Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe is a granite plateau held between two rivers: the Zambezi along the northern border, the Limpopo along the southern. The highveld between them runs at 1,200 to 1,500 metres, which is why Harare and Bulawayo are temperate rather than tropical, and why the country's wildlife country lies mostly at the edges, where the land falls away into the Zambezi Valley in the north and the lowveld in the south-east. Eleven national parks, a belt of safari areas and a handful of large private conservancies cover a great deal of ground for a country of this size.

The history is older and more layered than the safari brochures usually allow. The stone city of Great Zimbabwe was built and occupied between roughly the eleventh and fifteenth centuries by ancestors of the Shona, and gave the modern country its name. Mzilikazi led the Ndebele north from what is now South Africa in the 1830s and settled the granite hills near present-day Bulawayo, where he is buried. Cecil Rhodes' British South Africa Company took the territory in 1890 and named it after him; Southern Rhodesia declared unilateral independence in 1965, and after a fifteen-year war the country became Zimbabwe in 1980. Place names changed with it — Salisbury to Harare, Wankie to Hwange — and the new state chose as its emblem the soapstone bird carved by the builders of the stone city.

Hwange — where a first Zimbabwe safari should sleep

Hwange is the country's largest national park at roughly 14,650 square kilometres, gazetted in 1928 as the Wankie Game Reserve under a first warden, Ted Davison, who inherited land nobody wanted to farm. That is the key to the place: Hwange sits on deep Kalahari sand and has no permanent natural surface water. Left alone it empties of game every dry season. Davison sank boreholes and put up windmills, and the park has been kept alive by pumped water ever since, now through several dozen pans running on diesel and, increasingly, solar. It is an unusual thing to explain to a client and worth doing, because it changes how the safari works: in September and October the game does not wander, it queues, and camps positioned on productive pans deliver sightings that reserves with rivers cannot match.

The park holds over 100 mammal and 400 bird species, and an elephant population commonly put in the tens of thousands — among the densest concentrations in Africa, and the reason Hwange elephant viewing is regarded as the best in the country. Culling ended in 1986 and numbers doubled within five years. The Presidential Elephants, granted protected status by decree in 1990 and studied for two decades by Sharon Pincott, range on the unfenced Hwange Estate along the park's north-eastern edge. Hwange also carries one of Africa's more significant populations of African wild dog, supported by Painted Dog Conservation at Dete, which runs anti-snaring patrols and a rehabilitation facility that guests can visit. In July 2015 a collared research lion known as Cecil was shot by a trophy hunter on land adjoining the park; the case brought Hwange more international attention than anything in its history, and a good deal of research and anti-poaching funding with it.

Mana Pools — walking, canoeing, and the light

Mana Pools covers 2,196 square kilometres of the lower Zambezi floodplain and was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1984 together with the Sapi and Chewore Safari Areas, 6,766 square kilometres in total. Mana means four in Shona, for the four permanent pools left behind by the river as it shifted north. What makes it look unlike anywhere else is the forest: stands of Faidherbia albida, the winterthorn, which drop their leaves in the wet season and come into full canopy in the dry, producing a high, open, colonnaded woodland with almost no undergrowth. Dust and low sun do the rest. This is the most photographed light in Africa outside the Serengeti, and it is a genuine reason to book.

The albida pods bring elephant onto the floodplain in the dry months, and a small number of bulls have learned to stand upright on their hind legs to reach them — the behaviour the bull known as Boswell made famous. Mana holds Zimbabwe's largest concentrations of hippo and crocodile, over 350 bird species, and reliable wild dog. It is one of very few parks in Africa where visitors have historically been permitted to walk unaccompanied, which is part of its reputation, but this is not what Lime should be selling: put clients on foot with a licensed professional guide, and confirm current park rules at the time of booking, as ZimParks reviews them. Canoeing the Zambezi channels, either as an activity from camp or as a multi-day trip between fly camps, is the other signature. Sell Mana to second and third-time safari clients, to walkers and to photographers. It is not a first safari and not one for young children.

