Luangwa Safari House
In Zambia, we encountered death in the afternoon not twenty minutes from Mfuwe Airport, in the form of a family of hyenas gnawing on a buffalo carcass.
But our welcome at Luangwa Safari House was all civilized gentility. Khaki-uniformed staff greeted us with chilled hand towels and fruit juice cocktails.
Elephants were padding down to the lagoon next to the house, including a baby so young it fit beneath its mother’s belly and tripped over its own trunk. When the elephants were finished, a dazzle, or herd, of plains zebra took a turn, followed by a journey of Thornicroft’s giraffe and a sounder of warthogs.
The cheeky baboons hadn’t yet learned their manners. When we got up from the outdoor lunch table to look at some ground hornbills, an adolescent baboon leapt onto the deck and snatched a butter ramekin, racing away to lick the contents like a guilty child with a stolen cookie jar.
Luangwa Safari House was the brainchild of Jo Pope, wife of the legendary Zambian walking safari guide Robin Pope. The couple realized that their own fully walled three-room residence—with its pool and terrace overlooking the Luangwa River—would be ideal accommodations for parents of young children anxious about the wilderness setting. But while perfectly comfortable, their house wasn’t quite luxurious enough for style-conscious sorts wanting privacy from the main lodge, so Jo Pope hired Neil Rocher, a South African former guide who had launched a second career designing boutique safari lodging.
For Luangwa Safari House, Rocher set twenty-five leadwood tree trunks into the concrete foundation of a “grove” and built walls that followed the tree branches’ flowing curves. The stone-walled front entrance looks like a castle, with two rounded turrets topped by a witch’s hat–shaped thatched roof. A huge, asymmetrically planked front door pivots open to reveal a living room soaring under a 40-foot ceiling and completely open at the back, leading the eyes straight to the landscape and an ever-changing wildlife tableau.
The wraparound deck at Private Camp. Except for mealtimes, when a chef and butler are on hand, guests have the complex to themselves.
From the four bedrooms I selected an upstairs suite that had a drawbridge-style balcony overlooking the lagoon. The Diva took a ground-floor room with a polished copper tub. “Please refrain from taking your siesta outside by the pool,” our hostess, Irene Hinaran, had warned during the house tour. “There are wild animals here, and they will eat you.” At dusk staff blocked off walls and windows with grates that allowed us to see outdoors, while keeping monkeys and larger animals (but not bats) at bay.
During dinner, the maître d’ interrupted our beef and mushroom stew with a stage whisper: “Excuse me, mesdames, but something is happening to the moon.” A lunar eclipse was under way, and we broke the do-not-under-any-circumstances-leave-the-house-after-dark rule to join the kitchen gang watching a full moon turn a smoldering earthworm-pink, as if it had molted into a still-furled, newborn creature.
In the night, I heard the rumbling “hunnhh, hunnhh” of two male lions calling. I knew from experience that safari newbies fall into two categories: people who think wild animals exist to be photographed, and those who become seized by primeval fear. “Susan, I don’t think I can do this,” The Diva said, clawing my arm when Kanga Banda, our game guide turned up the next morning to lead our half-day walking safari. A 30-year-old Zambian dead ringer for Chris Rock, he cajoled her into a pontoon boat across the slow-flowing Luangwa River. We were met by the ranger and a four-by-four vehicle on the opposite bank inside the park and drove to a plain where some female puku antelopes were grazing, stalked by a nervous, rutting male with swept-back spiral horns. The guide parked under a tree; no lions in sight, we got out and walked single file into the bush, me dressed in insect repellent–impregnated khakis, The Diva exposed to tsetse flies in strapless Lululemon yoga gear. I’d been looking forward to getting up close to at least a few of the park’s 60 mammal species and 400 bird species, but to calm my friend’s nerves I said we’d be happy just to walk for a little while and look at plants and insects.
Norman Carr, Zambia’s original walking safari guru and Robin Pope’s mentor, earned fame for safely guiding clients within pouncing distance of lions and leopards and within stomping and goring distance of elephants, black rhinos, and African buffalo.
To build up The Diva’s confidence, we played chicken with an ant lion—the larva of a dragon-type fly—gently poking a twig into the inverted cone of its sandy trap; we were rewarded by the sight of pincer jaws, monstrously out of proportion to the larva’s body, snapping at what it thought was an ant. On our “Little Five” safari, we spotted the buffalo weaver (a bird) but struck out on the rhinoceros beetle, leopard tortoise, and the elephant shrew.
During a late-afternoon game drive, The Diva had her first big cat encounter when we followed baboon alarm calls and found the agitated troop high in mopane tree branches. On the ground, three large males bared their teeth and mock-charged a young female leopard. She turned, paused oh so casually, and climbed a termite mound to glare down at us all. Leaving the spotted princess, we proceeded to the riverbank for sundown aperitifs.
In the middle of our last night in Zambia, The Diva was awakened by the noise of tearing branches and made out through the screens of her room the immense silhouettes of elephants using their trunks to strip leaves. “The sound of their breathing was like a giant purr,” she marveled to me later. Instead of reaching for her emergency whistle, she had parted the mosquito netting, gotten out of bed, and peered into the dark with her nose against the screen. “Those sounds were so delicious in the darkness that my conservative instincts were overcome with curiosity,” she admitted. Perhaps the animals with night vision were equally transfixed. In the middle of the equivalent of a lighted window, The Diva stood, onstage, in their jungle.
Excerpted from an article by Susan Hack
