I leaf through the book and check the entries for 2004. There are nine names, all European. "We've had only one couple staying at the park who came specifically to see where Livingstone died," says Edmund Farmer, Kasanka's manager. "Geography teachers from England."

Chitambo village and Chief Chitambo, great-grandson of the chief who received the dying man and his companions, have relocated, and the only spectators to our arrival are five ragged children. The earth is drying out after the rains but the bush is green and heady with growing smells. Standing alone in a grove of trees, as if striving for obscurity, is a stone pillar surmounted by an iron cross. As I read the weathered inscription - David Livingstone… born Blantyre… died Chitambo's Village - I am moved by its simplicity.

My own journey, from Livingstone's Lanarkshire to the lonely place of his death, has come full circle.

There was a time when every Scottish child was raised on the Livingstone story, which took the form of a moral lesson: harsh but God-fearing childhood in a cotton mill near Glasgow, where he started work at the age of 10 but found time for his school books at the end of a 12-hour day; studied medicine, Greek and theology; trained with the London Missionary Society; posted to Bechuanaland, now Botswana, in 1841, where he soon developed the appetite for expeditions which thrilled Victorian Britain.

Anti-slavery crusader… fearless explorer… expert geographer… the first European to see and name the Victoria Falls… the object of Henry Stanley's famous search… the man who so inspired devotion in his followers that after his death they removed his internal organs, salted and dried his body and carried it on an epic 1500 mile journey to Bagamoyo on the coast of present-day Tanzania for the voyage to an icon's funeral in Westminster Abbey.

The makings of a myth. And they are still in place at the Livingstone Memorial Centre, where the millworkers' tenement houses in Blantyre have been turned into a celebration of his life. The Lanarkshire village was on the doorstep of my childhood home and I was very young, maybe no more than five, when I was first exposed to its stirring influence. Several decades on I find myself less in thrall to the myth, but more fascinated by the man whose heart was buried beneath a mupundu tree, where the monument and I now stand.

It was a heart which was never less than heroic. For all the frailties - pride, ambition, hypocrisy - airbrushed out of his reputation by imperial historians, Livingstone remains a great man. The last entries in his journal, when he records with equal interest the activities of red ants, the "high falsetto key" of the fish eagle and his own sufferings from dysentery and internal haemorrhages, reveal a stoicism and perseverance at once noble and obsessive.

His final journey began in 1872 on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, shortly after his meeting with Henry Stanley, whose effusive journalism did more than anything to promote his saintly image. It would take even the modern traveller months to trace the entire route, much of which would have to be done on foot. But the memorial at Chipundu and the Bangweulu swamps, the vast swampland where the explorer floundered, hopelessly lost, in the last months of his life, appear on a low-key tourist circuit which is also rich in some of Zambia's most bizarre and elusive wildlife.

They are accessible by dirt road but I've hitched a lift in Edmund's tough little Cessna, which he uses to ferry visitors between his base at Wasa Lodge in Kasanka National Park, his bush camp on Shoebill Island in the Bangweulu Swamps, and the game reserve of Shiwa N'gandu, which has Livingstone associations of its own - the good doctor stayed in the region on an earlier mission.

The easiest way to do the circuit is to reverse Livingstone's footsteps. The Livingstone Memorial is some 35 kilometres from Kasanka's main gate - the excursion through villages and smallholdings is full of interest, opening windows on rural life - and Kasanka is a good place from which to continue north to Bangweulu, then east to Shiwa N'gandu.

It's antelope nirvana in these parts. The flight from the airstrip at Wasa Lodge to Chikune, on the edge of the Bangweulu basin, is a 20-minute hop, and the Cessna sends tides of black lechwe spilling over the floodplains. "Thirty thousand at the last estimate," Edmund tells me. "The dark-coated variety is endemic to Bangweulu and although we get jackal and hyena the big predators have been hunted out. So the lechwe keep on multiplying."

The huge herds are part of the spectacle of these seasonal swamps to the south-east of Lake Bangweulu. That night, zipped into my tent on Shoebill Island, I'm wakened by a strange watery noise, like the flushing of a giant loo: the sound of several hundred startled lechwe leaping through the swamps. Once the basin had a range of game, including elephant. Their tracks did nothing to help the painful progress of the Livingstone expedition, whose leader had grown so weak by January 1873 that he was often carried on the shoulders of his men."Carrying me across one of the broad deep sedgy rivers is really a very difficult task… one after another took a turn, and when he sank into a deep elephant's footprint, he required two to lift him."

