At Mwaleshi Bush Camp I had a guest hut. First time it had happened on this trip to the Luangwa Valley in Zambia. I’d been in guide huts: perfectly adequate, indeed, utterly salubrious when compared to the guest huts I stayed in 30 years ago. I mean, bathroom en suite, with shower and flush lav: none of the old long-drop, nor the communal shower carved into living riverbank.

The guide hut at Chokoko was spacious and airy and almost cool, and what’s more it was always full of butterflies taking a break from the heat. I loved it. But here at Mwaleshi I had a view and what’s more, a comfy chair to appreciate it from.

The afternoon was coming up to the boil but I was in good heart. I looked out over the shallow, hurrying Mwaleshi River and sighed with pleasure. I didn’t move. Nor did anything else. It was the year’s mid-afternoon break as well as the day’s: an eternal boiling stillness held sway. Even the white-crowned lapwings, notoriously uncalm birds, were taking a siesta.

I could see eight elephants on a distant beach of the river: they seemed frozen in afternoon sun. Nearer to camp a lone female elephant was reaching high into an acacia for the seedpods while her calf helped to hoover them up.

I thought about the pile of rhino dropping we had seen on a walk that morning: scrabbled and spread about the place by a male keen on advertising his presence. Rhinos went extinct in the Luangwa Valley in the 1980s: a reintroduction began here in the North Luangwa National Park in 2003 and there are now between 50 and 100 individuals.

That was a heartening thing to think on.  I heard a bearded woodpecker drumming, and there was a three-banded plover feeding in the river. The Mwaleshi River is the thinking person’s television.

 

• I was co-leading a trip with wildlifeworldwide.com

Next trip www.wildlifeworldwide.com/group-tours/walking-safari-in-heart-of-zambia