Great Zimbabwe
Situated 28kms from Masvingo, connected by a good road, the Great Zimbabwe National Monument sprawls across 7½kms² of valley and hilltop.

It is made up of three main groups of stone structures: The Hill Complex; Great Enclosure (Great House); The Valley Complex. A huge elliptical wall, 9mtrs high and more than 5mtrs thick - with a circumference of more than 250mtrs - encircled this impressive capital’s great enclosure. At it’s peak the city, the largest of any in Southern and Eastern Africa at that time, boasted about 20,000 citizens. Radiocarbon dating and archaeological evidence suggests that this royal capital reached it’s great eminence between the 11th and 15th centuries AD. Perhaps most fascinating of all is the fact that the intricate complex has endured 700 years without mortar, as the walls were built using the dry stone technique.

Lake Kariba
It was at Kariba, that the Zambezi suddenly funnelled into the narrow neck of a 100mtr wide gorge, carving its way through a large granite block leaving the top to form a natural bridge. The arch looked like a traditional fish trap and the river people called it kariwa. Lake Kariba itself was born on 3rd December 1958, when the temporary openings in the dam wall were closed. It was not until another five years in September 1963 that the lake assumed its present dimensions. Covering more than 5,000km², the lake is 281kms long and at it’s widest point, more than 40kms across. It’s jade coloured waters are studded with islands and fringed with mountains and forests.

Lake Kariba wrought astonishing economic, as well as physical change before its formation as the Zambezi Valley was an infertile furnace, almost physically uninhabitable. More than just a sunny idyllic getaway, Kariba offers the supreme beauty of it’s surrounding landscapes, magnificent watersports - including some of the most exciting fishing in the world, water skiing, sailing or just relaxing on a luxurious houseboat - and a wildlife spectacle that has few, if any, equals.

Matobo Hills
From the top of Matobo Hills, south of Zimbabwe’s second largest city, Bulawayo, the eye scans across a world in tortured disarray. Granite masses - split, seamed, sculpted and shaped by time and weather - form an array of whalebacks and castle kopjes that dominate 3,000km² of Matabeleland South Province. Much of the countries history has been written in the confines of the Matobo Hills, from the time thousands of years ago, when ancient bushmen used the granite faces as a canvas for their unique and extraordinary art, to more modern times when black and white met in war and peace. These bushmen paintings date back to between 20,000 and 40,000 years, using pigments and natural minerals that have survived the ravages of climate and time.

The hills made a profound impression on two men of absolute power whose destinies drew them into final confrontation in the last decade of the nineteenth century. One of them, Cecil John Rhodes, lies buried in the hills, quite close to the grave of Mzilikazi, the father of his adversary, Lobengula. The Matobo hills became the last stronghold of Lobengula’s indunas and impis regular in the war against Rhodes’s colonizing ‘pioneers’.

Hwange National Park
Hwange National Park, one of the world’s last great elephant sanctuaries, is the largest National Park in Zimbabwe. Covering more than 14,600km², it has more animals and a greater variety (107) of species than any other park in the country, and more than 400 species of bird. The animals that roam the park today include a growing number of buffalo, zebra, giraffe, impala, kudu, sable, wildebeest, roan, tsessebe and gemsbok. Such numbers attract many predators: lion and leopard, cheetah, abundant spotted hyena, and now and then a rare brown hyena.

Water remains the single most important factor in Hwange’s continued existence, absolutely vital of what is perhaps Africa’s largest single concentration of elephant. The constant maintenance of artificial but natural-looking water pans complete with resident hippo and predatory crocodiles have been the major factor in sustaining this ecological treasury.