In Zambia, you'll find wildlife the way it used to be

By Jonathan Hanson

Lisa Hoffner

Sunrise over the veld in South Luangwa National Park

I scoot farther out and extend my arm. Not quite. I squirm until I'm stretched out as far as I can possibly be. The leg's six inches away, now four—but then it shifts out of reach. Dang. I debate another try, but the significance of the leg's new position hits me. I look up. Seven feet above my face is an elephant anus. Somewhere ahead of it, a stomach the size of a 50-gallon oil drum rumbles. Instantly I decide that "Oh, about four inches" will be an acceptable answer when someone back home asks how close I came to a wild elephant.

The managers of Zambia's game parks, it hardly needs saying, do not encourage guests to reach out and touch the animals, particularly the five-ton variety. And I really needn't have risked a gruesome obituary to have an inspirational encounter with an elephant there. Zambia may well be the finest place in Africa to experience game viewing the way it used to be: in small groups, often on foot, in parks that are truly wild. And all of it, as a result, up close and personal. Not once during the month I spent there did I see feeding lions surrounded by zebra-striped minibuses. Often, our guides and a handful of other guests were the only humans for hundreds of miles. But like so many of Africa's wonders, this abundant wildlife has a sad back-story.

Slightly larger than Texas, Zambia sits between the war-ravaged countries of Angola and Mozambique in southern central Africa. For years after independence from Britain in 1964, Zambia's autocratic rulers, fat on copper revenues, scoffed at tourism. Enormous national parks and game management areas (GMAs) languished almost unvisited except by poachers, who extirpated the country's black rhinos and cut its elephant population by 90 percent while other game flourished in obscurity. Then, in the 1970s and 1980s, worldwide copper prices plunged, also plunging Zambia into crisis. Years of high inflation and high unemployment followed, and the parks remained empty.

After the 1990 CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, where a ban on the sale of ivory was signed) and multiparty elections in 1991, things began to improve—if slowly. Now, a decade later, under President Frederick Chiluba, the national debt remains staggering and food prices continue to exceed what many Zambian families can afford, but corruption is reportedly "under control" (not getting any worse), the elephant population is waxing, and there are even rumors (fueled by occasional footprints) that a few black rhinos survive deep in the remote North Luangwa area. What's more, Chiluba's administration has decided tourism can grow the Zambian economy, help sustain its wildlife parks, and raise money needed to address the country's crushing social problems (Zambia has the continent's highest concentration of AIDS orphans, and has been inundated by thousands of refugees from Angola). According to a 1999 article in Zambia's Financial Times, revenues from tourism now exceed $150 million per year, and in 1996 accounted for one fifth of the growth in the nation's economy. The relief my tourist dollars might bring was important to keep in mind as I flew over poor towns en route to the country's spectacular game parks and their luxurious accommodations.

Zambia's habitats vary considerably, from lush riverine canopies along the Zambezi River—which originates in northwest Zambia and forms part of its southern border—to the intermittent shade of deciduous thorn forests, to open, Serengeti-like velds. You could choose to stay in one camp and never run short of things to see, but given the geographical diversity, it's better to pick several and spend three to four days in each. I started in the Luangwa River Valley in the northeast, flew (virtually all inter-park commuting is by Cessna) to Kafue National Park in the west, and then ventured on to Lower Zambezi National Park in the south.You can drive from park to park, but the distances aren't short, and as one guide said, referring to Zambian potholes, "You can tell the drunk drivers here; they're the only ones who go straight."