South Luangwa

South Luangwa is the valley of the leopard and the birthplace of the walking safari: nine thousand square kilometres of eastern Zambia along the Luangwa river, whose great meanders and abandoned lagoons — the luangwa wafwa — hold the densest hippo population in the world and crocodiles to match, and whose ebony groves and mopane hold leopard in numbers seen nowhere else, lion, wild dog, and three animals found here alone: Thornicroft's giraffe, Cookson's wildebeest and Crawshay's zebra. Norman Carr set the first camp at Nsefu in the 1950s and led his guests out on foot, and the walking safari — a guide, an armed scout, a line of people reading tracks and stopping for tea under a tree — is still what the valley does best, with night drives, which Zambia allows, for the leopard. Mfuwe is the gate: the airport, an hour from Lusaka, the bridge over the river, the lodges — one of which the elephants walk through each November to reach the mangoes — and the villages; Nsefu, across the river, is the oldest sector and has the carmine bee-eater colonies of September; the south, Kapamba and Chindeni, is the remote end.

The traveller flies to Mfuwe and moves between two camps — one near the gate, one deeper or in Nsefu, by road, by boat in the emerald season, or on foot from camp to camp —, and takes the valley's rhythm: the walk at first light, three hours behind the scout, learning the difference between a leopard's track and a hyena's; the long midday under the ebonies with the hippo grunting below; the drive at four that becomes a night drive with the spotlight, which is when the leopard walks; a morning at the bee-eater banks in the season; a visit to a village school or the textile workshop at Mfuwe, arranged through the camp; and, in December, the elephants coming through the lobby for the fruit, which the lodge has stopped fighting.

The Guide's honesty: the valley is a camps-and-flights journey, priced accordingly, though Mfuwe's lodges outside the gate are honest and the park fee is per day; the walking is real and the scout's rifle is a formality that has been used; the heat of October is a furnace and the emerald season closes many camps and floods the roads, which is also its beauty; the tsetse bite and the malaria are real; and a leopard on an ebony branch at nine at night, in the spotlight, with the river breathing below, is the picture the Guide keeps for this valley, which is why it holds the page as it does.