Victoria Falls Lodges

The name is a street number, which after a week of places called things like Wild Spirit Retreat comes as an odd relief. Eight suites, owners on site who take the bookings themselves, and that particular quality of service you only get when the person bringing the coffee also owns the coffee machine. Minutes from both the falls and the town. Small places like this live or die entirely on their owners, and these are the reason to book.

The Batonga were moved off the Zambezi in the fifties when Kariba filled, and their name is now attached, as these things tend to go, to a guesthouse in Victoria Falls. It is a well-run one. Gardens with the old trees left standing, rooms ranging from modest to fairly grand, and a kitchen that takes itself rather more seriously than a guesthouse strictly needs to. You are in town and not on the river, which is the trade every visitor here makes one way or the other. At this end of the market it is usually the right one.

Bayete is the salute you give a king, which is a considerable thing to be greeted with before you have put your bag down. The lodge is a good deal more relaxed than its name: a walled garden in the suburbs, thatch, a pool, and a bar sized for the number of people actually staying. It is a guesthouse and not a safari lodge, and the honest way to use it is as a base — sleep here, and spend the difference on the gorge, the river and the flight.

There are two island camps on this stretch of the Zambezi and they are not interchangeable. Chundu is the more polished of them: tents under big riverine trees on a private island inside Zambezi National Park, reached by the boat transfer that all island camps depend on for their atmosphere. You fish, you drift, you watch the far bank for an hour without noticing. Game drives happen over on the mainland and are decent rather than remarkable. The river is the reason to come, and the river is superb.

The whole property is arranged around a drop. Gorges sits on the lip of the Batoka Gorge with two hundred metres of air below the dining room and the Zambezi reduced to a green thread at the bottom of it, and there is a pair of Verreaux's eagles nesting on the opposite cliff that can be watched from breakfast without leaving your chair. Twenty-odd kilometres downstream of the falls, so you drive in for the day and come home to silence. For anyone who wants the falls without the town, it is the obvious answer.

Ilala is the closest hotel to the falls — close enough that on a still night in April you can hear them from the lawn, and close enough that the warthogs mowing that lawn have walked in from the national park themselves. Everything is on foot from here: the falls, the bridge, the curio market you will be talked into. Their boat, the Ra-Ikane, is named for the guide who took Livingstone down to the falls in the first place and carries a fraction of the passengers of the big double-deckers. Worth the difference.

A number of lodges around Victoria Falls have worked out that if you dig a waterhole and keep it filled, the bush comes to you and the view can be charged for. It is not cheating. Insika does it well: rooms looking over gardens and water, the usual town cast of warthog, bushbuck and baboon, and a rate that leaves money for the things you actually flew here to do. You will eat well, and you will certainly not go to bed hungry.

Masuwe has been on this hillside in one form or another for a long time, looking down the valley at the waterhole that decides what your evening is going to look like. The current version is tented, small and a good deal smarter than what came before it. The game is not Hwange and nobody should pretend otherwise. But you are fifteen minutes from the falls and completely out of sight of them, with a deck, a valley and whatever comes down to drink — and for a lot of travellers that is the better half of Victoria Falls.

Matetsi was a hunting concession for decades before anyone put a swimming pool on it, and the land has taken the change well. Fifty-odd thousand hectares with fifteen kilometres of private Zambezi frontage, which means the sunset cruise that everybody else shares with twenty other boats is, here, simply yours. Two small camps and a separate house. It is a long drive from the falls, which puts some people off, and those people are the reason it stays quiet.

Most hotels in this town were built by clearing the plot first. Mbano went the other way and put the buildings in among the trees, which is why you walk to your suite through genuine woodland in the middle of the Victoria Falls suburbs and why there are vervets in the branches above breakfast. The suites are large, dark-wooded and properly quiet. It is a hotel rather than a safari lodge and claims nothing else — the wildlife amounts to squirrels and hornbills, and it is still the most restful bed in town.

Great Plains built this one, which for anyone who follows the industry is half the review already. Four tents on the Zambezi inside Zambezi National Park, run on solar, deliberately small, with the Jouberts' particular obsession about treading lightly worked into everything down to the plumbing. The river does the rest. It is not the place for a town buzz and a choice of restaurants. It is the place for the arithmetic of four tents, a boat that is effectively yours, and nobody to talk to at dinner but the people you came with.

Victoria Falls runs on a quiet division of labour. The river lodges take your evenings and a great deal of your money; the town guesthouses take care of everything else. Nkosi is a good example of what that second category can be — rooms properly finished rather than merely clean, a garden worth sitting in, and staff who live in the town and will answer a question about it honestly. A short run to the falls. For a first trip with a long activity list, this is usually the sensible half of the budget.

