July 12-15: Chizarira National Park

After a brief safari respite on the shores of Lake Kariba, we headed to the remote and rarely visited Chizarira National Park, located in northern Zimbabwe south of Lake Kariba. Chizarira NP (770 sq. mi.), established in 1975, is the 3^rd largest national park in Zimbabwe and is situated on the Zambezi escarpment, which falls steeply some 2,000 feet to the Zambezi River valley floor and offers magnificent views towards Lake Kariba, 25 miles to the north. Rivers such as the Mucheni and Lwizikululu have cut almost sheer gorges in the escarpment, making for some spectacular scenery, as you will see if you watch the video below.

The landscape in this Park is dramatically different from that of Hwange. The landscape here is craggy near the escarpment, intensely incised by spectacular gorges and awesome gulches, with lush vegetation found in the impenetrable valleys because of natural springs. Grading south away from the escarpment are hills and valleys puncuated with drainages constituting the headwaters of the rivers that cut through the escarpment. Here are some photos showing the varied landscape:

As you may have noticed in the photos above, owing to the Park’s history, the landscape is rather heavily forested today, albeit with mostly young trees. Specifically, it appears that prior to independence in 1980 much of the Park was burned regularly with high severity fires (perhaps for many hundreds of years by the natives), and this was especially true during the war of independence between 1965-1980. Consequently, while miambo woodland dominated land cover near the escarpment, it quickly gave way to a mosaic of mopane woodland and open grassland savannah. Indeed, much of the Park was open grassland savannah. After independence there was almost no management of the Park and thus very little prescribed burning took place. Consequently, much of what was open grassland regenerated to dense woodland, which dominates the landscape today. Recently, the Park resumed burning with an aggressive acreage target every year, but they are burning with too low an intensity so that at best only a couple percent of the small woody stems are getting killed. Unless they start burning at much higher severity they will never recover the open grassland savannah they presumably want. Of course, one must ask whether they should seek to create an environment – open grassland savannah – that is not what nature wants to create. Nature wants this to be a rather dense woodland I think. Ah, the challenges of managing a landscape with such a complex ecological and anthropogenic history in the current socio-political context. I’m glad I am sort of retired! Here are some photos of the post-burn landscape:

Chizarira NP is arguably Zimbabwe’s most remote wilderness area. Unfortunately, the remoteness and low visitation of this Park, including the lack of lodges and safari operators, has meant increased risk from poachers in recent years and many wildlife populations have seriously suffered as a consequence. Accordingly, we saw very little wildlife on the few accessible drives in the Park. A partnership betweent the Park and an NGO called National Parks Rescue has mostly put a stop on the poaching, so they say, but it has only been 5 years since the anti-poaching effort began so the wildlife populations have not yet recovered, so most of the big game species are sparse and hard to find.

There are very few roads in the Park and most of them have apparently not been maintained since they were built, and thus they are essentially no longer drivable. Consequently, we had to content ourselves with driving the few accessible roads, which occupied us for the first couple of days. One of the so-called accessible roads even challenged the Green Dragon a little – but only a little! I actually had to put the troopie in 4×4 low for the first time to cross a gulch. Another so-called drivable road along the escarpment to a spectacular veiwpoint was just barely drivable, with numerous bolders strewn across the “track” and downed logs, some of which we had to remove to pass, as depicted in these photos:

Nevertheless, the remoteness and low visitation are the very things that attracted us to this Park. In fact, on our first day and night in the Park, we were the only visitors! Yes, that right, we had 770 sq. miles of Park entirely to ourselves for a day, except for the Park staff of course (of which there were quite a few for some unknown reason given the lack of facilities and tourism). On day two another self-drive party arrived, so it started to get crowded. Needless-to-say, on our drives through the Park we saw nobody, except for a 3-person team of researchers studying lion and elephant in the Park. Of course, most visitors with any sanity would not have tried to drive a couple of the roads we drove, so perhaps it is no surprise that we didn’t run into the one or two other visitors to the Park.

Our campsite was called Mucheni View and was situated right on the edge of the escarpment at the mouth of the Mucheni River gorge. The video below will do the talking I hope, but just let me say that Nancy said that this was in her top 3 favorite campsites of all time – that’s saying something! Unbelievable view, no bugs, perfect temperatures day and night, nice facilities (i.e., ablutions, gazebo, brai, water) – what more can you ask for?

One of the greatest things about our campsite in Chizarira was the night sky. We are talking seriously dark sky as there is literally no light pollution for hundreds of miles and the arid climate this time of year makes for superb night sky viewing. The Milky Way never was more visible and spectacular in its display. Here is a nice photo Nancy captured of just after sunset with our campfire in the foreground and the escarpment in the background:

Here is a short composite video of our campsite and the escarpment:

Chizarira Mucheni View Video (9 minutes)

OK, we are on to an unknown destination, as we have 3 days and nights to kill before going on to Mana Pools National Park, where we have reservations. Into the unknown we go! We’ll see you on the other side, hopefully!

Photo Gallery: