The Plain Truth

- Bruce Dennill

Much of the appeal of most Wilderness Safaris camps is their remote locations, which means that getting to them tends to be an episodic affair. Flying into Lusaka from Johannesburg is largely uneventful, other than the unnaturally straight lines where farmlands end and wilds begin and then the unexpected jagged coastline of Lake Kariba on the approach to the Zambian capital.

Kenneth Kaunda International Airport – the current version, anyway – is stark and boxy, its huge main hall accessorised with a giant chunk of rock with a pipe sticking out of it that passes for a fountain and a rather more attractive but equally retro statue of a couple of red lechwe, antelope with which you’ll become more familiar in short order.

The shell of the new, Chinese bank-funded airport looks just about complete next door, with finishing touches to be added over the next few months for an opening date of sometime in 2019. Meanwhile, there’s a curious etiquette that requires arriving passengers to leave the terminal building via one door (where someone with a sign will stand if you’re being met), and then enter via another entrance further down to get to the office where the charter flight to Shumba Camp in Kafue National Park is organised. Mess with this finely-honed system and you may miss your name on a sign which, theoretically, would lead to a tense 20 minutes of weighing up uniformly dissatisfying options.

Taken in isolation