Bangweulu is a game management area shared with fishermen and their families, who build reed-and-thatch camps on its islands. The polers who punt me through the maze of waterways around Shoebill Island have been recruited from these communities, and their expert navigation is essential to the spotting of the swamps' most distinguished resident: the massive shoebill stork.

This is its only breeding site in Southern Africa, and the breeding season makes the stork most visible. An hour out of the camp, in the buttery light of early morning, Patson the guide helps me out of the canoe and leads me over a raft of papyrus to see my first shoebill. The great grey bird, which looks more like a dodo than a stork, stares down its heavy, slipper-shaped bill towards us, thinking long and hard before taking to the air.

When the rains have passed and the floodwaters are high, this world class wetland is a birder's paradise, with migrant populations of flamingos, pelicans, spoonbills, storks, ibises and cranes. Its beauty is dreamlike, with clouds and sky drifting among water lilies on mirrors of water. But the basin has one of the highest rainfalls in Zambia and in the early months of 1873 Livingstone and his party were rarely dry. Their miserable journey through the swamps turned into an ordeal.

"It was neck deep for fifty yards, and the water cold… I lose much blood… a dreary wet morning… it is flood as far as the eye can see." Despite the fact that, as a doctor, he must have known he risked bleeding to death, Livingstone drove himself on: "Nothing earthly will make me give up my work in despair. I encourage myself in the Lord my God and go forward."

The explorer's route was not only misguided - he was heading in the opposite direction from the Nile's headwaters - but afflicted by miscalculation. Livingstone got lost in Bangweulu because, on an earlier expedition in the region, he had taken inaccurate bearings with a faulty chronometer. The instrument was damaged in a series of misfortunes near the lake of Shiwa N'gandu, where his pet poodle Chitane was either drowned or taken by a crocodile. Worse, his medicine chest disappeared.

The extraordinary red brick colonial manor at Shiwa N'gandu is our next stop. Stewart Gore-Browne built this, Shiwa N'gandu's "Africa House" (the subject of an eponymous book by Christina Lamb), after World War One. His grandson Charlie Harvey has, with his wife Jo, recently saved the house from abandonment, restoring it impeccably. "When we were children," recalls Charlie, "the grown-ups would keep us amused by sending us out to look for Livingstone's medicine chest on Nachapala." This hill - its Bemba name means "the man with no hair" - was used as a viewpoint by the explorer, and the climb to its bald summit is one of the excursions on offer at Shiwa, which the Harveys have opened to guests.
,Br>With a troop of handsome horses in the stable, fish in the lake and 24 species of game on offer, the estate has come alive again. The house, with its views over gorgeous gardens to the shining "lake of the royal crocodile", is among the most delightful, if eccentric, places to stay in the bush. And it's no surprise to find the library well stocked with memoirs and biographies of David Livingstone, whose grandson visited Shiwa nine years ago; aware, no doubt, that the seeds of the disaster which was to be the explorer's last journey were first planted in these sunlit hills.

Julie Davidson travelled with Wildlife Worldwide (020 8667 9158, www.wildlifeworldwide.com) who can tailor-make fly-in safaris to Kasanka National Park, Shoebill Island Camp and Shiwa N'gandu (three nights each, with a night at Chaminuka, a luxury lodge and game park near Lusaka airport). Price ( £2945 per person between April and June 2005) includes BA flights from London Heathrow and all internal transfers.

The Livingstone Museum

What do a placenta-stuffed python, a replica lion-mauled arm bone and a 19th-century medicine chest have in common? All are among the highlights of the Livingstone Museum, Zambia's oldest and largest, established in 1930 when the town was still the country's capital.

Nowadays the museum itself is virtually an exhibit, complete with glass cases, dusty tableaux, yellowing newspapers and sepia photos - a charming example of the way museums were before technology arrived. But although they're not interactive, its understated displays are a rich portrayal of the area's natural, social and political history, while its archive of documents and paintings produced by the earliest European explorers is irreplaceable.

The museum has four main sections. Human activity in the area dates back two million years, according to Archaeology (Livingstone certainly didn't ‘discover' Victoria Falls). Ethnography showcases traditional items, including musical instruments, weaponry, art, crafts and utensils. A display on witchcraft and traditional medicine includes the python (apparently deployed to induce miscarriage). The Natural History section features further taxidermy alongside a 3-D relief model which puts the Falls and gorge into perspective.

It's the History section that's unique, with its achingly personal display of Livingstone's possessions - great coat, cap, letters and journals, watch, medical kit - and that disfigured arm bone, which enabled doctors to identify his body in London. Factors that have shaped local society are explained, from 16th-century Arabic and Portuguese traders to the independence campaign, and older residents' wonderful personal stories are recorded in ‘Memories of Livingstone'.

