Month by month
Kafue in December
December closes the loop: 252 mm of rain over 24 days, the Busanga Plains flooding again, and Kafue back down to the small band of camps that never really leave.
If you only want the answer
December is a river-lodge and lake month, with green-season birding, storm skies and no fishing once the closed season starts on the 1st. It works as a Christmas escape from Lusaka; it does not work as a game-drive safari.
Back into the water
The thirty-year normals put December at 252 mm over 24 rain days, with days of 27.7°C and nights of 19.0°C, and the trajectory only steepens into January. By mid-month the seasonal tracks are gone for the year and the north-west is refilling.
The December roster
More stays open than the deep-wet cliche suggests. Mukambi, Kasabushi's campsite and glamping, and Musungwa run as always; Ila is open, McBrides' and Hippo Lodge see out the final month of their seasons in the north, Mawimbi's rate sheet ends with December, Konkamoya carries on to 7 January and Nanzhila Lake Camp into January. Around the lake, the shoreline game concentration that began in November is still paying out.
Getting south is easier than the season implies, because the Ngoma to Dundumwezi road is an all-weather corridor and, like the M9, free to transit.
What to do with a wet park
Birds, frankly, and the river. The migrants are all in, the storm fronts make the best skies of the year, and a slow boat past full banks turns up finfoot, skimmers and kingfishers at a rate the dry season cannot match. Remember the one hard prohibition: the national fishing closed season begins on 1 December, so no rods until March.
Christmas and New Year fill the handful of open lodges, so lock that one fortnight in a couple of months ahead. Any other December week, you can be spontaneous.