Inside the beautiful hotel where elephants join guests by the pool to sunbathe
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A trip to Zambia begins to answer life’s big questions. 1) What do you do when there’s a hippo outside your front door?. 2) Why do impalas “pronk”?. 3) Who wins between a leopard and a porcupine?. The best time to ponder these questions is at sundowners – where everything stops. Complete your safari, river cruise or fishing trip and pull up a chair, break out the local cocktails, and watch the magical African sunset disappear behind the back of a mountain the locals call “Never Again” (because they hate climbing it).
That’s Zambia in a nutshell – a dash of adventure, some luxury and a fair bit of craziness thrown in for good measure. You’d think this land-locked country in Western Africa is just full of natural wonders such as Victoria Falls – but in Lusaka it’s all about people.
Around 3.3 million pack a capital offering the best of the west, while hanging on to what makes it truly African. The contrasts are extreme. Just 40 minutes away from the state-of-the-art hotel complex Ciela – all set up for business – you are in Lusaka National Park at an elephant sanctuary run by a woman from Essex (yes, really).
Almost a third of Zambia consists of 20 national parks and 34 reserves with lions, leopards, elephants and hippos – lots of hippos. Here I am in one of them, just a few miles away from the nearest Nando’s (fun fact: Nando’s is actually an African brand) but also a few yards away from a pair of white rhinos that wander the park freely. Well, we say freely but they are flanked by guards at all times to keep them safe from poachers, which shows just how much Zambians value their conservation.
