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From The Sunday Times

January 24, 2008

Into Zambia

Close to the Victoria Falls, Karen Robinson finds herself even closer to an elephant nearly in the room

Karen Robinson

You know that saying about ‘the elephant in the room’?” I hiss indignantly to my son as we lounge under the tented canopy of Chongwe River Camp’s bar area.

“Well, it’s totally wrong. It’s supposed to mean something everyone ignores. But there’s an elephant right there (I gesture warily over the waist-high wall to the mighty tusker ambling ever closer), and there’s no way you can ignore that.”

Still whispering nervously (“no sudden movements!”), I drag my teenager with me to the other side of the bar, from where I watch, heart in mouth, as the elephant puts an exploratory trunk round a wooden carving just inches from where we had been lolling.

The barman assures us that we’re perfectly safe. After all, I have nothing to offer a pachyderm on a constant quest for his daily diet of about 400lb of plant matter, and by keeping still and relaxing I could have stayed where I was.

I really should have been more attuned to life in the bush by now. Since our arrival in Zambia five days before, we had been as close to the wildlife of Africa as it’s possible to be while still enjoying good food and wine, comfortable rooms and attentive service.

At Robin Pope’s establishments in the Luangwa valley, that’s pretty close. I didn’t even have to get out of bed at Nkwali Camp to see the Luangwa river, gleaming like mercury in the sunlight and home to more wallowing, grunting, snorting hippo than I could count.

Occasionally one would open its jaws for a yawn with the dimensions of a - dumpster - US truck. Fish eagles, Zambia’s national bird, stood sentry in the treetops, and black-and-white sacred ibis probed the mud for insects.

While the midday heat in the weeks before November brings the rainy season means a good snooze is a sensible option, it’s worth getting out of bed for the sights on offer in the South Luangwa national park. It is at the tail end of the Great Rift Valley which runs down the African continent.

The great flat Luangwa valley, with mountains in the far distance, is usually covered by a network of rivers and pools but by October the land has dried out — good news for game spotters as the lazy sweep of the Luangwa river draws the wildlife in to a relatively compact area.

You can take morning and evening Land Rover game drives from Nkwali — or you can walk. Accompanied by Zebron, our guide, and an armed park ranger, we haven’t gone far before we stop to examine an elephant footprint in the dry sand: each set of ridges and lines is as unique as a human fingerprint. Close by there are the markings of hippo whiskers, showing where it grazed on tufts of grass.

We see lion droppings containing small bits of bone and impala hair — like many predators, the big cat eats the whole animal (we got a good sighting of exactly that later when on a twilight drive we watched a pride of lions devouring a buffalo) but we are told that the crocodile is the only creature that can digest every bit of its prey.

We stroll on, giving the sausage trees a respectful berth. The gourd-like fruits, hanging like salami in a deli, are heavy and could be fatal if one fell on your head. Another tree seems like something out of a fairy tale: it is squeaking. The din from the leadwood is actually a flock of wattled starlings crowded into its branches.