayed hidden. It was super exciting to see. That sound of the elephant crashing trees was very impressive.
The next morning, we packed the car again and went back into the Lower Zambezi park as the guide from the night before, told us about a big pride of lions he saw and roughly where to find them. We drove around the area he told us (well we think) but didn’t see any lions, which was a bit disappointing. We still saw a lot of elephants; some group as big as 15 elephants (with several young ones which are Emma’s favourite).
Around 1pm we left the park, as we had to drive back to another lodge further from the park, called Kiambi lodge. We got there around 5pm and set up camp.
We booked a fishing trip for the next day as Andrew has been missing fishing a lot!
Kev and I shared a bottle of red to celebrate Mother’s day, then dinner, a bit of time around the fire and bed.
On the morning of the 12th of May we took a boat (with a guide) on a river infested by crocodiles and hippo! We have to be crazy! Well, you think if they sell this kind of experience to tourists it must be safe, right! I must admit I was a little bit worried at first, but all the animals seem to not want to eat us, so I relaxed after a while. Andrew was extremely happy to fish. We were told that the fishing was slow at the moment, so we didn’t expect too much. But in the first hour, Emma caught and Kev fought and got out, a tiger fish. This was around 3 to 4 Kg with big teeth! Kev put a good fight to get it out. We took a picture and release it, as tourists can’t keep the fish. I am not a big fan of fishing; I don’t understand why you would take so long to wait for a fish to hook, then fight to get it out and then release the poor fish with a hole in its mouth. It baffles me, but the other 3 in the family loves it (well especially Andrew and Kev) so I put up with it. And I spend 4 hours doing nothing, relaxing with Emma giving me the occasional massage (she says she is practicing in case she want to become a masseuse, and I am all for that!), so I am not complaining!
Andrew almost caught something but the fish got snagged under something and the line broke. I know he was disappointed but he dealt with it very well and he said he had a good time no matter what.
The afternoon was spent blogging and splashing in the pool of the lodge.
Tuesday the 13th of May was our last day of this camping/ national park part of our trip in Zambia. It was a fun adventure, and we will have something similar soon in Namibia!
We drove back to Lusaka, again, to give the car back. We have an apartment booked for one night (I thought after 11 days camping, a nice flat would be good!). When we found the place, the buildings looked a bit shabby but the flat is really nice and big!!! The kids were super excited, as if they have never lived in a big place!!!
Tomorrow we are taking a bus for Livingstone, which is near Victoria Fall: I am very looking forward to that too!!!
See you there.もっと詳しく