Day 55 Buffalo Camp, North Luanga

Guilt tripped into yet another shower before leaving camp – not sure if they were trying to tell us something – but still managed to be on the road by 8 am.  We gave our scout a lift back to his village where we found a Frankfurt Zoological guide camped at the gate – he didn’t look too pleased so we weren’t sure if he had expected to be able to camp on the campsite and arrived to find it booked out by us.

We had been warned that the road up to North Luanga was dreadful but we didn’t actually find it too bad.  The only difficult part was close to the pontoon and that was because we followed the Bradt guide and Satnav rather than common sense and used the road less travelled. 

This turned out to be the old road that traversed a back cotton mud field that had dried out – for 3 km the max speed we could achieve was 5 kph.  Arriving at the pontoon we were perplexed to find it was impassable.  Just as we were contemplating how we could cross the riverbed a girl came running up (in bare feet as she hadn’t had time to grab her shoes as we drove past!) and explained that we should have turned about 0.5 kilometres back at the camp – not sure how exactly we were supposed to know this but were relieved that she had taken the trouble to come and help us. Paperwork done and tyres let down we headed across the dry river bed into North Luanga which is definitely the most remote park we have visited. The drive to Buffalo camp was a bit desolate as the drought was clearly hitting the park hard.  We did see a group of elephants and some hippos by the riverbed along with puku and impala but away from the river there was no sign of life.

Arrived at Buffalo and were immediately offered a beer by Mark Harvey the owner – the guide book had stated that anyone staying when Mark was at the camp was privileged as he is an excellent guide.  We were soon able to confirm this to be true as he took us out for an evening game drive and made what could have been a quiet game drive in terms of wildlife spotting (except a huge herd of buffalo), highly entertaining and fascinating.  He is the grandson of Stewart Gore-Brown and so has an interesting family history plus years of anecdotes of life in the bush to keep his clients entertained.  Joined for the evening by the manager of a lodge in Luambe park, Natalie and her friend so we were able to share thoughts on the fee paying racket being employed for transiting the park.