Kasabushi Camp, Kafue National Park

Arrived at our campsite at Kasabushi in Kafue in the late afternoon. Because it was the end of a holiday weekend, the campsite was full and unfortunately they had double booked us on the first night. That said, the sites were really nice as they were located right next to a languid, boulder-filled, serpentine river, typical of what you expect a river in Africa to look like with dark, deep, slow-flowing water, ample vegetation coming down to the water’s edge, and countless birds and hippos everywhere. The showers here were the best we’ve had in Africa (maybe top 10 of our lives?) – outdoors, spacious, beautifully designed, hot and great pressure. They also light a campfire for you each night, which was another great luxury. We are going to call this valet camping and we really like it!
We took things pretty easy here, going out driving only a few times and taking a boat trip with the owner of the camp. Compared to other parks we’ve been in recently, the amount of wildlife we saw was a lot less. However, we did see 2 beautiful, young male lions, 3 elephants and some species of antelope we had not seen before. The birds were fantastic here – we saw skimmers for the first time, which are a very graceful flying birds that reminded us a small albatross. The behavior of the animals was also very different than in other parks – they were far more timid and likely to run when they saw us coming. We were told this is probably because the animals still have very distinct, recent memories or experience with poachers and/or they are not habituated to cars and humans as you find in other parks with a higher volume of visitors. To put a point on this, we heard 2 gunshots the morning of our departure. It was very likely from poachers and the camp owner reported it to the authorities immediately. Ugh!Read more