The Lower Zambezi has no shortage of camps. What it has a shortage of is camps run by people who have spent their entire careers on this specific river, on these specific islands, learning this specific ecosystem from the ground up. Classic Zambia is the exception. Co-owner Kyle Branch didn’t just build two camps in the Lower Zambezi National Park; he helped design Zambia’s National Guide Training Program. This is not incidental background information. It tells you everything you need to know about how seriously Classic Zambia takes the quality of what happens once you’re actually in the bush.
The two camps – Kutali and Chula Island – sit at different points along the eastern sector of the park, each on its own island in the Zambezi, each offering a distinct experience of the same river. Together they make the case for spending a minimum of five nights in the Lower Zambezi rather than the three most itineraries suggest. Split between the two, it’s the right amount of time.
Chula Island takes its name from the Goba word for frog, which gives you some sense of how embedded Classic Zambia is in this landscape; the name didn’t come from a brochure. The island sits on Katengahumba, separated from the mainland by the stretch of water locally known as the Discovery Channel; a canoeing corridor that moves guests through hippo pods, past elephant herds drinking at the bank, and under the watch of the escarpment rising steeply on the Zimbabwean side. Five tents in Natal mahogany forest, sandy beaches, hidden lagoons, and open dambos that attract wildlife in concentrations that make vehicle-based safaris feel slightly beside the point. Chula is a walking and canoeing camp at heart, and the best of it happens on foot and on water.
Kutali sits downstream in a Winterthorn forest on Kulefu Island; kulefu meaning, in the local language, a far away place, which is either a description or a promise depending on how you look at it. Also five tents, also a maximum of ten guests, also built on the principle that a small camp with outstanding guides will always outperform a large camp with average ones. The Winterthorn forest gives Kutali a different quality of light and atmosphere to Chula; dappled, cool, the pods crunching underfoot the same way they do at Anabezi downstream. Game drives here cover the mainland, crossing from the island by boat to access the park’s eastern road network.
The wildlife corridor through this section of the park is exceptional. Leopard, lion, elephant, buffalo, wild dog; and the Zambezi itself providing a permanent ribbon of activity that game drives alone can’t replicate. Canoeing a stretch of river with a crocodile sliding off a sandbank ten metres ahead and an elephant moving through the shallows on the far side is the kind of experience that resists adequate description. Guides who’ve spent years here stop trying to describe it and just take you there instead.
Combining Chula and Kutali on a single itinerary is the obvious move, and Classic Zambia makes it straightforward. The transfer between camps is a boat ride; short enough to feel like part of the experience rather than a logistics exercise. For guests who want to go deeper into the Lower Zambezi than most operators take them, and be guided by people who helped write the standard for how guiding in Zambia should be done, these two islands are the place.