A-Z an Epic trip to Zimbabwe

Much of the below is taken directly from Helen’s notes on our trip – a huge thanks to her for this.

On Saturday 13th  October, Helen and I woke up as the sun rose, made ourselves a quick cup of tea and then began our drive to the airport in Porky (my little red car) - eating leftover Egg Foo Yong, from the night before, on the way. We indulged in a 2nd breakfast at airport: sharing a waffle at a coffee franchise called Mugg & Bean, then we had a third breakfast on the plane before landing in Harare. Perhaps this was a portent of the week of eating to come!

Flying in over Harare, it looked very dry and brown from the sky – not surprising considering the time of year. October is known as ‘suicide month’ in Zimbabwe as everyone is waiting desperately for the first rain showers of the season – and each day as clouds build up, but then there is still not a drop, it is said to drive farmers that little bit closer to suicide! On arrival, we got through the “international” airport quickly (not difficult given that it was a tiny building) and it was interesting to note the number of signs in the airport written in Chinese. It would seem that the rumours of Chinese takeover of Zimbabwe have at least some basis. We happily met up with the rest of our group: my parents Keith & Pam, and my brother Andrew & Romain. Unfortunately Pam and Keith’s luggage had not arrived from their Kenyan flight but they were determined not to let it get them down, so on we went.

Our pilot Ed escorted us through immigration and onto our private light aircraft – a Cessna 8 seater. It was a small plane, and the flight was rather bumpy. About half-way into our hour-long flight Helen started to turn a rather green shade of pale, and had her eyes firmly shut as she breathed deeply. Unfortunately ten minutes before we landed she had to ask for a paper bag – but seemed to perk up rather quickly after parting with some part of our earlier breakfasts. We landed on the dry and dusty Dandawa strip in the Mana Pools National Park on the northern tip of Zimbabwe, not far from the Zambian border. We were welcomed by a wall of hot air as we climbed out of the plane and onto an open-sided game viewing truck driven by our camp manager Andre, who took us to our home for the next 2 nights.

Kanga bush camp is a luxurious tented camp built around ivory and nyala trees, overlooking a small waterhole that attracts an incredible number and variety of animals. The camp pumps water daily from a nearby borehole which means that it’s a permanent source of water. The interior of the park is very dry this time of year so Kanga pan with its constant water source is well frequented. It is an oasis in what feels like an incredibly isolated and uninhabited part of the world.

Kanga is a relatively new camp that has only been around for 2 years since the tourism industry took off again in Zimbabwe after contested elections. Troops of playful wild baboons were drinking, frolicking and lazing near the water. Luckily they are still too wild to get too close to humans and their stuff (for now). Within minutes of arriving at the camp, we were treated to spectacular elephant viewing - and as the afternoon wore on, the sightings didn't slow down: wart hog, zebra, kudu, eland, hyena & and fish eagle were all spotted.

As the sun set and our party sipped sun-downers on the raised wooded deck overlooking the pan, we were treated to a humorous tussle between 4 elephants who'd worked out that a nearby pipe pumped out fresh water from the borehole into the pan. Much giggling ensued as these creatures sneakily pulled the pipe from each other as we sat only a few meters away. We ate a sumptuous dinner of grilled bream from Kariba lake on the deck with the other guests & guides that evening, and caught a glimpse of a lioness and a few wildebeest with the aid of spotlights. We were escorted through the un-fenced camp to our rooms (Helen and I stayed in tented hut number 3 out of a total of 6).

Our tent was on a raised platform, like the dining area, with an open outdoor shower and running water toilet. The tent itself was mostly mesh-sides to let the breeze low through – which meant that from our bed we could see quite a bit of the water pan and the trees and bush around us through the mesh walls and doors. Helen had a very interrupted night, with her sleep being disturbed by giant elephant stomps around our tent, me waking up every half hour imagining that some animal was about to actually walk into our tent, and a suspected kill in the early hours of the morning with a stampede through the camp and lion howls.

On Sunday morning we had a 5:00am wake up, as was to become our norm during the holiday, and we got dressed and joined the others for tea and coffee & maize porridge (with lashings of butter & brown sugar for some of us) on the deck, followed by a walk in the bush for a few hours with our guide Shaun. We spotted a lioness & her cub, sausage trees & their heavy fruit, fresh kudu remains after a kill likely from the night before (the leg we found on the ground was still soft and rigor mortis had not yet set in) and we tracked various animal prints (lion, cub, leopard, various buck and all their accompanying dung). We were back at the camp by 9 and the heat was already setting in but Helen and I were hankering for some grub over and above the muffins on offer, so the staff very kindly whipped up another pot of mielie meal (maize porridge) for a ‘post-breakfast’ snack.

