An Ordinary Day in the Luangwa Valley

A great change comes over you when you come to the Luangwa Valley in Zambia. It's not something I can really tell; but I can at least have a try at showing. It happens when you go for a walk and meet an elephant.

Walking in the bush is a well-organised thing, because it has to be. A scout walks at the head of the file; he carries a gun and his job is to make sure that he never needs to use it, while at the same time getting close – as close as is safe for everyone involved – to the big mammals that dominate the wooded savannahs.

And so, we met an elephant under a winterthorn tree and because we were mere humans, we had no option but to stop and wait. You could call that politeness, common-sense or due deference: whichever way, we waited as you always wait, while he picked up seedpods fallen from the tree in the twin fingers of his trunk before eventually drifting away – note that elephants have the tendency to move, when on good terms with themselves and on terms with everything around them, as if wafted by a gentle breeze.

And that was it. He ate, he drifted, we watched, we waited. We waited on the convenience of an elephant and that was fine, just and utterly appropriate, because we had all the time in the world did we not? A yellow butterfly flew between us and the elephant; a species called African migrant, so far as I could work out. I wrote in my notebook

Like the butterfly
I always give way
to elephants

Have I managed to explain the unexplainable? Let me try again and move to the next Luangwa morning. The previous night we had seen lions and that was exciting and the next morning we did not see lions and it was even more exciting. That is because last night we were in a vehicle and that morning we walked. And while we walked, we knew – knew in our guts, having seen them – that there were lions about.

We saw many nice things, a lesser masked weaver, shining bright yellow, Dickinson's kestrel, delicate and fierce. We saw five elephants crossing the Luangwa River, the youngest still lacking trunk-skills and drinking by ducking his whole head into the water. We saw a hippo sleeping it off on the bank and made a detour to go round him: it's always wise to defer to hippos.

It was all, well, a bit ordinary. And that was the marvellous thing about it: it was ordinary for the bush; it was ordinary for the Luangwa Valley. It was an ordinary day in a place where lions feed and quarrel and sleep, in a place where elephants cross the river, where wild dogs set out on their remorseless hunts, and where leopards lurk in trees getting ready for night-time action.

And there are you, treading the same paths with your own feet and breathing the same air with your own lungs ... and all the time you're filled with an incredulous joy: and in 33 years of walking here, I have never for an instant lost that sense of awed privilege.

This is the Luangwa Valley: and I'm walking where the lions walk.

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