Mike & Jan's Great Escape: Wildlife Heaven

It had been a couple of days hard and long driving on some really terrible roads but it certainly was worth it. We left Mama Rula’s camp in Chapata and popped back into the town for extra water as we had realised the temperatures were going up. After that is was a short 90 mins drive to Mfue and the entrance to South Luangwa National Park. First though we decided to find somewhere to stay and we sought out The Wildlife Camp that had been highly recommended by several people we had met on our travels. After checking and finding they had space we went and found a camp site, this one with electricity so that we could run our fridge on it rather than on the battery system in the car. We had booked in for 3 nights but realised we may want to stay longer. We also booked 1 night game drive for the second night we were there. The park rules state that all private vehicles must be out of the park by 6pm but safari camps can use their own vehicles up to 8.00pm.

After sorting out the camp site we had lunch then around 3pm we went to the park entrance, paid a hefty fee of around £180 for 3 days passes for us and a foreign registered car (ours is still South African Registered) and entered the park. This time of year you have miles and miles of tracks and gravel roads to explore and look for game. Very quickly we came across a small group of elephants on the road so backed away quickly as the ones we saw most recently in Kafue were very wary of man and were actually very aggressive due to the recent poaching. We found out here that they are much more tolerant and do not attack even when they walk by your car. After that it was animal after animal including giraffe, zebra, the usual loads of antelope, hippos and crocodiles by the 1000s. The big thing that most people want to see are cats and we were not disappointed. We followed the Mfue pride of lions, usually 2 adult females plus 5 juveniles, as big as their mothers but still having the spots under the belly and on the legs, all the time we were in the park. They moved on at night so if you found them in one place in the early mornings then chances are they would still be there in the evening after having slept all day.

Our usual routine was to get up at 5 each morning, pack the tent away and get into the park at 6am when the gate opened. We would then leave the park around 11am and go back to camp and rest, have lunch etc before going out again around 4 to see what was about for the evening shift. As I put one evening we had a game drive in a safari truck so stayed out until 8.00pm looking.

We actually stayed at Wildlife Camp for 5 nights and drove in the park morning and night on all the days we were there. It wasn’t just in the park either that we saw wildlife, the campsite had elephants go through and our first snake was found at the swimming pool then another 2 actually by our car a day later. It was a fantastic place so just let the photos do the talking on this one. The photos are in no real order so we hope you enjoy looking as much as we have enjoyed seeing and taking the 1000s of photos of these fantastic creatures