Africa & Middle East > Zambia > Lower Zambezi > Victoria Falls > Articles > A Deep Breath of Africa

It is a small but favourable sign that tourist flights from Lusaka to Livingstone are now allowed to fly low over Zimbabwe to give a better view of the Victoria Falls. The classic picture of this wide curtain of water, surely the best-known view in Africa, is also on the Zimbabwe side. But significantly, it too has to be taken from the air. For it is ironical that that thundering torrent - with its tell-tale rainbow - is not really suitable for close-up viewing, owing to the drenching and dazzling spray that fills the sky around it.

The connoisseur’s view of the Falls is on the Zambia side at the Eastern Cataract opposite the Knife-Edge and overlooking that maelstrom called the Boiling Pot three hundred feet below. It is here that you can contemplate the mile-long chasm where the great calm Zambesi suddenly turns into a thing of fury, contorting and convulsing around a warren of breathtaking gorges. Although not as great as Niagara, it is somehow grander, poetry and legend deeply embedded within it. (Muriel Spark said it changed her life.)

And it is not just travel-snobbery to say that you must either see it more than once or be prepared to spend a full day and evening absorbing its endless facets, for it is a relationship that cannot be rushed. Most people agree that the night view is the most entrancing of all. But watching the afternoon shadows lengthen across one cataract after another to the cry of the hoopoe and the trumpeter hornbill is a memory touched with slow wonder.

Waiting to go at last, five or six of us are crowding over a map of the Falls. "Where do I get one of those ?" I ask our host, reaching for my wad of kwachas, confident that a map-wallah must be hovering somewhere nearby. Yet it turns out to be the only map for miles. And I reflect that Zambia is new indeed to the arts of tourism.

Most of the time, you’ll be glad of this if you’ve come here for the right reason, which is to view brilliant wildlife in peace and privacy. My first night was spent on a 3000-acre game farm which slept eight people the lot - a blessing for you and me, but enough to give most Ministers of Tourism a fit. At any rate, this is the Zambia you’ll soon get to know, characterized by vast national parks with their game reserves, safari camps and small, hospitable lodges. And it cannot be long before you are heading for one of the world’s great wildlife sanctuaries, South Luangwa National Park.

Having been promised the Big Five - elephant, lion, hippo, rhino, buffalo - we have to accept that the star turns do not always come on first, and your curtain-raiser is likely to be an hour or two of rather monotonous impala bouncing off into the bush. Trained eyes, of course, reap a richer harvest than that. Truly I envy those who can identify a distant spurwinged goose from the speed of its wing-beat or spot a fleeting plover against a mudbank, but I am not one of them. At first I had to be content with a few hovering vultures. But then came a revelation. Slowly, lazily, down from a top branch came my first lilac-breasted roller.

It is impossible to exaggerate the impact of those silken turquoise underwings as the aptly-named roller casually floats off the perch into its weightless blue dance across the sky. A common enough species according to Newman’s ‘Birds of Southern Africa’ (which I command you to take along.) And of course, these are not the only fine feathers that light up the bush. The vivid green of the Little Bee-eater... The startling black-&-white of the Pied Kingfisher diving from a height... But to me, it is the lilac-breasted roller that evokes the unexpected glint of magic that can suddenly cut across the basic left-right-left of the safari trek. For him alone, I believe I would come back.

These long days in the open do not seem to leave us tired at night, but quite wakeful and vigilant. So the sudden rustle of action at 4am in Chamilandu had us out with cameras and binoculars in very short order. The lion sounded close enough to touch, though it was actually calling from over the river. Then suddenly it was across, in respectful pursuit of two lionesses that could not be more than twenty yards from the huts. The ritual itself may have been unremarkable. But we stood amazed in that pre-dawn to see the big cats so unworried by a powerful spotlamp and half-a-dozen eager spectators.

That experience was curiously echoed the next evening, this time on an official night-safari up at Chinzombo, another major camp on the Luangwa. This time it was more like five yards, and the big cat was a slumbering leopard. Her freshly-killed prey - a young puku - lay in the cleft of the tree while madam got her breath back, not quite asleep as thieving jackals were visibly on the prowl. But then, after only minutes, we were granted a close-up view that might have kept a top lensman waiting for months. Yawning and stretching, she suddenly deigned to step down to a branch so low that it almost touched the Landrover. And half a million candlepower of spotlight just seemed to encourage her further. Back and forward along the catwalk she turned and posed again and again, a miracle of muscular grace and fatal, haunting loveliness. And nothing will convince me that she wasn’t flirting with us.

Your host at Chinzombo remembers when this was still Northern Rhodesia, though only a few greying hairs would suggest it. Conversation gets lively and witty in the little outdoor bar that is often surrounded by elephants that are anything but pink. And there is only a muted suggestion that the social life around these parts was better before independence. Better, or maybe just different. A quick drink at the Intercontinental in Lusaka’s diplomatic village turned into an astonishing all-night party, with some people still dancing at three and ready to fly at seven. Who they were, these birds of passage, I did not know, and was probably not meant to know, for we had stumbled into a mysterious demi-monde of Graham Greene characters whose cover-stories were entertaining indeed.

Dusk on the Zambesi. Across the tent, an old Africa hand is glorying in the view, saying it reminds him of a hundred nights on the old Congo River (now the Zaire). For the sky above Africa is also part of Africa - a big part of it. As always in the tropics, night steals down suddenly with a shiver, leaving you with a smoky-red ribbon of horizon that seems to intensify as it narrows out of sight.

This is Tongabezi camp near Victoria Falls, designed with fresh enthusiasm by two young Englishmen around thatched tents with only mosquito nets for walls. And so we can look out directly on to this dramatic wide bend of the river where even now the stars are peeping out at the other end of the sky.

Everything has mysteriously slowed down, and the silence is eloquent. Somehow the vastness of the continent is all there under the great dome - immortal silhouettes of palm and jacaranda, that red horizon now tinged with a layer of white gold, fading into the tender blue and silver of night, for the moon is full. And in this all-enveloping atmosphere of slow nightfall against the timeless river, we breathe a spirit of grandeur, big-heartedness and uninhibited joy - a deep breath of Africa.

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