Zimbabwe
House of Stone
Zimbabwe takes its name from stone — dzimba dza mabwe, the great houses of stone raised at Great Zimbabwe seven centuries ago — and the country still feels built from it: balancing granite kopjes over msasa woodland, the basalt lip of Victoria Falls, the sculpted gorges the Zambezi has cut below it. Along the northern frontier run Mosi-oa-Tunya’s mile-wide curtain, the Elephant floodplains of Mana Pools and the private Sapi wilderness beside them. With the most rigorously examined professional guides in Africa, Zimbabwe belongs among the continent’s great safari countries — wild, uncrowded and deeply storied.
SIGNATURE GUIDED SAFARIS® LODGES
- Mpala Jena Camp Victoria Falls
- Stanley & Livingstone Victoria Falls
- Singita Pamushana Lodge Malilangwe
- Sapi Camp Mana Pools
- Tembo Plains Camp Mana Pools
“You hear Victoria Falls long before you see it — a mile-wide thunder rising out of the earth, wearing its own storm of rain and rainbows”
Mosi-oa-Tunya · 1,708 m wide
Victoria Falls
The Kololo named it Mosi-oa-Tunya — the smoke that thunders — and the name is plain fact. At full flood the Zambezi pours over a basalt lip 1,708 meters wide and drops as much as 108 meters into a gorge barely wide enough to receive it, throwing spray that carries for thirty miles. This is the largest single curtain of falling water on Earth — roughly twice the height of Niagara — a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose crest islands, Cataract and Livingstone, stitch the border of two countries. Walk the rainforest path facing the main falls and you will be drenched under a cloudless sky; return on a full-moon night and a lunar rainbow stands in the spray. Our Signature Guided Safaris® itineraries keep you on the quieter Zimbabwean bank, where the viewpoints face the widest run of the curtain.
“No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed in England. It had never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight” — David Livingstone, 1855
“Above the falls the Zambezi is another river altogether — a slow gold mile of water threading palm islands, with Elephant swimming the channels as the sun comes down”
The Zambian bank · est. 1905
Livingstone town
The human story of the falls lives across the gorge, a short hop over the 1905 bridge. Be precise about the map: Livingstone is a Zambian town, set back from the river’s north bank, and reaching it from Zimbabwe is a border crossing measured in minutes — passports stamped beside a steel span hung 128 meters above the rapids. It rewards the detour. The Livingstone Museum, Zambia’s oldest, keeps the explorer’s letters alongside Stone Age tools raised from the Zambezi’s terraces, and the streets still wear their railway-era storefronts.
In low water, boats cross to Livingstone Island on the crest — where Chief Sekeletu’s canoes delivered the missionary to the lip in November 1855 — and the brave slip into Devil’s Pool at the very edge. Our Guided Safaris® Chief designers fold the town into your falls days with one guide handling both sides of the bridge.
Creeping with awe to the verge, I peered down into a large rent which had been made from bank to bank of the broad Zambezi, and saw that a stream of a thousand yards broad leaped down a hundred feet and then became suddenly compressed into a space of fifteen or twenty yards — Missionary Travels, 1857
The upper Zambezi · above the falls
The sunset cruise
Our Signature activity in Zimbabwe is the oldest one there is: an evening on the river. Above the falls the Zambezi spreads a mile wide and slows to walking pace, braiding through palm-topped islands where Elephant wade out to feed at dusk. The sunset boat cruise boards in the last two hours of light — a private boat, drinks on ice, no groups, ever — and idles past Hippo pods and fish eagles while the sun drops into the water and the falls’ spray column glows rose on the horizon downstream. At Mpala Jena, our camp on its own private stretch of the Zambezi ten miles above Victoria Falls town, the cruise leaves from the front of camp, water levels permitting — the same reach of one of the oldest rivers on earth that carries Crocodile, Buffalo herds and the Zambezi’s famous Tigerfish.
“Africa gives you the knowledge that man is a small creature, among other creatures, in a large landscape” — Doris Lessing
The grand dame · est. 1904
Afternoon tea at the Victoria Falls Hotel
Tea at the Victoria Falls Hotel has been served since 1904, and the ritual has outlasted the empire that started it. The hotel was raised for the Cape-to-Cairo railway — an Edwardian grande dame of white columns and deep verandas, a private footpath running from its lawns to the falls — and its terrace still frames the founding view: the green scissor of the gorge, the 1905 bridge, and the spray column standing over it all like weather. Afternoon tea on Stanley’s Terrace arrives on three tiers, with scones, silver, and Warthog cropping the lawn beyond the balustrade; come toward four o’clock, when the light turns copper on the bridge. We book it as the gentle middle of a falls day — the rainforest path at first light, the town after, and the evening cruise waiting back at camp.
“Downstream the river slows into Mana Pools, where in the dry winter months some of the great Elephant gatherings of the Zambezi Valley walk the fig-shaded floodplains of a UNESCO World Heritage wilderness”
The seasons
When to go
There is no wrong month at Victoria Falls — only different rivers. The summer rains run from late November into March, and the flood they raise arrives with a lag: the falls peak from roughly February through May, when the spray climbs some 400 meters and can veil the very curtain it announces — the season to watch Mosi-oa-Tunya live up to its name, and to fly the gorge for the full picture. June through August brings the classic dry winter: mild blue days, a still-powerful river, and game drawing to permanent water — prime months, too, downstream at Mana Pools, when Zimbabwe’s great Elephant herds hold the floodplains. From September to early November the Zambezi thins toward its low; bedrock opens across the Zambian half, Livingstone Island and Devil’s Pool become reachable, and heat builds toward the first storms. December to March turns the country green, dramatic and quiet. Our Guided Safaris® Chief designers will set the month to match your wider itinerary.
L’Ex-Libris — The 1923 Bookplate · Deboss & Foil
Pressed into the paper.
A bookplate pressed into cotton paper, its title stamped in gold leaf. Move your cursor across the plate: the foil catches the light only at the right angle, exactly as a stamped cover does when you tilt it.
Est. 1995
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