I first met Simone Micheletti at the bar of Victoria Fall’s Ilala Lodge, Zimbabwe in 2024. It was for a networking and information function celebrating the emerging Kavango-Zambezi (KAZA) Transfrontier Parks region.

I’d arrived fresh from a week spent travelling Namibia’s Caprivi Strip (officially Zambezi province) and the area linking Zambia’s Kazangula to Livingstone, finding and producing stories while deciding on which safari establishments to put my clients in along the way. Simone had just spent the week rough camping with a select group of tour operators from the UK and Europe, staying at the location in south-east Angola where he would be building the safari camp recently opened, as you see further down on this page.

The images above speak to some of my stories produced in the KAZA region in recent years.

We were at the function to share experiences and discoveries of the KAZA region. It was a gathering of northern hemisphere journalists and photographers, local establishments and foreign tour operators and senior tourism officials from the respective countries.

So we compared notes. We discussed KAZA’s significant birding destinations and pressing social issues. These included Human Wildlife Conflict, especially around Livingstone, and amongst the most impactful community craft and upliftment projects I’d yet come across, deep in the Caprivi.

He showed me drone footage of vast buffalo and elephant herds in the 45,000 square kilometers Luengue-Luiana National Park, the largest of all the KAZA parks, dwarfing Hwange and Chobe. He spoke of the wildlife numbers and sheer spatial exclusivity of their chosen setting for a tented safari camp.

That was early in 2024. The pictures above and below show where the Luiana Plains Safaris Expedition camp was erected in June, from an aerial and a ‘sundowners’ perspective.

As with the Caprivi, the floodplains and river system feel like a geographical extension of Botswana’s Okavango Delta, which is a little ironic considering that the Okavango river – albeit ‘born’ in far western Zambia, just across – only gets going in the Angolan Highlands.

Luengue-Luiana NP is a vital component of the Kavango-Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA TFCA). As seen in the map above, serving as a critical wildlife corridor linking Angola with Namibia, Botswana, and Zambia.

“We’ve already found our location for our next camp”, said Simone this morning, me in Haarlem and he in Vic Falls.

“It’s stunning, we want to see where the herds go in the rainy season”. While he says the large elephant herds spend much of the time in the forests and woodlands, he also mentions about “four of five herds” of maybe 500 buffalo each.

He speaks of the aardvark, caracal and leopard on a night-drive in the park last week. He shares an image he took of wild dog pack on a dirt road, adding that while he’s heard and seen lion tracks he’s yet to see them.

That luck went, rather obviously, to the camp manager, who also sent him a low res image – the left shot below – soon after our call. Five curious cheetah. Priceless.

Angola is a dramatically beautiful country, as the Angolan Tourism video clip shows below. While overlanders will relish the challenges, potential high-end visitors should be aware of the significant gap that remains between the marketing effort over the past ten months and the reality of delivery on the ground in the rest of Angola.

For now Luiana Plains Safaris Expedition camp is open for what can be termed a testing phase, before being fully open in 2027. And judging from his post this morning, ‘you’ve got to love Angola!’ or suchlike, Simone is really, really excited.

Enquire about the special I’m offering, expiring in December 2026🐾🇦🇴👣