Tracking new safari routes in Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe offers a spectacular alternative to more established African safari destinations
It was as if a plug had been pulled on the world: suddenly, everything went quiet. Our orders were issued in a frenzied whisper. Sit down! Don’t move! No talking! Jaws were clenched. Eyes were narrowed. Our driver, previously genial and easy-going, had become, in a shot, stern and commanding. I’m sure we were never remotely in danger but I’m also certain I detected, just for a moment, a flicker of genuine concern cross his face.
We watched our tracker leap from his seat on the bonnet of the Land Cruiser, hardly touching the ground as, in one swift movement, he unshouldered his rifle and vaulted up and into the passenger seat. Breaking the silence, we reversed backwards at speed, lurching up an incline, crashing through vegetation, sending up clods of red earth.
It was dusk in Zimbabwe, the second night of our safari. I was on the back bench of the opensided 4x4, white-knuckling a handrail. Beside me, unflustered as a leopard, was my daughter, aged nine, binoculars around her neck, pad and pencil in her hand, poised to record sightings of Attenborough-worthy flora and fauna. Her younger brother was in front of us, next to his mother. I’ve never seen him look so serious, or sit so straight. Ignoring the directive to keep still, I reached over and squeezed his shoulder. He ignored me, staring straight ahead, holding his breath. Scared stiff.
The engine was switched off. And then we heard something, a noise I can’t remember ever hearing before. It was the sound, it turned out, of bones being crushed by jaws, of huge teeth ripping flesh, claws tearing at hide. The situation
was explained: in a minute or two we would move slowly forward again and when we looked to our right we would see lion. Five lions, actually, three adult females and two cubs, magnificent in the fading light. They were gathered around a freshly killed buffalo, their muzzles and paws red with its blood. From time to time one would break off from chewing to reposition herself, wagging her long tail, shaking her huge head, grunting warnings at her companions. It’s a cliché older than civilisation to comment on the majesty of the lion, but, my word, theirs is a fierce beauty, even more so when seen in the wild, on home turf, at supper time.
Back on the veranda of our cabin at Matetsi River Lodge, upriver from Victoria Falls, at Zimbabwe’s north-western tip, we toasted our luck with sundowners while our own cubs wallowed in the plunge pool. We were serenaded to our beds by the foghorn blasts of our near neighbours, a mother hippo and her young. Another sound I can’t remember ever having heard before.
Next morning, at dawn, we were up and at it again. Nine-year-old Penelope, as I’ve mentioned, was keeping a record, assiduously noting down the names of everything she spotted. As a consequence my notebook is full of neatly inscribed lists of creatures, in hotel pencil. A brief selection, from a page headlined “Sunday morning”: Elephant x lots; Steenbok x 1; Giraffe x 4; Gemsbok x lots; Ostrich x 2; Waterbok x 4; Zebra x 3; Impala x 1; Buffalo x lots; Baboon x lots; Wildebeest x 1; Kudu x 2; Male lion x 1; Side-striped jackal x 1; Hyena x 2.
Oscar, her brother, was geeking out in his own way, reading aloud to us all from our guide’s trail-hardened encyclopedias — he had a number stacked on his knee — of the birds and mammals and trees and flowers and reptiles and bugs of Southern Africa, making sure we were fully briefed on the sizes and markings and habitats and diets of each animal we met. We saw secretary birds, vultures, hornbills, bustards, eagles, marabou storks. Beetles, bugs and butterflies. Lizards and snakes. We sheltered under baobab trees and mopane trees and acacias. On foot — on foot in the African bush! — we tracked leopard across the savannah. We washed our hands by rubbing together the leaves of devil’s thorn, brushed our teeth on sticks. We inhaled the incomparable aroma of months-old elephant carcass.
Every so often, we stopped in the forest and had a G&T and some cashews. (Fanta for the junior trackers.) In the middle of the day, when the heat shimmered, we sat in the shade or dipped in the pool and read our books and drank the local lager and the kids played Jenga with the Austrian kids from the next cabin over and we edited our photos and the American honeymooners kept politely — and understandably — to themselves. Some young men from the camp rode out into the bush on bicycles to serve us ice cream.
We walked across grasslands and repeated the collective nouns for each group of animals we came across. A tower of giraffes. A cackle of hyenas. A parliament of owls. A zeal of zebras. An obstinacy of buffalo. To which I added my own: An entitlement of tourists? A presumption of Brits? A smart-arse of liggers?
