Crossing the Luanginga River from Kalabo into Liuwa Plain National Park feels like drifting into another, older world. Driving from the nearest provincial capital Mongu, a nippy surfaced road across the Zambezi floodplain terminates at the gateway town of Kalabo, the sort of end-of-the-road backwater where even weekdays have the feel of a soporific Sunday. There’s no bridge here, just a rusty hand-pulled pontoon, with space for two vehicles. And once you’ve been hauled across the Luanginga, it’s time to deflate your tyres, engage 4x4, and prepare for a steep ascent of the north bank that provides a foretaste of the thick sandy tracks that lie ahead.
Liuwa Plain is one of Africa’s last unsung wildernesses. Extending across 3,600 square kilometres, this remote and little-visited park protects a Kalahari-meets-Serengeti landscape of seasonal floodplains interspersed with fields of wildflowers, stands of Baikiaea woodland, tributaries of the Zambezi and near perennial rainwater pans.
The thick, blinding white sands of Liuwa evoke the Kalahari, while the short-grass flatlands recall the plains of the southern Serengeti. The park’s
