1. The Search
2. The Sounds
3. Walk at Sunrise
4. Chamilandu Camp
5. Stalking
6. Chindeni Camp - The Senses
7. Snorting
8. Tastes
9. The Sighting and a Bush Breakfast

The Sounds

We arrived nearly at sunset at Kuyenda Camp. The stars came out most bright that first night. Sitting beside a small fire that took the chill from the evening and staring between the trees, I counted them - the Southern Cross forming, Venus in the wrong place and the moon hung askew. The crescent moon was the first surprise when I stepped off the plane from New York in Lusaka and saw it tossed awry, not where it would hang over the Palisade Cliffs of the Hudson River, New York. Here in the Southern Hemisphere, all my Western bearings are thrown off. It requires an opening of the senses to a different way of being to experience the bush.

I was travel tired from the first day's journey, flying from Lusaka to South Luangwa and then from Mfuwe Lodge driving rough back roads dirt with potholes that would turn impassable in the rainy season and so bad that the Bushcamp Company grades them itself. Moses Mukumbi, tourist director at the park, said he had spent the road budget already. I decided to forego the night drive to sit here beside the campfire and watch this my first African night in the bush take hold. The dark mounds of the Chindeni Hills are the backdrop, skeletal shapes of trees frame the sky and grasses tall around this camp are touched with moon light. Crickets, crickets and then a deep murmuring, rumbling bass tone intermittently.
"Lions. About two kilometers away," says Brendan, the camp housekeeper.

I love the sounds more than anything.

In the morning, I awoke in the early light and lay in the straw conical hut in my four-poster bed draped in mosquito netting, hazy in a half-sleep wondering: Why an electric motor? And what powers it?
The whir rose in waves and the bird song joined. A red sun poured over the Chindeni Hills, and Mary rose with her video camera to catch the colors washing across the sea of grass beyond our hut. A plop, plop mixed with the whirring sound and with the bird song. Deep blood-red tubular flowers with long yellow stamen fell from the sausage tree above the thatched hut and plopped on the roof and onto the sandy floor of the bathroom and shower that was wide open to the blue sky.

This camp is close and connected to the ground, right in the grasses and with the bushes hugged up against it, the huts made from the sorghum grass, trees around it and constructed only temporarily for the dry season, here where I heard my first lion and my first leopard -- these huts would be my favorite.

Perhaps it is the thrill of my first night in the bush, or I just like Kuyenda for its simple, pioneer-style comforts - rattan furniture, tribal print patterns on the pillows, woven baskets, plaited straw walls of the huts.

The camp staff is relaxed and generous, and we are exceptionally cared for. Greeted with cold face clothes and cold drinks as we stepped from the jeep.
Dinner is served in the long, low thatched pavilion open to the breezes of the night, a tablecloth and white linen napkins held in carved zebra and giraffe serviette rings, candles and a South African white wine. Mushroom soup, fresh rolls, roasted chicken, vegetables, potatoes and salad, followed by a lemon cake and coffee by the embers of the fire.

Three Italians are here, a South Carolina couple who are experienced safari travelers and us - two New Yorkers - our first time in sub-Sahara Africa, let alone in the bush.

The whirring sound was wasps that nest above our hut in the sausage tree, named for its pendulous fruit the size of a bed bolster. The wasps droned in the morning then calmed as the heat took hold when crickets took over the strings section of the symphony. In the evening, the elephant trumpets until late at night when the raspy roar of a lion or the saw-saw growl of a leopard is heard.


[continued...Walk at Sunrise]