The rest of the morning & afternoon was spent lazing on the deck or in our room with a view (of baboons’ bums). We relaxed and enjoyed watching elephants up close (including a teeny tiny baby not more than a few months old) as they bathed and wallowed in the mud, ridiculous looking warthog with their toothbrush tails, zebra, guinea fowl, 2 fish eagles singing to one another, and hundreds of baboons bending over & ungraciously revealing their bright pink bottoms to us with every sip of water from the pan.

Considering how remote the camp is, and that it runs off solar power for lights and a generator for a few fridges & freezers, the spreads that were put on at mealtimes was remarkable. Our drinks were always icy cold, the salads were fresh, and the overall cuisine varied & delicious. That afternoon Pam and Keith’s luggage arrived along with a new set of guests - 2 British women (including a doctor from Newcastle) and their guide Doug. At first we were quietly pleased, as the previous other guests had been a couple from Botswana: the wife being a very generously built woman whose passion was photography. Which meant that she would plonk herself down in the middle of one of the two sofas on the deck early in the morning, and thereafter would not move for the entire day except for meals. However, we weren't that pleased about our new arrivals when their guide promptly picked up the tea time coconut cake and placed it in front of his guests at their table, seemingly for their exclusive consumption! Luckily they improved as the evening wore on.

On Monday morning Helen and I missed our wake-up call before sunrise. Apparently, two tents and probably 40 meters away, my parents could clearly hear the staff outside our tent calling out to us: “wake up, wake up!” But I never hear anything like that anyway, and Helen was dead to the world after two nights of disturbed sleep. Later, Helen woke up to the call of 2 fish eagles singing to one another. We strolled to the shaded deck and realised that it was past 8 o clock and that the rest of our group were out game viewing on the truck. Perhaps we were more horrified at the thought that we had missed breakfast, so we asked the staff if they'd kindly whip up porridge and toast – which they did. As we were tucking into freshly made toast, the others arrived back and we discovered that breakfast was still to come!

Later that morning John Stevens, our host for the next 4 days, arrived to pick us up, accompanied by his son-in-law Milo Harrup who run Mana Pools Safari Company. With them we began our game drive transfer to Mana Pools on the banks of the Zambezi River. John is a well-respected guide: having been the park warden for Mama pools for many years. His enthusiasm for the area is quite infectious. We drove around 60km through dirt road, past ‘Crouton’ Forrest, a few baobab and sausage trees, passing zebra, waterbuck, elephant, and eland (biggest buck in Africa).

We drove into Trichilia (sausage tree) camp. Set on the banks of the Zambezi river was our canvas tented home for the  next few days. We were greeted by all the staff on arrival, and each of us given a cooled damp facecloth to freshen up. This eco friendly camp runs almost entirely on solar power and a gas oven for cooking. Generators are not allowed in the river-front concessions. Because the camp was exclusively ours for the next few days, it was made up of a tented kitchen and washing up station, a dining area under a large open-sided gazebo, and 3 tents had been erected for our party – each with a veranda overlooking the river and Zambian mountains in the distance. Leading off each tent was an enclosed open air bucket shower and long drop. Even a little splash pool made of canvas and pumped with fresh river water daily had been erected to stave off the midday heat.

The next few days were spent experiencing one of Africa's great walking wildernesses – as our mornings typically started just before 5am when we would get up and have porridge and tea and coffee for breakfast just as the sun was coming up. By 5:30 we’d be on the open sided safari truck watching a bright red sun rising in the distance. In the mornings we’d usually drive to somewhere, and then set off on foot with John and our tracker whose name might have been Orbit, or Aubert, or Obert, we never did quite figure it out. On Tuesday morning our aim was to track and find lion. We spotted a buffalo kill from the night before, found lion tracks and followed these on foot for a few kilometres. Eventually we caught up with a pride of lions made up of several females as well as a few juvenile males and two maturing cubs.

On Wednesday, we drove for an hour to the far eastern side of the riverfront in the park – to an area known as the Wilderness. There the road stops and the remaining area can only be explored on foot. We followed and observed up-close, another smaller pride of lions, including an impressively maned adult male. Thereafter we walked several kilometres and saw varied bird-life, a hippo returning to water, and Helen and I thoroughly enjoyed the comedy of watching Pam, Andrew and Romain slowly get as close as they could (walking in single file across a flat  sandy plain) to three dozing warthogs.