In 2000, heavy rains demolished the long-neglected museum's roof, threatening its precious document collection. Its displays have been housed in temporary premises while the building has been subject to extensive renovation, due for completion in late 2004 and funded by a $400,000 EU grant - money well spent, as the Livingstone Museum constitutes a priceless slice of Africa's past.

Livingstone Museum, Mosi-oa-Tunya Road. Entry fee: US$3 (children US$1). Open 09.00-16.30 daily.

Stephanie Debere

Whose statue is it anyway?

A tug-of-war over a statue of David Livingstone has turned into a good-natured international dispute.

The famous bronze statue of Livingstone surveying the Zambezi, bible in hand, has stood in the National Park on the Zimbabwean side of Victoria Falls for over 50 years. But Zambian chief Siloka Mukini claims that it originally stood on the Zambian side - and it's high time it was returned.According to Donald Chikumbi, executive director of Zambia's National Heritage Commission, this may be a matter of mistaken identity - he thinks that a different statue, now lost, used to belong to Zambia.

But Chief Mukini is convinced there has only been one statue. He feels a ceremonial relocation would be fitting, given that Zambia has a town bearing Livingstone's name, and a museum containing a prized collection of Livingstone memorabilia. "We would like to carry it across in time for the 2005 celebrations", he says, "and we would be prepared to pay!"

Where to stay in Zambia

In 1989, after a failed day's hitchhiking outside Chipata, I awoke blackened from my first night in Zambia. In the absence of any campsite or guest house, a trucker had kindly let me sleep in his empty coal lorry. Nowadays there is the cheerful Mama Africa's, with a grassy campsite, en suite rooms and a bar-restaurant, reflecting perfectly the upturn in Zambian accommodation.

Mosquito netting has become the curtaining for four-poster beds as design-driven interiors creep inexorably across the country. The ultimate chic lies in the new house-based accommodation. Guests can be forgiven delusions of grandeur at Shiwa N'gandu manor or Chichele, the former presidential mansion in South Luangwa. Large, dreamy and ideal for families, Tangala House (overlooking the Zambezi) and Robin's House (beside the Luangwa) are both available for private rent.

Camps and lodges, too, are in on the style act, led by Tongabezi's imaginative riverside suites. South Luangwa's Nsefu has transformed simple rondavels into luxurious rooms, while hideaways such as Lower Zambezi's Kasaka offer sumptuous chalets.

But Zambia hasn't abandoned budget travellers or fans of rusticity. Numerous camps cater for those who like the inside of their tent to resemble a tent rather than an interiors magazine. The intrepid will love extremely remote camps such North Luangwa's Mwaleshi or Bangweulu's Shoebill. Both are comfortable, but their features are functional.

Major hotels are largely confined to Lusaka (where the Holiday Inn is useful for stopovers) and Livingstone, where the Zambezi Sun brings big resort comfort at moderate prices. Budget travellers will find guest houses all over Zambia (good for meeting locals) and backpacker hostels at hubs such as Livingstone and Mfuwe.

Increasingly, these are places to hang out rather than just sleep. At Jungle Junction, above Victoria Falls, many a backpacker arrives for the night and stays several weeks.

Stephanie Debere

Zambia Find out more

Visit Zambia 2005 www.zambiantourism.com/visitzambia2005

The department of the Zambia National Tourist Board dedicated to increasing awareness of Livingstone Town, Victoria Falls and Zambia as a whole in 2005. According to Donald Pelekamoyo of the ZNTB, they aim to create sustainable projects for Livingstone and its surrounding communites to spread the benefits of tourism.

Zambia National Tourist Board www.zambiantourism.com

Zambian horizons www.zambianhorizons.comWebsite of a group including Zambia's top safari operators, with good background information on the country.

Zambia: the Bradt Travel Guide by Chris McIntyre (3rd edition, Bradt, 2004, £15.95). This, the most comprehensive guidebook to the country, contains detailed background information, plus full directions for driving around Zambia, including GPS coordinates.

Zambia and Victoria Falls by William Gray (Globetrotter Travel Guides, 2003, £6.99). A good introduction for the first-time visitor.

In Quest of Livingstone by Aisling Irwin and Colum Wilson (ISBN 1899863532, House of Lochar, www.house oflochar.com, £13.99). Superb, very personal account of the authors' two-month bicycle trek through Tanzania and Zambia, retracing Livingstone's final journey in search of the source of the Nile.

The Africa House by Christina Lamb (ISBN 0140268340, Penguin, £7.99). The story of Stewart Gore-Brown's "very British idyll" in Northern Rhodesia, in the last decades of the British empire.