Lusaka National Park

Lusaka National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

Lusaka National Park is the small fenced park on the south-eastern edge of Zambia's capital, half an hour from the city centre, and it should be understood for what it is: a morning among antelope and white rhinos for people with a free half-day in Lusaka, and not a substitute for Kafue, the Lower Zambezi or South Luangwa, whose multi-day safaris are what most tours sold from the city are about. The half-day tours collect at the hotel, drive to the gate on the Chifwema road, do a game drive of two to three hours in the operator's vehicle with a guide and return by lunch, sometimes adding a walk through the Bauleni compound or a craft market to make a city day of it; the four-hour safari experiences are the same outing under another name.

Visitors with their own car, which need not be a 4×4 in the dry season, pay the entrance and vehicle fees at the gate, which are low by the standards of Zambian parks, and drive the loop roads themselves, with a wildlife scout available to hire as a guide. Guided walks and cycling inside the park can be arranged with the rangers, the rhinos are usually shown on foot or from the vehicle by their keepers at a respectful distance, and there are picnic sites and a viewing tower but no lodge, only a simple campsite. For conference visitors and families with children it is an easy success; for anyone with three days, Kafue's Busanga side or the Lower Zambezi will reward the journey far more.

Visiting Lusaka National Park: what you will see

The park is the newest and the smallest in Zambia, gazetted in 2011 over the Lusaka South forest reserve and opened to the public in 2015, 67 square kilometres entirely enclosed by an electric fence beside the economic zone that the city is building on the rest of the old forest; it was made to give the capital's residents and schoolchildren a national park they could reach in a morning, and to protect the woodland that guards the city's groundwater. The vegetation is miombo woodland with open grassy dambos, seasonal wet hollows where the animals graze, on the limestone plateau at about 1,200 metres.

Into it the wildlife authority released species brought from other parks and ranches: white rhinos, kept under guard and the main attraction in a country that lost all its rhinos to poaching in the 1980s, giraffes, plains zebras, blue wildebeest, eland, sable, hartebeest, kudu, puku, impala, waterbuck, reedbuck, bushbuck, warthogs and ostriches, with pangolins and small cats among the residents that were already there; there are no lions, elephants or buffalo, which is why walking and cycling are possible. Axis deer, an Asian species, were among the odder introductions. The birds of the miombo, more than 160 species with rollers, hornbills, bee-eaters and raptors, are good in the early morning. A loop of graded tracks links the dambos, a wooden tower overlooks one of the waterholes, and the rhino boma near the centre is where the orphaned and the newly arrived animals are kept. It is a park of modest ambitions honestly met, and on a weekday it is often empty.

Lusaka National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The park is open daily from 6 am to 6 pm. The dry season from May to October is the best time, with short grass, the animals gathered at the dambos and the waterholes and all tracks passable in an ordinary car; the rains from November to April make the black soil of the dambos sticky, grow the grass above the antelope and bring the migrant birds.

Early morning and the last two hours before the gate closes are the times for animals, and the middle of the day is for the picnic sites. Weekends bring Lusaka families. Allow a half-day. The Lilayi elephant nursery, which can be visited at feeding time, is twenty minutes away, the Munda Wanga botanical gardens are on the Kafue road, and Kafue National Park is three to four hours west.