Hwange National Park is Zimbabwe's largest wildlife reserve, renowned for its enormous elephant populations, diverse ecosystems and pumped waterholes that attract abundant game year-round, offering visitors exceptional safari experiences away from the more heavily touristed parks of the region.
Zimbabwe: Victoria Falls National Park
Zimbabwe: Victoria Falls National Park
🌊 Victoria Falls: Zimbabwe’s Roaring Wonder
We’d heard people bang on about Victoria Falls for years before we finally got round to seeing the thing for ourselves, and we can tell you now, it didn’t disappoint one bit. The falls sit on the Zambezi River, which forms a natural border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, and the whole spectacle is, frankly, one of the most awe-inspiring sights either of us had ever clapped eyes on. We did a bit of digging into the history before we went, the way you do, and discovered that the Kololo people, who lived in the area back in the 1800s, gave the falls the name “Mosi-oa-Tunya,” which translates as “The Smoke that Thunders,” a name that’s still used officially today alongside the English one, and the Zimbabwean side of the national park even carries it as its proper title. We thought that was a far better name than the one the Scottish missionary and explorer David Livingstone gave it when he became the first European to lay eyes on the falls in November 1855, having been guided there by local chief Sekeletu, and promptly named the place after Queen Victoria, who was sat back home in Buckingham Palace having never been within several thousand miles of the spot. Livingstone, by all accounts, was so taken aback by the sight that he later wrote it was a scene of such beauty that angels in their flight must have gazed upon it, which we thought was laying it on a bit thick even by Victorian standards, but you can sort of see why he got carried away. We rather like the local name better ourselves, if we’re honest, as it actually tells you something true about what you’re looking at, the great rolling cloud of mist visible for miles around, rather than just flattering a monarch who’d never have to wade through the spray or hear the thing roar.
🚗 Getting to the Park
The Victoria Falls National Park is close enough to the town centre of Victoria Falls that you could quite happily walk it in twenty minutes or so, but being the sort of people who like a bit of comfort after a long flight, we decided to drive and park up in the park’s own car park instead. Mind you, the entry fee made our eyes water rather more than the falls themselves did later on, as it’s gone up quite a bit over recent years what with Zimbabwe’s economy having had a properly rocky old time of it since the hyperinflation crisis of the early 2000s, when the local currency became so worthless that the government ended up printing 100 trillion dollar notes that were, by the time they hit the shops, barely good enough to wallpaper the loo with. These days the park charges foreign visitors in US dollars, which gives you some idea of how things have settled, but it’s still a fair old whack for a single entry ticket. We did wonder, as we handed over our cash and watched the gate attendant count it twice, whether we were about to be disappointed after paying out that much, but we needn’t have worried in the slightest, as you’ll soon find out.
💦 Our First View of the Falls
Once you’re through the gate, there’s a well-trodden trail that takes you down towards the falls themselves, winding through a patch of rainforest that only exists at all because of the spray drifting off the falls, which keeps the ground permanently damp in a region that would otherwise be far too dry to support that sort of vegetation. Our first proper view of the thing, when it finally opened up in front of us through the trees, was nothing short of breathtaking. The Zambezi River, which at this point is well over a mile and a half wide, comes crashing over the lip of a great basalt cliff and tumbles more than 100 metres straight down into the gorge below, a gorge that geologists reckon was carved out by the river itself over roughly two million years, as it slowly cut its way back through a series of fault lines in the volcanic rock, leaving behind the famous zigzag gorge system you can see snaking off into the distance today, with the falls themselves having retreated steadily upstream over that vast stretch of time. We happened to be visiting in the dry season, so the flow wasn’t quite at its thunderous best, but it was still a proper spectacle and no mistake about it. What really got us, though, was the spray. An absolutely enormous cloud of mist gets thrown up by the water smashing into the gorge below, rising at times several hundred metres into the air and visible, on a good day, from many miles off, which is presumably how the Kololo came up with their rather more poetic name for the place in the first place. As it was a sunny afternoon when we went, we were treated to the most extraordinary rainbows forming in the mist, arching right across the gorge in a way that felt almost theatrical, as though somebody had stage-managed the whole thing for our benefit. It was magical, no two ways about it, and we stood there for a good while just taking it in. The thing people often get wrong about Victoria Falls, by the way, is thinking it’s all about the height of the drop, the way you might with Niagara or Angel Falls. It isn’t really. At around 1,708 metres wide, very nearly a mile and three-quarters, it’s the sheer width of the curtain of falling water that makes Victoria Falls, by most measures used by geographers, the largest single sheet of falling water on the entire planet, and that’s the bit that genuinely takes your breath away when you see it stretching out before you from end to end.
