ZAMBIA | BANGWEULU
BANGWEULU – where the Water meets the Sky [ WRITER: Sarah Kingdom ]
[ PHOTOS: Linde Meintjes, Patrick Bentley ]
We wake to the cry of a fish eagle, and I’m reminded of what explorer and missionary David Livingstone is said to have remarked in Bangweulu almost 150 years ago… “it is as though the large black and white predator were calling to someone in another world.” This was shortly before, exhausted by a gruelling eight-month trek through the swamps, searching for the source of the Nile, he knelt beside his bed to pray and died. Livingstone’s heart was buried, beneath a mpundu tree, near the edge of the Bangweulu Swamps, his body was carried to the coast and sent back to England where it was ultimately buried in Westminster Abbey.
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TRAVEL & LEISURE | Sept - Dec 2021
We are in Shoebill Island Camp, nestled in a grove of quinine trees, on a tiny island in the Bangweulu Wetlands. We’ve woken early, to paddle from the camp to the floodplains, to see the endemic black lechwe, who call this unique wetland home. We reach the floodplains just as the sun peeks over the horizon, turning the sky from grey to pink. As we stand on the causeway that runs through the middle of the floodplains, there are thousands of lechwe, as far as the eye can see, barely visible in the early morning mist. Having come into the water overnight for safety, the lechwe are now heading slowly back towards the tree line, grazing on nutrient rich semiaquatic grasses as they go. We’ve come to the Bangweulu Wetlands, in north-eastern Zambia, specifically to see the black lechwe, as well as the wetland’s two other flagship species, the shoebill and wattled crane.