Before the bridge, everyone crossed here by barge, and a settlement grew up on the bank called the Old Drift. It had a store, a hotel and a graveyard that filled faster than either, malaria doing most of the work, until in 1905 the survivors moved to higher ground and called it Livingstone. The lodge takes the name and sits on the same stretch of river, inside Zambezi National Park, with tented suites facing the water and baths out under the open sky. The mosquitoes are now somebody else's problem.

Phezulu means up high, which for a lodge in a town built on flat Kalahari sand is more aspiration than description. No matter. What it actually is: a comfortable, well-kept guesthouse in the suburbs with more space than the rate suggests and a garden the warthogs have decided belongs to them. You are minutes from the falls and from every operator you have booked. The expensive part of Victoria Falls is the activities, not the bed, and there is a strong case for budgeting accordingly.

The original pioneers camped upstream at the Old Drift, drank out of the river, caught malaria and in a good many cases died of it. The hotel now carrying the name has air conditioning and a wine list, which seems like the right direction of travel. It is one of the newer upmarket places in town: stylish rooms, more than one place to eat, a short hop to the falls. No river frontage and nothing in the garden but birds — though nobody books a town hotel for the game, and as town hotels go this is a good one.

A lodge that calls itself a Lookout has set itself a test, and it is a fair test to apply to every bed in this town: what exactly can you see from it? Shongwe is a guesthouse rather than a safari camp — small, unfussy, run by people who are actually on the property, which around here counts for more than the thread count. The falls are a short drive. Everything you have booked is a shorter one. What you save on the room is what pays for the gorge swing.

Stanley found Livingstone at Ujiji on Lake Tanganyika, the better part of two thousand kilometres from here, so the name is best taken as a mood rather than a claim. What the hotel does have is its own game reserve, which almost nothing else in Victoria Falls can say, and rhino on it. A small number of suites, a great deal of silver on the dinner table, and a drive home from the falls that turns into a game drive for the final ten minutes. It is more country house than safari camp and does not pretend otherwise.

From the deck you can see the spray standing over the gorge, and you can hear absolutely nothing of it. That gap between the view and the silence is what The Elephant Camp is selling. It sits on private ground between the town and the gorge, tents strung along the edge with plunge pools on each one, close enough for the rafting take-out and far enough that nothing reaches you after dark except the bush. The plunge pool is not a gimmick here. In October you will use it hourly.

Victoria Falls, the Victoria Falls Hotel, the Victorian Manor — this town has never had to think hard about naming things. This one is a small boutique house in the suburbs rather than a lodge: gardens, a handful of rooms, and someone who notices when you come back in. You will not see game from the bed. What you get instead is a few minutes from the falls, a quiet garden to return to, and enough saved on the room rate to pay for the helicopter flight you were going to talk yourself out of.

Named, with some honesty, after a mud hole. The Wallow looks down on the Masuwe River outside town and the entire design points at the water below it, because by October that is where everything has to come. Tented suites, a deck, and a view that changes according to what has turned up to drink. It is quieter than the Zambezi-front lodges and the trade is a simple one: no big river, but nothing between you and the bush either.

Everything about an island lodge comes down to a single moment: the boat leaves. Tsowa has its own island in the Zambezi inside Zambezi National Park, and once you have been put ashore with your bag the options narrow agreeably to the river, the tent, the deck and whatever walks along the far bank. There is no road in and no particular reason to want one. Dinner happens when somebody tells you it is happening. I would not send a restless person here. I would send almost everyone else.

It opened in 1904, a year before there was a bridge to arrive over, which tells you most of what you need to know about the confidence of the period. It has been the Grand Old Lady of the Falls ever since and wears the title with less irony than you might expect. Tea on Stanley's Terrace, the gorge and the bridge framed at the end of the lawn, corridors of photographs of people in entirely unsuitable hats. The rooms are grand rather than contemporary, and if what you want is a rain shower and a sensor minibar you should stay elsewhere. Almost nobody does.

The Zambezi above the falls gives nothing away. It is wide, slow and entirely unbothered, and only the column of spray downstream tells you what it is about to do. River Lodge sits on that stretch, inside Zambezi National Park, which means the elephants that come past the tents in the afternoon are not visiting from anywhere — they live there. Canvas, a deck, a river behaving like a lake. All the drama is a few kilometres away and you can go and look at it whenever you like.

The brochures will tell you this one is a stone's throw from the falls. It isn't, and that is the whole argument for it. The lodge sits on a ridge a few kilometres out of town with Zambezi National Park in front of it and nothing in between, so the waterhole below the deck does the work a shuttle bus would otherwise have to do. Elephant through the dry months, buffalo, and at one o'clock the vultures arrive to be fed, which is either the best thing on the property or slightly too much, depending on your feelings about vultures. The sunsets are aimed straight at you.