🌉 The Trail Along the Gorge
From there, we followed a footpath that runs for well over a kilometre along the lip of the gorge, tracking the line of the falls themselves, with a good number of viewpoints dotted along the way for getting those obligatory holiday snaps that everyone insists on taking, ourselves included if we’re being entirely truthful. Eventually the path brought us out at the famous Victoria Falls Bridge, an extraordinary feat of Edwardian engineering that was actually built in sections in England, shipped out in pieces, and assembled on site before being completed in April 1905, as part of Cecil Rhodes’s grand and rather wildly ambitious dream of building a railway line all the way from Cape Town to Cairo. That dream, in the end, never quite got finished, falling well short somewhere in East Africa, but it did at least leave us this rather splendid bridge spanning the gorge and linking Zimbabwe with Zambia some 128 metres above the river below. These days it carries road traffic, a working railway line, and, for the more adventurous among you, a bungee jump platform and a rather terrifying-looking “Big Swing,” neither of which we had the slightest inclination to use ourselves, thank you very much.
😱 The Madness of Devil’s Pool
About halfway along the trail, we stopped for a good while to watch the goings-on at the so-called Devil’s Pool, which sits over on the Zambian side of the river, right on a stretch known as Livingstone Island, where the explorer himself is said to have first set foot on the rock before the falls were ever named. It’s a smallish natural pool that perches right on the very edge of the falls, and we do mean right on the edge, close enough that we found ourselves holding our breath just watching other people go anywhere near it. To get there at all, visitors first have to take a boat across to the island and then scramble over a stretch of slippery-looking rock, and the whole approach looks utterly precarious, the sort of thing that has us asking ourselves out loud what on earth would happen if somebody slipped at the wrong moment. Once people are actually sat in the pool itself, it apparently feels reasonably safe, as a natural rock lip just beneath the surface holds the main current back from the drop, but to get the famous photograph of yourself peering straight over the edge of Victoria Falls, people have their mates grab hold of their ankles while they crawl forward on their bellies right to the lip of the rock and look straight down into the abyss below, which strikes us as a peculiar way to spend a holiday morning. As we sat there watching, one particular character, who’d stayed behind after the rest of his group had wandered off back towards the boat, decided to clamber up onto the rocky edge of the pool entirely unaided and stand there taking selfies, fully upright, balanced above a drop of over 100 metres with nothing whatsoever to hold onto. You read time and again in the papers about people losing their lives the world over chasing the perfect selfie, sometimes from clifftops, sometimes from train tracks, sometimes from the edges of waterfalls just like this one, and we couldn’t help thinking, as we watched him pose, that this particular fellow was doing his level best to add himself to that grim and growing statistic.