Matobo Hills — granite, rock art and rhino on foot

Two hours south of Bulawayo, the highveld breaks into a field of granite kopjes and balancing boulders weathered out of some of the oldest rock on earth. The Matobo Hills became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2003, on cultural grounds: the caves and overhangs hold one of the densest concentrations of San rock art anywhere, thousands of registered sites, some of it several thousand years old, and the hills remain an active centre of Mwari religious practice. Cecil Rhodes is buried at World's View, on the summit the Ndebele called Malindidzimu, under a brass plate set into the granite. Mzilikazi's grave is a few kilometres away. Few destinations put the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial arguments this close together.

The hills also carry an exceptionally dense breeding population of Verreaux's eagle, drawn by the rock hyrax on the kopjes and the subject of a study running since the 1960s, and white rhino tracked on foot with an armed scout — one of the better rhino experiences in southern Africa, and unusually intimate. Two nights, positioned as a cultural and walking counterpoint between Hwange and the flight home, or as the front half of a Bulawayo, Matobo and Hwange loop.

Lake Kariba and Matusadona — the inland sea

The Kariba Dam was built across the Zambezi gorge between 1955 and 1959, and the lake behind it filled from 1958 to 1963: 223 kilometres long, up to 40 kilometres wide, and by volume one of the largest man-made lakes in the world. Filling it displaced some 57,000 Tonga people from the valley floor and drowned the mopane woodland, whose bleached trunks still stand in the shallows. As the water rose, Rupert Fothergill led Operation Noah, which took several thousand stranded animals off shrinking islands by boat between 1958 and 1964. Houseboats out of Kariba town remain the classic way to see it, and the tigerfish is the reason many people come.

On the southern shore, Matusadona National Park runs from the lake shore up to the Zambezi escarpment. It was badly depleted by poaching in the 2000s and has been managed since 2019 under a partnership between African Parks and the Zimbabwe Parks and Wildlife Management Authority, with translocations rebuilding game numbers. It is early days, and honest advice is to sell Matusadona to repeat clients and conservation-minded travellers rather than to anyone who needs guaranteed sightings, and to lean on the lake, the boating and the setting as much as on the game.

Gonarezhou and the south-east lowveld — the remote one

Gonarezhou, the place of elephants, is Zimbabwe's second-largest national park at around 5,000 square kilometres in the hot south-eastern lowveld, and forms the Zimbabwean third of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, joined with Kruger and Mozambique's Limpopo National Park in 2002. Since 2017 it has been run by the Gonarezhou Conservation Trust, a joint venture between ZimParks and the Frankfurt Zoological Society. The set piece is the Chilojo Cliffs, red sandstone running for kilometres above the Runde River. Camps are few and the park is genuinely empty. Adjoining it, the private Malilangwe Wildlife Reserve holds Singita Pamushana and a strong black and white rhino population, and is the practical high-end address for this corner of the country.

Great Zimbabwe and the Eastern Highlands

Great Zimbabwe, near Masvingo, was inscribed by UNESCO in 1986 and is the largest stone structure in sub-Saharan Africa. Built without mortar between roughly the eleventh and fifteenth centuries, it was the capital of a Shona state trading gold and ivory to the Swahili coast and on to Asia; Chinese and Persian goods have been excavated on the site. The Great Enclosure's outer wall runs some 250 metres around and stands up to eleven metres high, with a conical tower inside it. The name comes from dzimba dza mabwe, houses of stone. It also carries an unattractive piece of historiography that is worth stating plainly rather than skating: from the 1870s onward a series of European visitors and, later, the Rhodesian government insisted the site could not have been built by Africans, and pressed archaeologists to say so. Gertrude Caton-Thompson established its African origin in 1929 and it has never seriously been in doubt since.

The Eastern Highlands, along the Mozambican border, are the other reason to send clients inland: Nyanga in the north, with Mount Nyangani at 2,592 metres the highest point in the country, then Bvumba above Mutare and the Chimanimani range in the south. Cool, green, high, and closer to a Scottish glen than to the Zambezi Valley — trout, hiking, gardens and old country hotels

Victoria Falls — the gateway, not the itinerary

Victoria Falls town is where most Zimbabwe itineraries begin and end, and for planning purposes that is what it should be treated as here: an international airport, a night either side, and the easiest bookend in the region.