The Plain Truth

A camp named after a lion, in a far-flung corner of Zambia’s Kafue National Park – it’s flat-out great

- Bruce Dennill

Much of the appeal of most Wilderness Safaris camps is their remote locations, which means that getting to them tends to be an episodic affair. Flying into Lusaka from Johannesburg is largely uneventful, other than the unnaturally straight lines where farmlands end and wilds begin and then the unexpected jagged coastline of Lake Kariba on the approach to the Zambian capital.

Kenneth Kaunda International Airport – the current version, anyway – is stark and boxy, its huge main hall accessorised with a giant chunk of rock with a pipe sticking out of it that passes for a fountain and a rather more attractive but equally retro statue of a couple of red lechwe, antelope with which you’ll become more familiar in short order.

The shell of the new, Chinese bank-funded airport looks just about complete next door, with finishing touches to be added over the next few months for an opening date of sometime in 2019. Meanwhile, there’s a curious etiquette that requires arriving passengers to leave the terminal building via one door (where someone with a sign will stand if you’re being met), and then enter via another entrance further down to get to the office where the charter flight to Shumba Camp in Kafue National Park is organised. Mess with this finely-honed system and you may miss your name on a sign which, theoretically, would lead to a tense 20 minutes of weighing up uniformly dissatisfying options.

Taken in isolation

The flight to Shumba, in a six-seater twin-prop that’s small enough for the pilot to shake to make sure the fuel gets into all the appropriate corners of the fuel tanks, takes about an hour and 20 minutes of what the pilot calls “medium bumpy” smoothness. There’s time for a nap before you cross the boundary of Kafue National Park and start zeroing in on the airstrip where your ranger awaits you.