Adjacent To Adventure

Masuwe Lodge is close to the town of Victoria Falls and all its attractions, but still surrounded by nature

- Bruce Dennill

Getting to the town of Victoria Falls is easier than ever, with flights into Kasane in Botswana (if you fancy a Chobe interlude en route), Livingstone (just across the border in Zambia) and the Victoria Falls Airport down the road in Zimbabwe.

A transfer from any of them into town gives your guide a chance to add some local colour. Arriving from Livingstone, one of the stories told is of the heavily laden cyclists ferrying fruit between the towns on either side of the Zambia-Zimbabwe border. Big city weekend racers, if you’d like a more testing fitness regime than you currently have, consider this: these guys must negotiate enterprising elephants who have figured out the routes the cyclists take and lurk around corners waiting for a mobile snack (the fruit, not the cyclist, but up close, it’s easy to blur that line).

At the Victoria Falls border post, you can purchase a billion Zimbabwe dollar note for a rather smaller denomination in another currency. Alternatively, you could purchase a scrupulously burnished copper bracelet – worth considerably more and eminently more durable.

From the border, slalom between the five-star hotels closest to the Victoria Falls and head through the town’s shopping district (which is expanding; there’ll be a new mall in a couple of months) and beyond the built-up area to where the wilderness begins.

Masuwe Lodge, not far off the main road, is just 7km from town, but because of the topography of the area, there is no sense of there being an urban area close by.

Central and social