We learned over the course of our walking treks, that the key to approaching all of these wild animals on foot is to walk slowly, never to appear to be stalking them or being sneaky, and not to look them in the eye or make it too obvious that you’re watching or make them feel like they’re being stared at. Even with lion, we were at times able to walk within 30-40 meters of the pride before they became uncomfortable and would move another 50 - 100m meters away from us to re-settle in another patch of shade under trees. John was always careful not to allow us to bother the animals by ensuring we keept a respectful distance, and he carried a rifle with him, which he would load when we began to walk in more dense bush – the animals that most seemed to worry him were elephants with baby calves, and buffalo.

On Thursday morning we set out to track leopard and ended up walking many kilometres, but the reputation of a leopard for being incredibly difficult to track is not undeserved, and we were forced to abandon our search in the end despite feeling several times that we had come tantalisingly close to finding the owner of the paw-prints we followed. We did however come across a pack of about 17 wild dog under a large African fig tree. We were able to approach on foot quite close to the dogs, who were all dozing in the shade. A few kilometres drive up the road we also saw the pride of Lions we had seen on Tuesday morning. As the sun rose in the sky, we decided that the wild dogs and lions clearly knew what they were doing, so we returned to the shade of our camp to eat and cool off in the plunge pool.

That evening we went back to see the Lions, and for the first time during our trip, we felt a considerable presence of other people there with us – until then we had felt alone during our explorations of the park, and often we had been the only humans within a radius of many kilometres. Although the lions were tired and dozing, with almost 20 people sitting on various parts of a fallen tree about 50 meters away, some of them did at least seem to scan the watchers. It didn’t escape my or Romain’s attention that they seemed most interested in the only two children there – and particularly in a rather chubby little fellow who we immediately dubbed ‘sausage roll boy’, as the Lions clearly ear-marked him as the most easily attainable snack among all of the on-lookers. As we departed from the throng to return to the wild dog, we also saw another vehicle we had passed once or twice before: containing a group of four rather distinctively unattractive people (Andrew dubbed them ‘the uglymobile’) – an older couple and a younger pairing who we couldn’t figure out: she was painfully thin (and promptly became known as Skeletor) and he was bulgingly fat. At first we thought he was the older brother who always got the first helping of food and left her with nothing but the scraps, but later he put his arm around her and we all tried not to think too much about how she didn’t drown underneath him if he got on top of her!

Moving on from the Lions, we revisited the wild dogs we had seen earlier in the day. They were still napping and not doing much at all. We didn’t walk up to them this time, as another group were already on foot in the vicinity and there is a sort of code of honour among the guides not to disturb one-another’s groups. But John is a savvy veteran, and we waited around because he predicted that with only a sliver of the new moon and therefore not much light in which to hunt at night, the dogs would get up just before sunset. True to his word, as if at some signal, first one then another dog slowly roused himself, wagged his tail a bit and then began sniffing about and nuzzling his friends in the pack. For about ten minutes there was much sniffing and bounding about, then when the alpha female roused herself, they began to walk away parallel to the road but through the trees about 100 meters away from us. We drove along the road hoping to follow them as we saw occasional glimpses of white-tipped tails lolloping along through the bush. As they approached a more open plain we could tell that the pace was picking up, and by this time we were driving along the dirt road at about 20km per hour, straining to see them in the distance. Then suddenly, we could see that the pace of their run had picked up tremendously, and seemingly out of nowhere, several of them shot in front of the other car ahead of us on the road at top speed. We reached the place where they had crossed the road seconds later and knew that they must have been close to making a kill. We stopped and for a moment it seemed that they might have gone too far from us. But then we heard them making noise, and jumped out of the truck to follow them on foot through the darkening evening. By the time we approached the dogs, some 150 meters from the road, there was almost nothing left of the kudu they had brought down. With only a few scraps remaining which were being carried away to feed the cubs. It was a truly incredible experience to arrive literally within a few minutes of the kill being made and a stroke of tremendous luck - even someone like John had only seen this a few times in his long career. With a small bark as a signal to the other group within the pack who were presumably hunting elsewhere, the wild dogs disappeared into the night just as quickly as they’d arrived.

