Expert Reviews of Matusadona National Park (8 Reviews)

Matusadona is home to four of the Big Five (black rhinos are absent), and while lion numbers have declined of late, elephant and buffalo are common. The park’s remote situation between Lake Kariba and the Matuzviadonha Hills is stunning. The closer you get to the 700m summits, the wilder and woollier it gets, with walking the only real option.

My favorite way to experience the magic of Matusadona is by water, cruising along the lakeshore into the mouth of the Gache Gache, the river that forms the park’s eastern boundary. To explore its serpentine channels is to be engulfed in a sunlit silence of reed beds and water lilies, broken only by the yelping cries of fish eagles. Wherever you look there is life: crocodiles basking with jaws agape, buffalo browsing on the torpedo grass, shy bushbuck watching from the shadows and herons stalking through the reeds. In places, long-dead trees rise from the water; drowned when Kariba was created in the 1950s, their skeletal superstructures

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provide ideal perches for cormorants and kingfishers.

For a longer stay, Bumi Hills Safari Lodge, Musango Safari Camp and the small, upmarket Changa Safari Camp are among the best options. On game drives, bumping down red-dirt roads in open 4x4s, you drive through mopane woodlands coppiced to orchard height by the park’s elephants, keeping an eye open for leopards and hyenas, not to mention some 350 bird species. In April, Amur falcons, on migration from faraway Russia, hunt dragonflies along shorelines graced by big herds of impala and sudden flurries of egrets that stand out like snowflakes against the indigo lake.

Flanked by Lake Kariba in the south, Matusadona is different to any other national park in the region. The shoreline is dominated by a forest of skeleton trees. This iconic feature dates back to when the world’s largest artificial lake was filled in the early 1960s after the completion of Kariba Dam. With this came Operation Noah, the translocation of over 6,000 animals in danger of drowning by the rising waters. Lots of these animals were brought to Matusadona, which was elevated to a Big Five destination virtually overnight. Sadly, poaching and habitat-related issues have led to the decline of animal densities and rhinos have been wiped out altogether.

The wonderful news is that since the involvement of the non-profit organization African Parks in 2019, the park is being restored to its former glory. Elephants are thriving and lion numbers are slowly increasing as well. Black rhino and cheetah are due to be reintroduced in 2025.

Right now, there isn’t as

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much diversity in the park as in many other wilderness areas in the region, but if you love elephants, like I do, you won’t be disappointed. One afternoon, we ended up parking on the floodplain and watching a large herd for three hours. They were drinking and bathing, the youngsters were playing in the mud, the adolescent males were fighting, babies were suckling, and one stroppy teenager was chasing birds along the shore. As the sun set on the lake, silhouetting the elephants between the stark outlines of the dead trees, the photo opportunities were out of this world. What’s more, it wasn’t just magical in the photos, it was magical in real life… In all the time we spent with this herd, we didn’t see another car.