🦅 Vulture Feeding at the Safari Lodge
Every single day at one o’clock sharp, the Victoria Falls Safari Lodge puts on what they rather grandly call the “Vulture Culture,” and we made sure we got ourselves along to it during our stay. The lodge sits a fair way out of Vic Falls town itself, perched up on a ridge overlooking a waterhole where elephants and other game regularly wander through, but we set off in plenty of time and managed to nab ourselves good seats before the rest of the crowd piled in behind us. There were about thirty of us altogether, gathered in an area just below the lodge’s main bar, where we were given a thorough briefing on the different species of vulture we’d be seeing that afternoon, including the white-backed vulture and the rather more imposing lappet-faced vulture, alongside other scavenging birds such as the marabou stork, a creature with a bald, blotchy face that only a mother could possibly love. Our host explained, with a fair bit of genuine passion in his voice, that vultures right across southern Africa are sliding rapidly towards extinction, with some species having seen population declines of well over 90 per cent in recent decades, largely because farmers lace animal carcasses with poison in an effort to kill off lions and hyenas that have been preying on their livestock, and the vultures end up dying in exactly the same poisoning incidents purely by accident, sometimes dozens at a single carcass. It’s a real shame, because vultures are essentially nature’s own clean-up crew, and a remarkably efficient one at that. They can strip a carcass right down to bone in a matter of hours, which in turn cuts down sharply on the flies and parasites that would otherwise breed in rotting meat and spread disease among both wild animals and the people living in the surrounding villages. After the talk, we were led down to an open area below the lodge where rows of plastic chairs had been set out for us, facing a clearing fringed by tall trees. The vultures, being no fools whatsoever, know exactly what time feeding happens, so they’d already started gathering overhead well before the appointed hour, wheeling round in lazy, patient circles and settling into the surrounding branches to wait their turn. The host had lugged two great coolers full of meat scraps and offcuts down to where we were sat, leftovers donated by local butchers, and when he finally hurled a sizeable chunk of meat out into the clearing, it set off an absolute feeding frenzy in seconds flat. Hundreds of vultures and assorted other carrion birds dropped out of the sky in one great mass, all scrapping and shoving over the scraps, with no end of squabbling, hissing and jostling going on in the melee as the bigger birds shouldered the smaller ones out of the way. After about twenty minutes the lot had been hoovered up clean and things settled back down again, with the birds drifting back up into the trees to digest in peace. Karen, meanwhile, had started feeling rather queasy by this point, likely some combination of the midday heat, not having drunk nearly enough water beforehand, and the rather pungent smell of rotting flesh hanging thick in the warm air, so we made our way back up to the bar sharpish to get some proper cold water into her before she came over all funny. It was quite the spectacle all told, equal parts grisly and genuinely fascinating, and we’d happily recommend it to anyone with half a strong stomach and a decent interest in conservation, even if Karen herself might give it a miss next time round.
Planning Your Visit to Victoria Falls
| Field | Details | Field | Details |
|---|---|---|---|
| 📍 Location | Victoria Falls National Park, Park Way, Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe (entrance opposite the Victoria Falls curio/craft market, ~10-minute walk from town centre) | ||
| 🕖 Opening Times | Daily, 6:00 AM – 6:00 PM (summer); from approx. 6:30 AM in winter | 🌐 Website | zimparks.org.zw |
| 📞 Phone | +263 13 44566 / +263 13 44571 (ZimParks Victoria Falls office) | info@zimparks.org.zw | |
| ℹ️ Notes | Gate closes at 6:00 PM; entry tickets are valid for a single visit only — re-entry requires a new payment. USD cash strongly recommended as card machines are unreliable. Rainforest trail and 16 viewpoints can take 1–2 hours to walk. |
🎟️ Entry Fees (Rainforest main gate, 2026 rates)
| Category | International Visitors | SADC Residents | Zimbabwean Citizens |
|---|---|---|---|
| Adults | US$58 | US$30 | US$8 |
| Children (6–11) | Half price | Half price | Half price |
| Under 6 | Free | Free | Free |
🧭 Getting There
The park is a short 10-minute walk from Victoria Falls town centre, directly opposite the main curio market. Taxis and tour-operator transfers are widely available from local hotels and lodges. Visitors arriving from the Zambian side can cross via the Victoria Falls Bridge on foot or by taxi, with separate Zimbabwe entry/visa requirements applying. Victoria Falls International Airport is about 18 km from town, with airport transfers easily arranged.
The Best Time to Visit Victoria Falls
❄️ Cool and Dry Season (May to August)
This is winter in Zimbabwe and the most popular time to visit. Days are sunny, crisp and largely free of rain, with daytime temperatures sitting comfortably between 20°C and 25°C. Mornings and evenings, however, can be bitterly cold, occasionally dropping close to freezing, particularly in higher areas such as Harare and the Eastern Highlands. Because vegetation thins out and water sources become scarce, animals gather predictably around rivers and waterholes, making this the prime season for safaris in Hwange, Mana Pools and Matusadona. It’s also peak tourist season, so expect higher prices and busier lodges.
What to pack: Warm layers for chilly mornings and game drives, including a fleece or jumper, a scarf, gloves and a woolly hat, alongside lighter clothing for the warmer afternoons, comfortable closed shoes, and a good pair of sunglasses.