On Friday, our last morning at Mana Pools, we walked along the Zambezi river and enjoyed the abundance of bird life. We also watched a hippo walk into the river down one of the ‘chutes’ in the otherwise steep river banks - surprised at how narrow the chutes seemed in comparison to the girth of the hippo. Later in the morning, just as I was ready to consider this the least interesting of all our walks, John showed us tree that used to be a favourite leopard spot. We were standing right under it when a flicker of a tail caught Helen’s eye. She looked over at John who mouthed 'leopard' excitedly. The leopard eyed us cautiously from the dense foliage of the high branches, flicking her long spotted tail vigorously. Baboons nearby started to howl and cajole her as she slid down the tree and landed on the ground with a surprisingly heavy ‘thud’ – making us realise the power as well as the stealth of such a magnificent animal. Before we could react, she dashed swiftly out of sight. It was a great sighting on our last day in Mana!

During our time at Mana we spotted a huge variety of animals, a brief listing includes:

Buck:  eland, waterbuck with toilet seat markings on their bums, kudu that look as though they’ve had cake icing drizzled over them, and plenty of impala (so common they are called mana goats)

Of the big 5: elephant, leopard, lion, and buffalo

Wild dog

Crocs and Hippo’s

Baboons

Civet, honey badger

Favourite birds: carmine bee eater, violet breasted roller,

After our exciting leopard spotting, we returned to camp for a last breakfast. Then two transfer vehicles picked us up around mid-morning and we started the long sweaty trek towards Lake Kariba. Temperatures outside were soaring, and as Helen and I and Andrew and Romain rode in a dilapidated mini van (with “full aircon” according to the driver) it was closer to 40 degrees celsius. So we kept the sliding side door on the side of the vehicle wide open for some air circulation – never dreaming that we would have done this in an area of wild animals before, whereas now we all felt rather casual about nearby antelope and the occasional elephant in the distance. An hour into our 4 hour journey, on a long stretch of dusty road through a forest of leafless trees that appeared dry as a bone, our driver decided to stop the vehicle and have a pee in the bushes. As if this was a sign to the car, there was a sudden popping noise and a woosh of water onto the windscreen as the car’s radiator burst! Luckily Pam and Keith were ahead of us in an old Landcruiser so we radio’d them to turn back. Anxious to get to Kariba, we all piled into the remaining functional car along with all of our luggage, and waved our dejected second driver ‘au revoir’ as we carried on - another 100km of dust road through the park, then up windy roads overtaking large trucks, and somewhat alarmingly passing truck carcasses on unforgiving bends in the road. Arriving at Kariba, we hopped onto a speedboat transferring us 60km south west across the lake.

After our epic journey, we were delighted to arrive at Musango safari camp located on a small island just off the shoreline of Matusadona National park. Here the focus was on water activities: riding a pontoon boat around the islands while game and bird watching from the water, and fishing. Saturday began with a sunrise trip out to identify birds, feeding fish eagles, and fishing (bream mostly, and the odd tiger fish). The fishing skill was largely that of our young guide, Adam, who taught us neophytes how to hook worms, how to strike when we felt the bream bite, and later, with live bait, he taught us to cast, and then once he had managed to strike a tiger fish, he let first Keith and then Romain each reel in a fish that is famed for its fight.

Andrew and Romain very kindly gave Helen and I one of the two cabins that had a plunge pool directly outside and we enjoyed a wonderfully lazy afternoon in the main swimming pool as well as in our delightfully cool neck-deep plunge pool. It was an odd feeling standing in the plunge pool and being observed with curiosity from not more than 10 meters away, by the resident bushbuck who clearly wondered why we were in her territory. We all hopped onto a large catamaran in the evening, sailing towards Bumi Hills as we enjoyed game viewing, getting temporarily stuck on a submerged tree and toasting our eventual freedom with sun-downers. We were all tremendously relieved that our boat captain’s sudden foray chest deep into the water to free the catamaran from the tree had not resulted in anything more than him getting wet – given how many crocodiles there are in the lake and how many stories we’d already heard of both people and local wildlife being eaten by the crocs.

On Sunday, we squeezed in a last sunrise ride on the pontoon, catching a few small bream to be used as tiger fish bait. After a hearty breakfast we took a boat and road transfer to Bumi airstrip, where we met our charter flight to Harare. Luckily this time it was a larger, better air conditioned plane and everyone arrived safely in Harare with their digestive systems undisturbed. Helen and I bade farewell as we flew back to Johannesburg and real life, while the others stayed on to enjoy another week in Leopard Rock and Inyanga.

It was an amazing, unforgettable trip which Helen and I both thoroughly enjoyed. Pam and Keith were incredibly generous in sponsoring the trip for all of us, and we are already dreaming up how we can possibly re-pay their kindness, as well as where we should all travel to for our next great adventure.