Hwange National Park

We were pleased to be leaving the noise and mosquitoes of the busy tourist town of Victoria Falls behind us and headed a few hours down the road to Hwange National Park hoping for some peace and quiet. Hwange is one of Zimbabwe´s premium national parks with a reputation for being packed full of animals, predators and, specifically, cats.

Our first stop was Robbins Camp on the western edge of the park. It was clean and relatively well maintained, but it was to be the last campsite we stayed in for a month that could be described that way – we didn´t know how lucky we were.

We did a game drive late that afternoon and were amazed at how many animals we saw. Mainly antelope but of types we had not seen before – new country, new animals

One of the great, and very unusual, things about Hwange is that you can get out of your vehicle within the park. At almost all waterholes they have built wooden viewing platforms that you can climb up and look out over the absolutely stunning landscapes

That seem to go on forever

It was a completely new experience in a national park and added a real extra excitement to things.

At one waterhole I spotted a herd of antelope coming towards us in the distance. Through the binoculars I thought they might be the rare and beautiful Sable but doubted our luck would be that good on our first day. I should have been more confident, slowly over the course of the next half an hour a dozen of these stately animals came into clear focus and wandered towards the water for a drink

What a treat!

We were up early the next morning and out in the park by 6:30am. It didn´t take long before we saw our first lions

This male and female had made a kill overnight and, having eaten their fill, came down to the water for a drink

Before slowly meandering into the bush to sleep it off

The kill was just a few metres away, clearly marked by the fighting, squawking vultures

We followed a safari vehicle across a steep ditch to get a closer look and saw other birds of prey on the outskirts of the crush

Everywhere we went we were surrounded by elephants

Some with their young

But most crowded around the waterholes

As we stood on one of the platforms looking out I was amused to see a baboon lounging around on the step into the toilets underneath – luckily neither of us needed to use it at the time!

We had to get across the park to Main Camp on the eastern side for our second night´s camp so by lunchtime we were on the main dirt road heading that way. All of a sudden we saw two or three vehicles parked near a bush and assumed we were about to see a second pride of lions. But as we pulled up we saw to our excitement that it was actually a cheetah with her cub and a kill

This was an incredible sighting and we sat and watched for an hour whilst first Mum then the cub filled their stomachs

It´s always difficult watching something like this, you cannot escape the fact that the meal is actually another creature that had fought for its life and lost. But if the cats don´t hunt they too will die

Nature is cruel and only the fittest survive, that´s the way of life, but it never makes it any easier to watch – awe-inspiring but not easy

But we had to laugh when dinner managed to get it´s own back on the cub even after death!

Cheetah´s are beautiful creatures even if they seem savage at times

And seeing a little one is so rare as they become increasingly endangered

Our next stop was a waterhole with just a few elephants at it including a cute baby

who was copying Mum in everything she did

As we stood on the platform watching, two ladies from a nearby lodge came up and asked for our help. They needed to switch the main water pump on from the waterhole to the lodge but the elephants were too close and they couldn´t get to it. So James, gallant as ever, drove them to the pump

and parked Henry between them and the elephants so that they could safely do their work

By the time we made it to Main Camp we were tired but happy, it had been a very successful day. We checked in at reception and found an enormous campsite that was practically empty. There were dozens of individual ablutions blocks scattered around the place but, no matter how many I checked, they were all the same – old, crumbling, dirty and full of bugs. There was no hot water and no showers – only grimey baths. It seemed grim at the time but sadly we had found the level of most campsites across the country – they must have been lovely in their day but twenty years of neglect had taken its toll.

Main Camp was also full of flies. They crawled up your nose, in your ears, in your eyes and the tickling, scratching of their legs was all over your body all the time. We were not happy. Fortunately on this first day we arrived at about 3pm and dusk had settled by about 5:30pm at which point all the flies left. And there were no mosquitoes! So we had a reasonably good evening as the searing temperatures cooled in the darkness.

Our fly experience made us decide to keep off the campsite all day the next day. We were up and out by 6:30am and driving the trails on our animal hunt.

We found another two lions lazing under a tree

And hundreds more elephants around every corner!

We had planned to have a nice, easy lunch of cheese, crackers and fruit at one of the picnic spots and spend a couple of hours relaxing, reading and looking out over the views. That way we didn´t need to go back to the fly-invested campsite again until the evening.

But as we pulled up at our chosen picnic site and jumped out to prepare our feast we were swarmed on by even more flies than there had been at Main Camp. I could barely even open my eyes and every inch of my skin was crawling with them. No words needed to be exchanged between us, we jumped back into Henry and drove away.

We agreed that we couldn´t just drive all day, besides anything else it would be exhausting. So we went back to Main Camp to find out whether the information we had been given that the restaurant was closed was true or not. It was not! We were relieved beyond words. We settled in to some nice food, used the wifi and hid from the flies for over two hours before getting back into Henry and finishing our afternoon game drive.

We saw so many animals of so many different types. From kudu and impala drinking at the waterholes

Not to mention the zebra

To the birds surrounding them

and not forgetting the crocodiles keeping everyone on their toes!

Hwange is an amazingly beautiful place

Full of the weird and wonderful

Small and large

The foragers

The predators

The gentle peacelovers

And the ones who just want to be left alone!

But let´s give a special mention to the wonderful secretary bird who makes you smile just looking at his hair cut! What had he lost in that grass??

Lovely as Hwange had been we couldn´t wait to get away from the flies – we couldn´t even have breakfast the next morning because of them. We were driving away before 8am and heading for the Khami Ruins and the colonial town of Bulawayo…..