Norman Carr invented it. Phil Berry perfected it. The guides who learned from them still walk this valley today — and you can walk it with them.

Every walking safari on the African continent traces back to one valley, one man, and one radical idea: that a wild animal is worth more alive than dead, and that the way to understand a wilderness is to walk into it on your own two feet.

That happened here, in Zambia's Luangwa Valley. And the line that runs from the man who started it to the guide who will lead you out of camp tomorrow morning is not a marketing story. It is a real, unbroken chain of apprenticeship — and it is the single most valuable thing this valley possesses.

Norman Carr and the Idea That Changed Safari

In the 1950s, safari in Africa meant hunting. Norman Carr — a game ranger turned conservationist — proposed something close to heresy: bring people into the bush to look at animals rather than shoot them, on foot, and share the proceeds with the communities who lived alongside the wildlife. If local people benefited from animals being alive, he reasoned, the animals would stay alive.

He was right, and the idea reshaped conservation across the continent. But its first proving ground was the Luangwa. Carr walked his guests through this valley, taught them to read tracks and alarm calls and the small signs that reveal a landscape, and in doing so invented the modern photographic walking safari — the form that every operator from the Serengeti to the Okavango now imitates.

The measure of a safari is not how many animals you saw. It is how deeply you came to know one wild place.

Phil Berry and the Second Generation

An idea only survives if someone carries it. Carr's protégé was Phil Berry — a man many in the valley consider the finest walking guide the Luangwa has ever produced, and one of the most experienced naturalists in Zambia. Berry did not simply inherit the tradition; he deepened it, spending decades on foot in this landscape and studying its wildlife with a rigour that few guides anywhere have matched.

Berry founded Kuyenda Bushcamp — a cluster of thatched rondavels on a spring-fed knoll deep in the bush, deliberately simple, deliberately close to the ground. Kuyenda is not a luxury statement. It is a walking camp, built by a walker, for people who want to walk. It remains part of The Bushcamp Company's circuit today, and it is the reason our walking tradition is not a claim but an inheritance.

The Chain That Is Still Unbroken

This is the part that matters, and it is what separates a genuine walking heritage from a marketing line. The guides walking our circuit today were trained by guides who were trained by Berry, who was trained by Carr. Three generations of apprenticeship, in one valley, on the same ground.

That is not a lineage anyone can purchase or manufacture. It is transmitted the way all real craft is transmitted — slowly, in person, through thousands of hours in the bush with someone who knows more than you do. When your guide stops mid-stride, holds up a hand, and shows you the difference between a lion track laid down last night and one laid down at dawn, you are receiving something that was handed to him, and handed to the man who handed it to him, going back to the beginning of the whole idea.

To walk here is to follow in the footsteps of the people who invented the walking safari — with the people they taught.

Why It Matters Where You Walk

South Luangwa has several superb operators, and a traveler would be fortunate with any of them. But the walking safari asks something specific of the ground beneath it, and here is what The Bushcamp Company can offer that is difficult to replicate:

• The lineage itself. We operate Kuyenda, the camp Phil Berry founded, and the guiding tradition on our circuit runs directly from Carr through Berry to the guides walking today.
• Ground of our own. Our six bushcamps sit inside a 140,000-acre exclusive-use area of the national park. On a walk, that means no convoys, no radio chatter, no vehicles arriving at your sighting — the silence the walking safari was designed for.
• A circuit, not a base. You walk from camp to camp through genuinely different country — ebony groves, open floodplain, spring-fed plains, the Kapamba riverbed — rather than radiating out from a single lodge and returning to the same view.
• Wholly inside the park. Once you pass the gate, you stay inside it. No river crossing to reach the wilderness each morning; you wake up already there.
• Terrain built for walking. Kuyenda alone offers open plains, palm islands, riverbanks, and natural salt springs — more variety on foot than any other camp on the circuit. No two walks are the same.

A Note on Standards

Zambia's guiding examinations are among the most rigorous in Africa, and walking safaris here are led by a qualified professional guide accompanied by an armed national park scout — a two-expert system conceived in this country and tested over decades.

We will let others speak for the rest. In Travel + Leisure's 2025 World's Best Awards, voted by readers, Mfuwe Lodge was named the #3 Best Hotel in the World and the #2 Best Safari Lodge in Africa — with a reader score of 99.73. Mfuwe Lodge is also a member of National Geographic's Unique Lodges of the World. We mention it not to boast, but because it answers a fair question: whether a company with this walking heritage can also look after you properly. It can.

Come and Walk

There is a moment on every walking safari — usually on the second or third morning, when the novelty has worn off and something else has replaced it — when the bush stops being scenery and becomes a text you are learning to read. The alarm call of a puku means something. The direction of the wind means something. The freshness of a track means something.

That moment is what Norman Carr was after. It is what Phil Berry spent a lifetime teaching. And it is waiting, most mornings, about twenty minutes out of camp.

The Bushcamp Company operates eight camps inside South Luangwa National Park — two gateway camps and six remote bushcamps across a 140,000-acre exclusive area, including Kuyenda, founded by Phil Berry.

Plan your South Luangwa walking safari at bushcampcompany.com