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Link to The Times Online - page 1

Eagle eyes of the expert guides

Rod Tether is one of the best of the new generation of guides. He was just 17 when he started guiding in South Luangwa in 1989. A year later he moved to North Luangwa and is now established at Kutandala.

Link to The Times Online - page 2

Going bush: solitude on safari

HIS lean features shaded by a broad-brimmed bush hat, Rod Tether drove off North Luangwa’s only road and parked his Land Rover on the banks of the Mwaleshi River.

“It’s boots-off time,” he said. “The camp is on the other side and we won’t be using the vehicle again until we leave.”

In the dry season the Mwaleshi runs clear and shallow over its sandy bed and is, Rod assured me, mostly free of crocs and hippos, enabling us to wade safely across. “Although we did have a rogue hippo here last week,” he added once we had reached dry land. “He trashed one of the deckchairs we had left on a sandbar. He saw it in the dusk and decided to charge at it. Then he defecated on it for good measure, just to make his feelings known.”

Kutandala is no ordinary bushcamp, and Rod Tether is no ordinary guide.

For a start, he is the owner of the camp, not a manager, and he runs it with Guz, his wife, who creates cordon bleu meals on beds of hot wood ash in an open-air kitchen. She learned her skills at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland, and I have never eaten so well in the bush.

Food apart, everything else at Kutandala is simple, low-key and uncluttered. The camp takes a maximum of six guests, and the dining room is a giant Natal mahogany tree, which also shelters the bar and a small library of field guides.

My home for three nights had reed walls, a thatched roof, and an en suite bathroom with flushing loo and a hot shower open to the sky. There were rush mats on the bare earth floor, a soft double bed under a mosquito net and a veranda overlooking the river.

Kutandala is a camp for safari purists rather than first-timers, and the same is probably true of the walking in this, one of Africa’s wildest and most pristine big-game strongholds.

Solitude and exclusivity are its greatest luxuries. Imagine a park roughly the size of Cornwall with only three camps and a maximum of 22 visitors at any one time. There are no other vehicles, no power lines or any other signs that the 21st century has reached this far. Even the camps — including Kutandala — are dismantled at the end of the dry season and re-built in May when the rains are over.

What you will see on your twice-daily game-viewing walks are lots of animals; not only lion, elephant and huge herds of buffalo, but uncommon sub-species such as Cookson’s wildebeest and Crawshay’s zebra.

The night before my arrival, the Kutandala lion pride had killed a buffalo and kept the camp awake for hours with their roaring. So, on my first bush walk, Rod suggested that we should look for them.

He carried a rifle and so did Tryson Nkhoma, our Zambian park ranger, who has worked in North Luangwa for 13 years. We walked slowly, in single file, speaking only in whispers.

Vultures led us to what was left of the kill — little more than a rug with a horned head — and soon after we came upon four of the pride resting in the shade of a thorn thicket.

There were three sub-adults, including two males with scruffy manes, and an old grey lioness who rose to her feet as we approached and fixed us with hostile yellow eyes.

Separating us was perhaps no more than 40 metres of open ground; but eventually the lions switched off, although the old lioness continued to watch us until we had moved on out of sight.

Not every walk brought such moments of drama, but there was always something interesting to see, and at all times I felt entirely safe.