This week’s dream: the ethereal beauty of a Zambian wildlife park

For safari holidays, tourists tend to think of Kenya or South Africa, says David Pilling in the FT. Zambia makes for an equally spectacular but far quieter and more “contemplative” experience. Nearly a third of this vast country is reserved for wildlife – and among its national parks, none is more “haunting” than Liuwa Plain. Remote and barely visited even by Zambians, it was all but emptied of game during the 1975-2002 civil war in neighbouring Angola, when soldiers poured over the border and into the park in search of meat and money. But the wildlife is fast recovering, and Liuwa recently acquired its first ever luxury camp, the King Lewanika Lodge.

To get there, it’s a two-hour flight from Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, to Kalabo, in the far west. From here, you cross the Luanginga River, a tributary of the Zambezi, and then drive for miles through dense teak woodlands. When you finally emerge from the forest, you feel like a C.S. Lewis character, stumbling through the wardrobe and into Narnia. Suddenly, you find yourself looking out over grassy plains, bewildering in scale, dotted with shimmering lily ponds: the “ethereal beauty” of this landscape is simply impossible to “distil in ink”. Roaming across them are antelope, buffalo and cheetah aplenty, as well as wildebeest “on a hoof-thundering scale”. And there are more than 300 species of birds here, some quite “breathtaking” in their beauty.

The star of the plains, however, is Mambeti, a gentle lioness in whom the local people say the spirit of a renowned royal gamekeeper’s daughter was reincarnated. Of all the park’s lions, she alone survived the Angolan war. At 18, she may be the world’s oldest lion in the wild. Lately, she has given up hunting, and is often to be found babysitting the cubs of a splendid new pride, recently introduced by the park authorities. Natural World Safaris (01273-691642, www.naturalworldsafaris.com) has an eight-day trip from £6,080, including flights.