Hwange

Hwange is Zimbabwe's largest park and one of Africa's great elephant countries: fourteen and a half thousand square kilometres of Kalahari sand, teak and mopane on the country's western edge, with no rivers of its own — the water is pumped, and has been since Ted Davison, the first warden, sank the boreholes in the 1930s — and some forty-five thousand elephants who gather at the pans in the dry months in herds that come to drink by the hundred at dusk. Main Camp on the eastern edge, by the railway and the village of Dete, has the Nyamandhlovu platform over its pan; the south-east has Ngweshla and the Kennedy pans and the private camps of the concessions; Sinamatella sits on a ridge over the hills of the north; Robins and the Mandavu dam are the north-west; and the sands of the south-west hold the sable and the roan. It is the park of the painted dogs, whose conservation centre is at Dete, and of Cecil, the lion whose killing outside its boundary in 2015 was heard around the world; Victoria Falls is two hours north, Bulawayo three hours south-east, and the train between them stops at Dete.

The traveller comes from Victoria Falls by road or by the rail car that runs to Dete, or flies to the airstrips of the concessions, and gives Hwange three nights: one at Main Camp or a lodge on the eastern edge for the Nyamandhlovu platform at dusk, when the elephant come in lines out of the teak; one at a camp with a hide sunk beside a pan — an afternoon at eye level with a herd is the park's gift —; a morning with the painted dog centre; a drive south to Ngweshla and Kennedy for the lions and the giraffe on the vleis; and, with more, the north — Sinamatella's view, Mandavu's hippo — which few reach.

The Guide's honesty: Hwange is dry, and its water is a machine — the pumps run on diesel and solar and on the fees the visitors pay, and a park without them would empty in a season, which the traveller understands as they watch the herds; the roads are sand and the distances long, so the private camps and their vehicles earn their price, while Main Camp and the national parks' lodges keep the honest end; the season matters more than most parks — the green months scatter the animals —; Zimbabwe's welcome is among the warmest on the continent and its currency the most confusing, so dollars in small notes; and an elephant herd of two hundred arriving at a pan in the last light, seen from a hide at ground level, is why the Guide keeps this page beside Chobe's.