Drama, action, comedy — African wildlife has it all. So, how can you get exclusive access to the stars of Kingdom?
Ed Grenby - 4 November 2025
Alamy
The elephant in the room here is an actual elephant in the room. I’ve popped back to my safari camp suite for a post-lunch nap, you see, and found a 900-stone pachyderm in my sitting area. (The Albida Suite has open walls and it turns out Nelly and friends like to wander in to drink from its plunge pool.)
This is one of the perks of doing a safari in Zambia rather than more touristed destinations such as Kenya or South Africa – and is possibly why David Attenborough and the crew of Kingdom chose Zambia for its epic four-year shoot. The natural history blockbuster, which follows four animal families over almost half a decade, was shot in Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park, and that’s where I began my own, sadly rather briefer, safari. Nkwali Camp, which I’d booked through experts Robin Pope Safaris (robinpopesafaris.net), gazes aristocratically down over a hippo-filled river, its collection of breezy wood-and-thatch cottages seemingly playing hide-and-seek with each other in a forest of ebony trees.
Game drives are undertaken in 4WDs with a couple of rows of seats fixed high on the vehicle’s back end – so everyone gets a great view, and in a further crucial contrast with the sometimes cattle-truck experience of a safari in such honeypot destinations as Kenya’s Maasai Mara or South Africa’s Kruger, it soon becomes apparent that we have the animals more or less to ourselves. When, within minutes of the beginning of my first drive, we come across a small herd of zebras, I wait for what I previously thought was the inevitable chug-chug-chug of a dozen other vehicles joining us – and it never comes.
“Exclusivity” is a much-bandied word in luxury travel, but here it’s more than a mere snobbish refusal to holiday with Ordinary Folk. Without a ravening pack of Land Cruisers waiting to descend every time an animal is spotted, you feel as if you’re really interacting with the landscape and the animals, rather than just watching them in an enormous zoo. Baboons eye you up curiously, their sprogs monkeying excitedly about for the cameras, thrilled to have such an appreciative audience; giraffes turn haughtily to face you, winking their doe eyes; skittish impalas bounce off as soon as they scent you, far enough down the food chain they think everything looks threatening; elephants stand four-square and purposeful in the middle of the dirt road, flaring their ears and trumpeting, daring you to try and drive round them – then mock-charging when you do, apparently well pleased with the alarmed squeals of a few timorous humans.
Even more intimate are the walking safaris. In the company of an armed guard and an expert tracker, I followed a trail of footprints and faeces into the bush. With no engine noise, I was able to hear the buzz of the common bee-eater bird (back home I can’t tell one feathered friend from another, but out here they’re colour-coded – the bee-eater, bright fire-engine red; the lilac-breasted roller, opalescent peacock-feather violet). And with no petrol smell, I was able to catch the sweet honeysuckle savour of the wild rose tree, its flowers white with a yellow centre, like fried eggs wearing fragrance.
Less appealing, but just as memorable, was the skin of a dead elephant. The bones had been gnawed by jackals and hyenas, but vultures circled above the hide. Looking on were marabou storks, earning their “undertaker bird” nickname, with wings like grey Dickensian morning coats, and baleful expressions that sit well with their taste for carrion.
Elephants have an entourage while alive, too, it turns out – a phalanx of white egrets follows them around like the wake behind a speedboat, feasting on the insects disturbed by their five-ton footsteps. But the most avid members of the jumbo fan club are human, of course. Back at Nkwali that evening, plates of buttery rice and delicately-seasoned tilapia cooked in banana leaf were abandoned mid-mouthful when three elephants strolled past the dining room to take advantage of the camp’s waterhole. The youngest, unable to stand in the deep water, doggy-paddled endearingly through the lake and into the hearts (and camera memory cards) of everyone watching.
In the Lower Zambezi National Park, I stayed at Chongwe River Camp, where I added lions, leopards and crocodiles to my I-spied list – the latter heart-racingly close as I canoed past them just yards from the grove of winter thorn trees that conceals the camp. It’s the winter thorns’ seedpods (as well as my plunge pool) that lure elephants into our quarters. So when nobody is looking, I gather a few of the pods and scatter them round the Albida Suite’s sitting room. Unlike Attenborough and pals, I haven’t got four years to hang around waiting for that perfect shot…
Alamy
The elephant in the room here is an actual elephant in the room. I’ve popped back to my safari camp suite for a post-lunch nap, you see, and found a 900-stone pachyderm in my sitting area. (The Albida Suite has open walls and it turns out Nelly and friends like to wander in to drink from its plunge pool.)
