Zambia Geography, Climate & Nature

Zambia is a landlocked country of 752,614 square kilometres, the 39th-largest in the world, consisting mostly of high plateau with some hills and mountains, dissected by river valleys. The lowest point is the Zambezi at 329 metres and the highest Mafinga Central in the Mafinga Hills at 2,339; most of the country lies between a thousand and fifteen hundred metres, which is why a tropical country has cool dry winters. The population concentrates around Lusaka in the south, at 1,279 metres, and the Copperbelt to the north.

The Zambezi rises in Zambia and runs 2,574 kilometres to the Indian Ocean, forming the border with Zimbabwe for much of its middle course; Victoria Falls is its most noted feature, a 1,708-metre curtain falling into a First Gorge 80 to 108 metres deep, and Lake Kariba below it, filled between 1958 and 1963, is over 223 kilometres long and up to 40 wide. The Kafue and the Luangwa are the Zambezi's great Zambian tributaries and give their names to the parks along them.

The corners are water: Lake Tanganyika in the north-east, the largest rift lake in Africa and the second-largest freshwater lake in the world by volume; the Bangweulu wetlands in the north; and the Barotse floodplain in the west, where the upper Zambezi floods the plains of the Western Province every rainy season and the Liuwa Plain lies beyond it.

Zambia is tropical by latitude and temperate by altitude. There are two main seasons: the rainy season from November to April, starting earlier and ending later in the north, and the dry season from May to October or November. The dry season divides in two: the cool dry months of May to August, with daily maxima of 21 to 26 degrees and minima of 6 to 12 on the plateau that covers 80 per cent of the country, and the hot dry months of September and October, with 28 to 35 by day and 17 to 22 at night. The rainy months run 25 to 30 by day and 14 to 19 at night. Summer averages 30 degrees and the winter can fall to 5; most of the country is frost-free, but ground frost occurs in some years.

The visitor's calendar follows the water. Victoria Falls is at its fullest after the rains and thins through the dry season until the Zambian side is a curtain in October; the parks are best from June to October, when the game gathers at the rivers; the rains close many bush roads, flood the Barotse plain for the Kuomboka, and bring the emerald season of birds and low prices. Drought years cut the hydropower and the lights.

Best Destinations by Month has the practical reading.

Zambia's biodiversity is that of a wooded plateau with great rivers running through it, protected in a park system that is old by African standards. South Luangwa, 9,050 square kilometres along the Luangwa, holds over 400 bird species and more than 60 mammals, among them Cookson's wildebeest and Crawshay's zebra, endemic or near-endemic to the valley, and Rhodesian giraffe; Kafue, the second-largest national park in Africa, has 152 mammal and 515 bird species; the Lower Zambezi, a park since 1983, faces Zimbabwe's Mana Pools across the river.

The west and north are wetland and grassland. Liuwa Plain's tens of thousands of blue wildebeest make Africa's second-largest migration; the Bangweulu wetlands, named among the world's most important by UNESCO and Ramsar and an Important Bird Area, hold the black lechwe; Mosi-oa-Tunya's 66 square kilometres at the falls keep ten southern white rhinos, calves included. Lake Tanganyika, the largest rift lake in Africa, has its own fish fauna on the Zambian shore.

No species-level survey was consulted beyond the sources named in the data file; the figures are indicative.

South Luangwa is where a visitor meets the animals on their terms: on foot, on the walking safaris the park invented, among elephant, buffalo and Rhodesian giraffe and the endemic Cookson's wildebeest and Crawshay's zebra, with over 400 bird species along the river's lagoons. Kafue's 152 mammal species and Lower Zambezi's riverbank herds, seen from a canoe, are the other two great parks; Liuwa's wildebeest migration and Bangweulu's black lechwe and shoebill are the specialist's. At the falls, the Mosi-oa-Tunya park's ten white rhinos are walked to with an armed scout.

The advisories put the rest plainly: wild animals in the bush, including venomous snakes, are unpredictable and do kill, on land and on water; they venture into camps; swim in no lake or river. It is illegal to buy, sell, kill or capture any protected wild animal or trade its parts without a licence. The tsetse fly of the game parks carries sleeping sickness and dislikes light clothing; the mosquito carries malaria everywhere, and antimalarials are recommended for most travellers.