Zambia

Zambia hit differently from the moment I arrived near Livingstone. The air was thick with humidity, the kind that presses against your skin and smells faintly of rain and red earth. Everything felt a little overgrown, a little raw — the trees pushing right up to the edges of the roads, the grass on the lodge lawns almost unnaturally green against the dark thatch roofs above.

The Zambezi was the heartbeat of the whole trip. Sitting on a wooden deck above the wide, slow river — those houseboats drifting in the grey afternoon light, the far bank just a dark green line — I kept thinking how different it felt from any river I'd seen before. Not dramatic, not loud. Just enormous and quietly there. The cold Mosi beer on the table helped too.

The craft markets around Livingstone were the other thing that stayed with me. Woven baskets piled on trolleys under the trees, painted fabric panels lined up wall to wall — elephants at sunset in bold reds and blacks, the word ZAMBIA stamped across everything like a proud signature. A tall wooden sculpture of the Big Five stacked on top of each other stood in one of the shops and I genuinely couldn't stop looking at it. Zambia doesn't need to shout. It just lays it all out and lets you find it.