Ramblings from the bush & beyond
Ramblings from the bush & beyond
Zambia safari next month!
After much planning, we are going to Zambia for a 13 day / 12 night safari next month. Of the 12 safari nights, we’ll spend 7 in South Luangwa, 2 in Kafue and 3 in Lower Zambezi. We’ll have the usual overnight in Joburg at the tail end of the safari.
South Luangwa is a large 9,050 sq. km national park located at the end of the Great Rift Valley. The Luangwa River is its lifeblood – wildlife becomes highly concentrated during the dry season – and 3 of the 4 camps we are staying in (Kalamu Lagoon, Tena Tena and Kaingo) are all along or near its banks, while Mfuwe Lodge is in an area that is said to be very prolific. There are said to be 60 animal and over 400 bird species in the park, including Thornicroft Giraffe and Cookson’s Wildebeest (unique to Luangwa) as well as Crawshay’s Zebra. The Leopard sightings are also legendary but on our last Zambia safari (May 2006) we managed to miss them all! We hope our luck changes! In our defense, we did see Wild Dog the last time.
Kafue is the oldest national park in Zambia and also the largest (at 22,400 sq. km, it is one of the largest in Africa). We’ll be staying at Shumba Camp in the famed Busanga Plains in the northwest sector of Kafue, which is considered one of Zambia’s most important wetlands. There are around 390 species of birds as well as abundant plains game and predators.
Lower Zambezi is a 4,092 sq. km. national park on the Zambian side of the Zambezi River (which we canoed and camped in the adjacent Mana Pools NP in Aug 2005). Most game is concentrated along the river and correspondingly our 3 camps (Sausage Tree, Chiawa and Kulefu) are on the river.
Zambia (South Luangwa in particular) is where walking safaris originated and we are looking forward to many great walks in addition to the usual 4x4 drives. In addition, Kaingo Camp has Elephant and Hippo hides, which will put us up close & personal.
We are still planning the types of shots we wish to take (to the extent that these things can be planned!). But, high on the list are Leopard in trees and social interactions among the big cats and Elephants plus of course stalks/chases/kills! Given the location of our camps, water should feature prominently in our photos. We experimented with motion panning quite a bit in Tanzania in July 2008 and we’ll do more of that in Zambia.
In terms of gear, we will experiment with using a full-frame camera (Canon 5D mark 2) as the primary body, and have gotten a 2x extender to help give the necessary reach, though we will only use it in good lighting. The 2nd body will have a 1.6x crop sensor (Canon 50D), which will be used if the game are too distant and would require too much cropping with the 5D. We will miss the excellent AF and overall robust construction of the 1D mark 3 but are hoping to take advantage of the higher resolution and shallower depth of field of the 5D mark 2.
We may also decide to leave the laptop at home, both to lighten the load as well as encourage us to maximize the time spent enjoying the camps as opposed to editing pictures... but that will require us to triple the capacity of our memory cards!
We hope to upload a selection of photos to our gallery by mid/late July. We’ll keep you posted!
Wednesday, May 13, 2009