☀️ Hot and Dry Season (September to October)
As winter fades, temperatures climb quickly and dramatically. By October, the heat can be intense, often exceeding 35°C in lower-lying regions such as Mana Pools and the Zambezi Valley, with little to no rainfall to offer relief. The dry conditions push wildlife even closer to dwindling water sources, so game viewing remains outstanding, arguably at its best, even though the heat itself can be gruelling for visitors. The landscape turns dusty and brown, but golden light and dramatic skies make for excellent photography.
What to pack: Lightweight, breathable, light-coloured clothing, a wide-brimmed hat, high-factor sunscreen, sunglasses, and a refillable water bottle to stay hydrated throughout the day.
🌧️ Wet and Green Season (November to March)
This is Zimbabwe’s summer and its rainy season, characterised by intense but typically short-lived afternoon thunderstorms following warm, often sunny mornings. The bush transforms into a lush, vivid green, newborn animals appear, and birdlife flourishes, making it a wonderful period for birdwatchers and keen photographers. Victoria Falls is at its most thunderous and spectacular during these months, fed by the peak of the rains. Game viewing becomes trickier, as animals disperse into thicker vegetation and no longer need to cluster around limited water sources, but visitor numbers and prices both drop considerably.
What to pack: A reliable rain jacket, quick-drying clothing, waterproof or quick-drying footwear, insect repellent, and a dry bag or waterproof cover to protect cameras and electronics.
🍂 Transitional Period (April)
April sits neatly between the wet and dry seasons and is often overlooked, yet it’s a genuinely lovely time to travel. The rains are tapering off, temperatures are mild and pleasant, typically between 15°C and 25°C, and the countryside is still lush and green from the preceding months. Wildlife viewing is improving as the bush begins to thin, while crowds and prices remain lower than in the high season that follows.
What to pack: Layered clothing to handle variable temperatures, a light rain jacket just in case of a lingering shower, and comfortable, sturdy walking shoes.
Overall Best Time to Visit
Taking everything together, the cool, dry months from May to October stand out as the best overall window to visit Zimbabwe, with August and September often singled out as the sweet spot. Rainfall is minimal, skies are clear, and wildlife is concentrated around reliable water sources, making game viewing exceptional, particularly in Hwange and Mana Pools National Parks. Within that window, late winter (September and October) offers the very best safari conditions, albeit with significant heat, while May to August is gentler on visitors though colder at night. That said, travellers chasing Victoria Falls in full, roaring flood, lush green scenery, or quieter, lower-cost travel may well prefer the wet season instead. There is genuinely no wrong time to visit Zimbabwe; it simply depends on whether your priority is wildlife, weather comfort, photography, or budget.
Where to Stay in Victoria Falls
1. Luxury – Mbano Manor Hotel
Mbano Manor Hotel is an intimate luxury boutique hotel in Victoria Falls. Nestled in an enclosed ancient teak forest, the hotel comprises of 18 luxury suites & one presidential Mutota Forest villa. The tranquil setting offers a uniquely perfect blend of rich cultural history and world-class hospitality at the majestic Victoria Falls.
Proudly founded, built & managed by a dynamic African woman, we are a family-owned & independent luxury boutique hotel at Victoria Falls.
Mbano is the new destination of choice for discerning travellers seeking an authentic & exclusive luxury experience at Victoria Falls.
2. Mid-Range – Amadeus Garden Guest House
During our visits to Victoria Falls, we stopped at the Amadeus Gardens Guest House, which worked perfectly for us. The staff were excellent and the rooms were comfortable. It is a kilometre or so to walk to the centre of town, and at night you should not walk the streets as you might run into an elephant or cape buffalo.
Amadeus has 12 twin en-suite guest bedrooms of which 8 can be converted to doubles. All beds have firm therapeutic mattresses.
Each room has a shower, the family room has both a shower and a bath.
All rooms have air conditioners, ceiling fans, glazing on the windows, an electronic safe, 220-volt plugs and solar-powered geysers.
3. Budget – Victoria Falls Backpackers
The accommodation is scattered across a luscious garden of which our swimming pool and fireplace form the centre piece providing a delightful setting for interacting with other travellers or simply relaxing.
Double rooms, En-suite, Dorms, Tent camping and Self Drive camping are available, only a short walk from town, (2.5 km), and taxis and airport pick-ups can be arranged. All activities booked include transport to and from the lodge or the town.
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