Landlocked Zimbabwe is not, typically, first on the list of marquee safaris. It’s probably not seventh or eighth on the list. Of Africa’s starriest destinations, there is the Okavango, in neighbouring Botswana. There’s the Masai Mara, in Kenya. There’s Kruger in South Africa, and the Serengeti in Tanzania. There’s the extraordinary salt pan of Etosha in Namibia.
Zimbabwe’s reputation for violence, poverty, and corruption, well-earned over generations, has long overshadowed accounts of its natural attractions. The ugly legacy of the British colonialists, who named the country Southern Rhodesia; the brutality of the white supremacist rulers who kicked them (us) out; the horror of the repressive authoritarian regime that followed the new nation’s founding, in 1980… all of these eclipse, in most Western imaginations, the marvels of Zimbabwe’s wilderness, its remarkably diverse plants and animals and its widescreen landscapes, the soaring hills and sweeping savannahs.
For many Zimbabweans, the situation remains
dire. The veteran despot Robert Mugabe was finally forced into retirement in 2017, but all the locals I spoke to — a number brought it up unbidden — felt that the present government, under Mugabe’s ZANU-PF ally Emmerson Mnangagwa, aka “The Crocodile”, was not any better. There was trouble in Harare, the capital, in the weeks leading up to our holiday. Angry mobs were rioting because of a steep hike in fuel prices. You could have said the same, at that time, about Paris. But still. The optics, if you’ll forgive me, aren’t great.
Naturally, one feels a sense of responsibility when embarking on a holiday to a country where human rights abuses are a regular feature of life. By going, is one tacitly endorsing the government, even helping to prop it up? Do any of the dollars we Westerners spend in the smart hotels and on the game reserves reach the people who need them most, or do they line the pockets of corrupt officials?
You must make your own decisions on all that. My calculation is that in choosing not to go for ethical reasons, one only compounds the impoverishment of the country and its people — and its animals. If Zimbabwe is to ever have a thriving economy, tourism will be key. Efforts to conserve the environment will not succeed without the money earned from safaris. Those lions will not survive without us. Their habitats will be used for agriculture.
As for any suggestions that Westerners are tolerated rather than embraced — not as farfetched as you might think, given the history of European intervention in Africa — I have to say that apart from one moment when a zebra gave me the side-eye, I met nothing but smiles and handshakes. Granted, almost everyone I encountered was being paid to be nice to me. But the seasoned air miles collector can, I hope, discern when a people are generally well disposed towards visitors, and when they are not. The Zimbabweans we came across were unfailingly warm and welcoming.
Our trip was organised by the excellent, perhaps uniquely experienced Mavros Safaris, a family business, owned and run by fifthgeneration white Zimbabweans who offer trips across Southern and East Africa, but call Zimbabwe home. We flew with Virgin Atlantic to Victoria Falls from Heathrow, via Johannesburg, and spent our first nights at Matetsi. There we had a bungalow to ourselves, with plunge pool and outdoor rainforest shower and the Zambezi right there, at the bottom of the garden, where crocodile bask on the banks. We toured Victoria Falls, took a boat trip on the Zambezi, and game drives twice a day.
From there we took a pulse-quickening four-seater Cessna flight, 40 minutes southeast, crossing spectacular wilderness, to Hwange National Park, and Somalisa Acacia, a tented camp in the bush, where our bedroom looked onto a watering hole visited by elephant and lion and more breeds of deer than I knew existed. By day five, I was so unusually relaxed that I even accepted the loss of my iPhone with equanimity. I’d left it on the back bench of the Land Cruiser and it must have slipped off into the long grass.
Somewhere, deep in the bush of Zimbabwe, there’s a baboon playing Candy Crush. Don’t say I never do anything for the locals.
○ Definitive Zimbabwean travel specialists, Mavros Safaris (mavrossafaris.com; +44 20 3824 6000,) offers this family safari from £16,125 for a family of four (two adults and two children). The itinerary includes three nights at Matetsi Victoria Falls and three nights at Somalisa Acacia on a full-board basis including all activities (game drives, boat cruises and a Victoria Falls tour), conservation fees and road transfers. This price also includes return charter flights from Victoria Falls to Hwange National Park, plus return international flights from London to Victoria Falls