zimbabwe: mana on foot and the matobo rhino

It is safe enough that the parks authority allows walking here, and serious enough that it is done with a licensed professional guide. On this trip you never walk alone. Every walk is led by a licensed Zimbabwean professional guide who carries a rifle and decides how near is sensible.

The place helps too: the woodland is open, so you and the elephants can see each other from a long way off, and the bulls here are used to people on foot.

None of that removes the risk. It is managed by the guide, whose word on a walk is final.

Reasonably active, not athletic.

A walking safari is slow: a few kilometres at most, with frequent stops to read tracks and never an endurance test. The floodplain at Mana Pools is level going. The Robins country in Hwange is hillier and stonier, so bring boots you have already worn in.

Canoeing at Mana is drifting with the current more than paddling against it, needs no previous experience, and is leisurely.

The longest single outing is likely to be the morning with the rhino trackers in the Matobo Hills, three to five hours at an unhurried pace that all levels of fitness can manage.

The real test on this trip is heat, not distance. By October the Zambezi Valley can easily pass 40 degrees, so if you feel the heat, choose June to August, when mornings on foot are cool.

White rhino, very likely, though you are tracking wild animals and nothing is promised.

Matobo is one of the few places in Zimbabwe where following rhino on foot is offered, and they can reliably be tracked, sometimes within twenty minutes. Other mornings take hours.

You go out with the lodge's guide and a tracker, often joined by a ranger from the park's anti-poaching unit, and they work from fresh tracks until the animals are in view, then hold you at a respectful distance. Most guests succeed.

Black rhino share the park but are seldom met, so we would not plan around one. The dry months from May to October are the easiest, when the grass is low and tracks are simpler to follow.

They suit different people and different river levels.

Rafting the Batoka Gorge is class five white water, with a minimum age of 15 and a climb out of the gorge at the end, one we liken to a 70 storey building. From about August the river is low enough for the full run from the first rapid.

Earlier, in high water, a shorter run starts further down, and around the peak of the flood the river can shut to rafts altogether; operators differ on the dates, so we check.

The helicopter asks nothing of you and flies at any water level, for 12 to 15 minutes on the usual circuit or between 22 and 30 on the extended one. It adds most in May, at the start of this trip's run, when the river is still high and spray hides part of the view from the paths.

We do not say in advance what you will fly in, because that is the company's choice and not ours.

Only from May to November, because two of the five camps exist only in the dry months.

Little Vundu and Hwange Bush Camp are both put up in May and taken down in November, ahead of the rains that turn Mana Pools' black soil impassable.

Within that window our ratings are at their highest everywhere in July, August and September, and June to August are the coolest for long mornings on foot. From August the elephant bulls at Mana start rising onto their hind legs for the winterthorn pods, and Hwange's herds crowd the pans most heavily in September and October.

October has the most concentrated game of all and the fiercest heat.

At the two ends of the season the trade is a simple one. In May the country is still green, the Falls close to full flood and Matobo already at its best; in November the first storms build, migrant birds return and antelope drop their young. Both are quieter and usually cheaper, with the game spread more widely.

Yes to both.

The sample route leaves the travel between areas open, and the distances are large, so we plan it with you.

Mana Pools is the far corner: it is about two hours ten minutes by light aircraft from Victoria Falls, against six to seven hours by road from Harare, so we would suggest flying in and out of Mana.

Hwange Bush Camp is about four hours by road from Victoria Falls, the second half of it a game drive through the park, and Matobo at the end is 45 kilometres from Bulawayo.

As for changes, the fixed points are the two camps that stand only from May to November, and their size, five tents and seven, which is why July to October needs booking early. The easiest things to alter are:

• The lodge at the Falls
• The two nights on Lake Kariba
• The length of the stay at Mana