Kafue National Park

Kafue National Park is vast by any measure: 22,400 square kilometres of protected wilderness roughly the size of Wales or New Jersey, making it one of the largest national parks in Africa. Despite its size and its location barely two hundred kilometres from Lusaka, it receives a fraction of the visitors of South Luangwa or the Lower Zambezi. The result is a park where you can drive for hours without seeing another vehicle, where the bush feels genuinely unexplored, and where wildlife moves through the landscape without the constant proximity of tourist minibuses.

The park's ecological diversity is remarkable for a single protected area. The Kafue River runs north to south through the park, creating a ribbon of riverine forest that contrasts sharply with the surrounding mopane woodland. To the west, theBusanga Plains are a vast seasonal floodplain that in the wet season becomes a shallow lake and in the dry season is a sea of golden grass studded with palms and dotted with waterbuck, red lechwe and the endemic Kafue lechwe.

The Busanga Plains are the ecological heart of Kafue and the reason most visitors come. In the dry season from June to October, the plains hold one of the highest concentrations of lions in Africa, with prides of fifteen or more individuals regularly observed. Cheetah are common here too, using the open grass to hunt Thomson's gazelle and the young of larger antelope species. The lions have learned to hunt buffalo, a dangerous prey that requires coordinated pride action, and the spectacle of a pride taking down a full-grown bull buffalo is one of Africa's most dramatic wildlife displays.

Birding in Kafue is exceptional throughout the year. The park holds more than 490 species, including the elusive African skimmer that breeds on the sandbars of the Kafue River, the stunning Pel's fishing owl that hunts the river channels at night, and vast colonies of waterbirds on the Busanga Plains during the wet season. The combination of river, floodplain and woodland habitats means that a single visit can produce a bird list that would take weeks to compile elsewhere.

The roads in Kafue are a genuine adventure: rough, sandy and sometimes impassable in the wet season, they require high-clearance vehicles and experienced drivers. The park has no tarred roads and no infrastructure comparable to the major East African parks, which is part of its appeal. You drive through the bush and the bush is your toilet, your picnic site and your wildlife theatre. The absence of a fixed circuit of tourist roads means that every game drive is genuinely exploratory.

Access to the prime wildlife areas of the Busanga Plains requires passing through the park's eastern section, which is accessible from Itezhi-Tezhi. The journey from Lusaka takes five to six hours by road, and the last forty kilometres are on a rough dirt track that tests both vehicle and passenger. Some operators run charter flights to private airstrips in the park, which is a significant expense but transforms the experience from an expedition into a comfortable safari.

The park was heavily impacted by poaching in the 1980s and 1990s, but has recovered significantly under the management of the Zambian Department of National Parks and Wildlife. Elephant populations have rebounded, and the lion and cheetah populations are considered healthy. The wild dog population in the northern part of the park is one of the most viable in southern Africa, and sightings of these endangered animals are increasingly common.

One of Africa's largest and least-visited parks, offering genuine wilderness without the crowds.

The Busanga Plains hold some of the highest lion and cheetah densities in Africa.

Significant populations of endangered African wild dog and the endemic Kafue lechwe.