About this guide
Who's behind South Luangwa Park?
An independent visitor guide, not a tour operator. We chase down the official numbers, and we correct the ones everyone else copies.
Who writes this
This guide is written by someone who overlanded much of Africa in his own Land Cruiser with a rooftop tent, and for whom the national parks were what stayed. The information about them online was usually missing, wrong or years old: fees from three tariff sheets ago, camps that had closed, roads described by people who had never driven them.
So he started writing it down properly. This guide runs on the park authority's own tariff documents, on climate normals rather than brochure weather, and on what the camps tell us directly, with a date on every claim. Where we do not know something, the page says so.
What this site is
A guide to South Luangwa written by nobody who sells safaris. The reason it exists is simple: this valley is described online using facts that stopped being true years ago, and somebody should fix that.
How we work, and why it matters here
This park attracts more out-of-date information than most. The road from Chipata was surfaced years ago, yet guides still warn about a punishing gravel track. Flights to Mfuwe run all year, yet plenty of sites claim they stop in the green season. Fees are still widely attributed to ZAWA, an authority wound up in 2015. We check the source documents and say when we last did it.
The gate fee of $25 is only a fraction of what an in-park guest pays: camps add a bed-night levy and a community conservation fee that together run $75 to $110 per person per night. You deserve to know that before you budget.
Where there is no official figure, the page says so. Zambia publishes no visitor statistics for this park, so we do not quote any.
The network
This site is one of a small family of independent park guides covering Africa's great lesser-known wildernesses, from Ruaha in Tanzania to Hwange in Zimbabwe. One clarification, since the question comes up: we have no connection to African Parks, the conservation NGO, and neither does this park. South Luangwa is managed by Zambia's Department of National Parks and Wildlife, with Conservation South Luangwa as its NGO partner.