The Robson Travel Blog

After a five-hour drive, we made it to Monze and our accommodation for the night, the Golden Pillow Lodge. We had stayed here in 2019, and it was clean and very reasonably priced. There was a roadhouse next door with cold beer, so I was happy.

What we weren’t happy about, though, was that when we showed up to check in, they didn’t have our reservation. Rather than wasting time trying to sort things out, we paid for two rooms (fortunately, they had two rooms) and unloaded our luggage.

The restaurant at the lodge was definitely not the type one would take a date to. The dinner menu was fish, chicken and something else, so we made our way to the local Hungry Lion to pick up some takeout chicken.

Back at the ranch, we sat around a covered picnic table and ate an early dinner. The chicken from Hungry Lion is actually quite good, and a dinner for four—with 12 very meaty pieces, coleslaw and fries—cost about $17.00 CAD.

A little later on, I decided to pop out to the roadhouse for a couple of cold ones and met and chatted with the head of security at the establishment. His name was Wezly, and he was a Rasta with dreads tucked under his tam/Rasta cap. He asked if I would like to see them, and of course I did, but they weren’t what I expected.

The roadhouse was slowly getting busier. On one side, there were cloth bags containing pork lining the side of a BBQ, and on the other side, another BBQ for cooking additional goodies.

It was Friday night, and the loud music didn’t stop until 4:00 a.m., but fortunately, our rooms were far enough away that the music wasn’t too much of a bother.

Breakfast in the restaurant the next morning was barely palatable, so we choked down a few bites and departed for our final stop back in Kasane, Botswana.

We departed Chitake Springs on August 1st, after a total of six amazing nights camping in the wilds of Mana Pools National Park, and made our way to Warthogs Camp near the shores of Lake Kariba in the town of Kariba, Zimbabwe.

I say near the shore of the lake because the water level is at record lows. Where once you could stand on a small wooden platform at the edge of the property and see fish swimming is now a dried plain that extends about 500 metres until the water’s edge.

Waterbuck, zebra and the occasional warthog grazed on the newfound plain.

Warthogs is a funky, basic place with good food, cold beer and very nice safari-style canvas tents, where we spent the next two nights with hot showers and a semblance of civilization. And we usually had internet!

I won’t get into the difficulty we had finding the place. We didn’t have a Zimbabwean SIM card, so no Google Maps, but we made it after about three hours of hilly, scenic driving on a good road to reach our destination.

Our plan was to go fishing the next day for the elusive tiger fish, referred to as the piranha of the Zambezi.

Lake Kariba is the largest man-made lake by volume in the world and was formed by the damming of the Zambezi River and the filling of the Zambezi Gorge.

It was the wrong time of year to catch the tigers, but we hired a boat anyway and headed out onto the lake to catch the not-so-elusive bream that are plentiful.

We continued to the shores of Antelope Island, where we tied up to the shore and set our hooked worms into fairly shallow waters.

It didn’t take long, and we started reelin’ in the bream. (Any Steely Dan fans!?)

It was great fun and after a couple of hours we made our way back to camp and kicked back for a little relaxation.

Kariba is located in the Charara Safari Area, so wild animals roam freely. When the lake was at normal levels, many animals would wander into camp, but with the lake so low, they had no reason to stop by for a visit. You could always hear the grunts and antics of the hippos in the distance.

The two nights passed quickly, and we departed Kariba on August 3rd, crossed the Kariba border with little hassle, and made our way into Zambia for a five-hour drive to Monze and a one-night pit stop on our way back to Kasane, Botswana.

Well that wasn’t so bad after all.

The last time we crossed into Zimbabwe at Chirundu, in 2019, it took us more than two hours of a bureaucratic nightmare to get through. The biggest hassle was filling out the paperwork, several times, for the vehicle TIP (temporary import permit).

This time around, it was possible to actually fill in all of the vehicle details online on the Zimbabwean eTIP site. I did this in advance and received a confirmation number, and this seemed to speed up the process.

Along with a “helper,” who cost 20 USD and whom we swore we wouldn’t use to help us this time, it took us less than 1 1/2 hours to clear customs and be on our way. We were four very happy campers.

It took about two hours to reach the reception office at Nyamepi, where we checked in and then proceeded to get two days’ worth of firewood.

This is not your typical split-log type of wood. This is from the mopane tree—long and wrangled, sharp at the ends, and extremely dense and heavy. It makes great, long-lasting fires, but we had no idea how we were going to pack all this wood in the truck, which was essentially impossible.

I wish we had taken a photo. It’s the last thing you are thinking about when you’re hot, sweaty and anxious to get going.

Anyway, we had a small roof rack with a ratchet strap, so we slowly and strategically placed the heavy, sharp logs across the rack, most pointing front to back so the strap would hold them in place. Then we headed off for an 8 km bumpy drive to our camp, fingers crossed that the logs and assorted very heavy wooden firewood wouldn’t come crashing down on our windshield. They didn’t.

Mucheni #3 Exclusive Camp

What an amazing location! And a huge area all to ourselves with no other campers within at least 1 km.

There is no toilet, other than a hole dug in the ground with a half-metal barrel on top, with a broken toilet seat surrounded by a corrugated pony wall. To use it, one had to brush off numerous insect species and hold one’s breath. There was no water, other than the river and our reserve tank on the truck for washing, and all of our cooking was done over an open flame/embers.

Our site was situated along the banks of the Zambezi River. In front of us was the Zambezi Escarpment in Zambia.

We were located at the edge of the riverbank and, to our left, an open, expansive floodplain, which attracted a large variety of animals that came to graze. These included large herds of elephants that would walk down to the edge of the banks and the beginning of the plain, which was no more than 40 feet away from us.

We had several memorable moments when elephants would wander to within a few metres of us as we sat at our table having lunch or, later on, relaxing. We stayed calm. An absolutely incredible experience!

There was little to no moon so the stars were phenomenal.

We cooked over an open fire every night and sat in awe at the world around us.

On our last night we watched two lionesses walk past our camp.

This was a motivating factor to decide to hit the sheets early.

After a short while lying in our tent and the girls all cozy in the bush camper, all hell broke loose.

Elephants started trumpeting loudly, hyenas screamed to high heaven, and loud lion growls permeated our surroundings. Then all went quiet. Something wasn’t lucky and became the evening meal for the lions.

As Joyce and I lay in our sleeping bags, we noticed a strong stench as we heard some animal(s) wander closely past our tent.

We figured the hyenas were passing by us, smelly from the rotten meat they had probably eaten earlier, before one of their comrades became lion food that evening. The smell can also be associated with lions. Either way, we lay in our sleeping bags, listening to and smelling the wildlife at 2:00 a.m. and enjoying every minute of it.

It is difficult to put into words, so hopefully the pictures below will give you some idea of what we experienced at Mucheni 3.