Last night we saw lions and that was exciting and the next morning we didn’t see lions and it was even more exciting. That’s because last night we were in a vehicle and that morning we walked. And while we walked we knew – knew in our guts, having seen them – that there were lions about.

We saw many nice things, a lesser masked weaver, shining bright yellow, Dickinson’s kestrel, delicate and fierce. We saw five elephants crossing the Luangwa Rover, the youngest still lacking trunk-skills and drinking by ducking his whole head into the water. We saw a hippo sleeping it off on the bank and made a detour to go round him: we had to defer to hippos.

And all this sounds OK, but I know it doesn’t sound like the sort of experience you boast about to your friends, the sort of morning that that the world will envy. There was nothing that made for award-winning photography.

It was all — well, a bit ordinary. And that was the marvellous thing about it: it was ordinary for the bush; it was ordinary for the Luangwa Valley. It was an ordinary day in a place where lions feed and quarrel and sleep, in a place where elephants cross the river, in a place where wild dogs set out on their remorseless hunts, and in a place where leopards lurk in trees getting ready for their night-time activities.

And there are you, treading the same paths with your own feet and breathing the same air with your own lungs… and all the time you are filled with an incredulous joy: and in 33 years of walking here, I have never for an instant lost that sense of awed privilege.

This is the Luangwa Valley: and I am walking where the lions walk.

 

I was co-leading the Ultimate Luangwa safari for www.wildlifeworldwide.com. Next year I will be co-leading https://www.wildlifeworldwide.com/group-tours/sacred-combe-safari and I will also be participating in https://www.wildlifeworldwide.com/group-tours/festival-of-wildlife-zambia