This is one of the perks of doing a safari in Zambia rather than more touristed destinations such as Kenya or South Africa – and is possibly why David Attenborough and the crew of Kingdom chose Zambia for its epic four-year shoot. The natural history blockbuster, which follows four animal families over almost half a decade, was shot in Zambia’s South Luangwa National Park, and that’s where I began my own, sadly rather briefer, safari. Nkwali Camp, which I’d booked through experts Robin Pope Safaris (robinpopesafaris.net), gazes aristocratically down over a hippo-filled river, its collection of breezy wood-and-thatch cottages seemingly playing hide-and-seek with each other in a forest of ebony trees.
Game drives are undertaken in 4WDs with a couple of rows of seats fixed high on the vehicle’s back end – so everyone gets a great view, and in a further crucial contrast with the sometimes cattle-truck experience of a safari in such honeypot destinations as Kenya’s Maasai Mara or South Africa’s Kruger, it soon becomes apparent that we have the animals more or less to ourselves. When, within minutes of the beginning of my first drive, we come across a small herd of zebras, I wait for what I previously thought was the inevitable chug-chug-chug of a dozen other vehicles joining us – and it never comes.
“Exclusivity” is a much-bandied word in luxury travel, but here it’s more than a mere snobbish refusal to holiday with Ordinary Folk. Without a ravening pack of Land Cruisers waiting to descend every time an animal is spotted, you feel as if you’re really interacting with the landscape and the animals, rather than just watching them in an enormous zoo. Baboons eye you up curiously, their sprogs monkeying excitedly about for the cameras, thrilled to have such an appreciative audience; giraffes turn haughtily to face you, winking their doe eyes; skittish impalas bounce off as soon as they scent you, far enough down the food chain they think everything looks threatening; elephants stand four-square and purposeful in the middle of the dirt road, flaring their ears and trumpeting, daring you to try and drive round them – then mock-charging when you do, apparently well pleased with the alarmed squeals of a few timorous humans.
Even more intimate are the walking safaris. In the company of an armed guard and an expert tracker, I followed a trail of footprints and faeces into the bush. With no engine noise, I was able to hear the buzz of the common bee-eater bird (back home I can’t tell one feathered friend from another, but out here they’re colour-coded – the bee-eater, bright fire-engine red; the lilac-breasted roller, opalescent peacock-feather violet). And with no petrol smell, I was able to catch the sweet honeysuckle savour of the wild rose tree, its flowers white with a yellow centre, like fried eggs wearing fragrance.
Less appealing, but just as memorable, was the skin of a dead elephant. The bones had been gnawed by jackals and hyenas, but vultures circled above the hide. Looking on were marabou storks, earning their “undertaker bird” nickname, with wings like grey Dickensian morning coats, and baleful expressions that sit well with their taste for carrion.
Elephants have an entourage while alive, too, it turns out – a phalanx of white egrets follows them around like the wake behind a speedboat, feasting on the insects disturbed by their five-ton footsteps. But the most avid members of the jumbo fan club are human, of course. Back at Nkwali that evening, plates of buttery rice and delicately-seasoned tilapia cooked in banana leaf were abandoned mid-mouthful when three elephants strolled past the dining room to take advantage of the camp’s waterhole. The youngest, unable to stand in the deep water, doggy-paddled endearingly through the lake and into the hearts (and camera memory cards) of everyone watching.
In the Lower Zambezi National Park, I stayed at Chongwe River Camp, where I added lions, leopards and crocodiles to my I-spied list – the latter heart-racingly close as I canoed past them just yards from the grove of winter thorn trees that conceals the camp. It’s the winter thorns’ seedpods (as well as my plunge pool) that lure elephants into our quarters. So when nobody is looking, I gather a few of the pods and scatter them round the Albida Suite’s sitting room. Unlike Attenborough and pals, I haven’t got four years to hang around waiting for that perfect shot…