Walking With Giants

After decades of instability, Zimbabwe is reinventing itself as one of Africa’s safari gems – we rediscover a wilderness where there are 200 times more elephants than visitors…

- Mark Eveleigh

Just a few metres away, hunkered down in the dust, was a herd of snorting African buffalo. There was nothing but a thin veil of spiky acacia between us and a group of half-tonne bulls that served as the herd’s rearguard. I was aware that there was only one high-calibre rifle in the immediate vicinity and I was doing my very best to position myself in between the man holding it and the potentially belligerent creatures.

There’s something about the sheer, wild immensity of Hwange National Park that makes you feel very small indeed. Nowhere on the planet can you immerse yourself in such an impressive concentration of large animals; the biodiversity of Zimbabwe’s biggest park (covering an area about twice the size of Devon county) is surpassed in Africa only by the Serengeti and Kruger. But whereas the crowded Tanzanian and South African giants each attract close to 2 million visitors a year, Hwange sees fewer than 40,000. With the long-awaited end of former president Robert Mugabe’s dictatorship, visitors are slowly starting to return to Hwange; for the moment, though, it still offers that rare chance to experience an African wilderness where elephants outnumber foreign visitors by almost 200 to one.

Ever since I had entered Hwange, after a three-hour road-trip from Victoria Falls, we’d been surrounded by elephants. At this moment, however, my focus was on the shadowy forms of the buffalo that were staring in our direction and sniffing noisily at the air. Zimbabwe is famous for producing the best guides in the safari industry and I was grateful that mine, Ty Hurst, had vast experience of bush-walking.

“We’ll be fine if we keep downwind of them,” he whispered over his shoulder. “But the wind’s swirling a bit.”