Land of lions, leopards and oxbow lagoons

Riding pillion behind my pilot, I go bumping down Tafika’s dusty airstrip and am airborne before I know it, lifting up over the surrounding woodlands to meet the red bubble of the rising sun. It’s my maiden flight in a microlight – a cross between a motor mower and a hang-glider – and I am hooked from the start. If you are making a list of 10 best things to do, put this near the top; but make sure that Tafika is where you do it.

Tafika, an idyllic bush camp with six comfortable reed-and-thatch chalets on the edge of the Luangwa River, is the home of John and Carol Coppinger, where safari purists come to explore Africa on foot and, uniquely, to fly by microlight over the South Luangwa National Park. John had already established himself as one of Zambia’s most respected guides when he set up his own company, Remote Africa Safaris, in 1995. On a trip to South Africa he visited a microlight factory and knew he just had to have one. “I bought it even before my wife and I had a house to live in,” he says. Having already qualified as a commercial pilot he took to the air as effortlessly as the bateleur eagles that ride the thermals on black-andwhite wings, and has since clocked up more than 2,200 flying hours.

Only from the air does the valley’s extraordinary topography begin to make sense. Laid out below, you can see every serpentine loop of the river as it makes its way down the park, and the oxbow lagoons that are the ghosts of its former meanderings. The sun floods the plains with amber light, casting long shadows across lion-coloured

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200 miles grasslands where kudu and eland canter away beneath us. Giraffes stand like markers, measuring the distance. We spot elephants under the tamarind trees, and a herd of Cape buffaloes, 600-strong, moving through the dappled woodlands.

Coppinger points out a shallow stretch of the river where hippos rest like polished cobblestones. “That’s where Livingstone crossed in December 1866,” he says. Apart from a few tyre tracks and the thatched roofs of a distant safari camp hidden among the ebony groves, nothing has changed. On the home stretch we zoom below treetop height along a dried-up lagoon, scattering impala in every direction, and 30 minutes later we are back in camp for breakfast.

Africa doesn’t come any wilder than South Luangwa. Lying at the tail end of the Great Rift Valley, this is Zambia’s finest big-game stronghold: 3,500 square miles of woodlands and floodplains heaving with 60 kinds of mammals including lion, leopard, a unique population of Thornicroft giraffes, and the greatest concentration of hippos in Africa.

The reason for this extraordinary biomass is the Luangwa itself, a major tributary of the mighty Zambezi. During the rains the animals disperse into the park’s interior; but when drought returns they are drawn inexorably back to the river whose life-giving waters sustain them through Zambia’s long, hot dry season. This year the rains ended early. Already the beds of the oxbow lagoons are bone-dry when I visit, cracked and cratered with elephant footprints baked hard by two months of relentless sun.

Farther south in the park at Puku Ridge Safari Camp, a regular procession of animals troops in to drink at the waterhole – elephant, buffalo, zebra, impala – delighting guests on their verandas. When it comes to location, Puku Ridge is hard to beat. All seven spacious tented rooms, minimal in style but supremely comfortable, with cooling fans and a choice of indoor and outdoor showers, are raised on decks. What you see from them, enclosed by a distant wall of woodland, is a vast floodplain nibbled smooth as a Home Counties lawn – a giant, natural theatre-inthe round on which all kinds of dramas are played out.

The day before my arrival, I am told, lions had tried to kill a buffalo while guests were at breakfast, so in the afternoon we drive out to look for them. We find only one, but what a lion he is. The guides call him Shaka. Two years ago he lorded it over the local pride. Then, as is the way with lions, three feisty young strangers deposed him. Now aged 15, his day is almost done, but he

Giraffes, above, are a common sight in South Luangwa where the river meanders along, centre top, and leopards doze in the trees, centre. Opposite: the late Norman Carr with the lions he reared; dusk at Tafika bush camp on the Luangwa River; and...