Heartbreak is no stranger to Hwange National Park. But better times might be beckoning for Zimbabwe’s biggest and arguably most enchanting reserve, the bizarre politics of the country permitting.
More and more tourists are said to be turning off the road between Bulawayo and Victoria Falls for stays in the park’s so-named Main Camp that is situated not far from its main entrance. Traffic has apparently been picking up since Robert Mugabe and Morgan Tsvangirai struck their unity-government deal in 2007. It would therefore be sad for the park, as for the rest of the country, if hopes of a return to normality are once more frustrated.
It’s believed the visitors are mostly South Africans. Among them, one imagines, may be more than one hankering for days when the essence of park visits was the sense of being with nature, not of being stuck in traffic on game drives.
This sense of blissful solitude is precisely what Hwange offers. They say that even with more people starting to return, the chances of coming across other vehicles on game drives along its sandy tracks are slim, not to speak of getting squashed at lion and leopard sightings.
I did not see any of Zimbabwe National Park’s own camps as I was a guest of Wilderness Safaris, which has a concession called Makalolo in the south-eastern section of the 1.4 million hectare park where it juts out in a south-easterly direction towards Bulawayo. I was told that though the amenities remain rudimentary, there are now again a restaurant and a shop of sorts at Main Camp.
With Wilderness Safaris it is different. Since starting out from Maun in Botswana in 1983, it has perfected the art of combining true wilderness experiences with perfect bush comforts, even luxuries, at the more than 50 camps and lodges it has in the far-flung wilderness areas of southern Africa.
The purpose of our visit was to mark the company’s airline change of name from Sefofane (meaning big bird, or aeroplane) to Wilderness Air. Its chief executive, Neil Lumsden, says the change was to integrate the marketing and operation of the company’s 49 aircraft with those of the parent company, and to underpin their shared culture.
The junket included being flown back and forth over Victoria Falls, which were at their spectacular best after heavy rains in the Zambezi’s catchments in Angola and Zambia.
Having flown from Victoria Falls International Airport to Hwange, similar photographic flights were done over the park. This provided us with views of the lush country and large buffalo herds and elephant that congregated at the shallow water pans which dot the wide and practically treeless floodplains curving through the bush.
Down on the ground on game drives, encounters with elephant, buffalo, giraffe, kudu and the like were as captivating as the large kiaat, teak and leadwood trees that, between sections of mopane brush, line the vehicle track.
Wilderness Safaris has four camps in the area. Like the rest, ours, named Davissons Camp, was situated on the edge of a grassy floodplain with a water pan where, from the comfort of a sofa, or sitting at the dining table, we could watch the animals as they came to drink and then drifted back into the thickets.
Even the smartly-appointed tent huts, with full ablutions, are positioned in such a way that one can watch the activities around the water hole from the comfort of one’s bed, or sitting in the shade of the porch.
True to the Wilderness Safaris philosophy of touching nature as lightly as possible, the tents and rustic main lounge and dining structure are designed to blend with the surrounds.
The camp is open, with elephant and even lion sometimes passing through.
The staff say they looked on as a leopard walked across the braai area. After dark, an armed guide needs to accompany guests to and from their tents.
The easy hospitality of the staff perfects the experience.
Camp manager Chris Chiparanshe in particular, proved a font of information
on Zimbabwe, its people and its parks. As is always better on such occasions, we steered clear of politics.
But it is precisely the conditions so often inflicted by politics that have been the cause of Hwange’s many tragedies. It started off with the park’s founding in 1928 and its subsequent extension by the British colonial authority, which unhappily required the relocation of some of the local inhabitants.
The indigenous community’s presence in the area was itself the result of intriguing circumstances that occurred early in the 18th century when a chief’s son named Dende, feeling the need to escape the wrath of his father for having disengaged from his authority, fled there with his followers. The fugitive chief’s clan, in turn, were ravaged by slavery and then by Ndebele raids.
It might be that the colonial overlords wanted to placate the locals by naming the park Wankie, after their chief. On independence in 1980, the misspelled name was changed to Hwange, but even that was not quite correct as it’s believed the proper spelling in the local Shona dialect of Kalango is Wange.
From the onset of the Rhodesian bush war in the 1960s, the region became a no-go area for tourists, with people having to travel in armed convoys along the main road passing through. In 1967, in what became known as “The Wankie Battle”, heavy casualties were suffered on both sides in an engagement that raged for several days between government forces and guerrillas inside the park.
There was a window period in the 1990s when the newly independent country showed much promise. Unfortunately for the park, as for so much else, it dissipated when the chaotic land reforms brought on the collapse of law and order, and of democracy and the economy.
Flying low over the area one is especially overcome by thoughts about the absurdity of the country’s politics when measured against the allure of this natural wonderland sliding past. It is a flat landscape that makes the horizon seem as if it had been drawn with a ruler. To the west, Hwange bumps up against the Botswana border, and from about there a relative wilderness stretches off westward towards that country’s vast Chobe Park, and towards its Makgadikgadi Pans in the south-west. It is home to about 30 000 elephants that, I was told, amble back and forth between Hwange and Chobe.
From Hwange to Victoria Falls in the north, for 40 minutes we flew over practically unbroken parkland, the Matetsi Safari Area, which includes a smallish reserve called the Kazuma Pan National Park and which blends with the Victoria Falls National Park where it ends against the Zambezi River.
It is an enormous expanse of wilderness, made more wondrous by its proximity to the Kaza (Kavango-Zambezi) Transfrontier Conservation Area that is being planned to include Botswana’s Okavango Swamps and Chobe Reserve as well as parks and wilderness areas in Namibia and its Caprivi strip, and in southern Angola and western Zambia.
Hwange, so immensely rich in tourism potential, is left largely to its own devices and practically without funding. How fortunate then, that there is an outfit like Wilderness Safaris that is not only treating nature lovers to wonderful wildlife adventures in the park, but are also ploughing back money and effort into conservation and community awareness and education programmes.
In Hwange, the company’s environmental officer, Jaelle Claypole, researches wildlife conditions and behaviour. But a major task is to help the park’s under-staffed and under-equipped rangers contain the worryingly high incidence of poaching. Much of it is carried out by the local communities using snares, with some of the wire contraptions even placed in trees to catch giraffe round the neck. But there are also dangerous elements who come with guns to shoot rhino, elephant and the like.
When Zimbabwe’s troubles get settled, its fabulous array of parks should become an international attraction. And, as already proved by the tourists heading there, Hwange will be a shiny jewel among them.
If You Go...
For further information about Wilderness Safaris and any of their special packages to these destinations, contact +27 11 807 1800 or visit www.wilderness-safaris.com
For information on Wilderness Air, see www.wilderness-air.com
Hwange National Park is warm and rainy from November to April, and warm with cold nights in winter.
It is a malaria area.
Background information on Hwange National Park was obtained from a book titled Hwange-Zimbabwe: Land People History by Phyllis Johnson & Hugh McCullum, published in 1997 by the African Publishing Group in Harare. - Saturday Star