Game Trail Accommodated Safari
Safari Information
- Departure; Scheduled and tailor-made departure dates
- Duration; 16 Days / 15 Nights
- Lodging; Bush Camps, Lodges and hotels
- Group Size; Minimum 2
- Note: Travel insurance is compulsory for all safaris
16-day Budget Accommodated Safari Highlights: Game Drives in Kruger, Matobo, Hwange and Okavango Delta
Embark on the Game Trail Accommodated Safari for an unforgettable African wildlife experience. This 16-day small-group Zimbabwe safari visits Zimbabwe, Botswana and South Africa's best game parks, including Kruger, Matobo, Hwange and Okavango Delta.
Travel in a customised 4x4 safari vehicle with your expert guide and enjoy morning and evening game drives searching for lions, elephants, leopards, etc.
This is a budget-friendly way to see Africa's most iconic wildlife destinations, with Victoria Falls included!
Days 1-2: Kruger National Park
- Departing Johannesburg at 06:30 am we head northeast into the world-famous Kruger National Park.
- We arrive in the remote and seldom visited the northern part of the park, driving from Satara to Pufuri.
- We enjoy morning and afternoon game drives in our safari vehicle and hope to spot lions, elephants, rhinos and other animals in this icon of wildlife conservation.
- Overnight: Chalets BLD (except breakfast on the first morning of safari).
Day 3: Great Zimbabwe Monument
- Entering Zimbabwe at the Beit Bridge border post, we travel to the town of Masvingo and the Great Zimbabwe Monuments.
- The well-preserved ruins are some of the oldest and largest stone structures in Southern Africa and were built during the 11th to 14th Centuries.
- We explore on foot and wonder at the mysteries of these ancient stone structures and the civilization that built them.
- Overnight: Hotel BLD.
Day 4-5: Matobo National Park
- Travelling via the city of Bulawayo, we move on to the Matobo National Park and our chalets on the outskirts of the park.
- This afternoon we enjoy sundowners from the granite ridge overlooking the park.
- The following morning we visit World’s View and the historical site of Cecil John Rhodes’ grave.
- Unusual rock formations are home to an array of ancient bushman paintings, which we visit while on our game drive and walk.
- This area is also home to Zimbabwe’s rhino which we hope to see on our excursion to the national park.
- Overnight: Chalets BLD.
Days 6-7: Hwange National Park
- Named after a local Nhanzwa chief, Hwange National Park is the largest Park in Zimbabwe, occupying roughly 14 650 square kilometres and is located in the country's northwest corner.
- It is famed for its large elephant population.
- Our chalets are in the game management area that borders the park, and we explore the park with our local guide on a full-day game drive in an open 4WD game viewing vehicle.
- Overnight: Chalets BLD.
Days 8-9: Victoria Falls
- We spend 2 nights in the town of Victoria Falls.
- We enjoy a spectacular walk through tropical vegetation to the very edge of the “Mosi oa Tunya” or “the smoke that thunders” - Victoria Falls.
- There are opportunities to white water raft on the mighty Zambezi River, bungi jump or take a “flight of angels” (own expense).
- Overnight: Chalets B--.
Day 10: Chobe National Park
- Entering Botswana, we head to the town of Kasane on the banks of the Chobe River.
- The river flows lazily along the northern boundary of the Chobe National Park, attracting some of Africa's largest herds of elephants.
- A highlight of any trip to the Chobe is the afternoon game viewing “sundowner” cruise, where we hope to see a large number of elephants and other wildlife as they quench their thirst at the end of the day.
- Overnight: Chalets BLD.
Day 11: Nata
- This morning there is time for an optional (own expense) game drive in the Chobe National Park.
- Heading south through the Kasane Forest Reserve, we make our way to the Nata area for our overnight stop.
- Overnight: Tented Lodge BL-.
Days 12-14: Okavango Delta
- We transfer into the delta by open 4WD game viewing vehicle.
- Our local guides will take us deep into the heart of the Okavango Delta on Mokoro (dugout canoes).
- Being gently poled through the network of channels is an experience not to be missed.
- The delta forms as rainwater from the Angolan highlands flows out over the flat Kalahari Desert sands, forming a delicate, green oasis for birds and wildlife.
- We will camp wild on remote islands in this amazingly dynamic environment and enjoy bush walks, bird watching and swimming in the clear waters.
- Camping with our local guides, we learn more about their lifestyle and culture.
- We return to Maun in the late afternoon of day 14 and have time for an optional (own expense) game flight over the Okavango, which will reveal a different aspect of the delta.
- Overnight: Tented Camping and chalets BLD.
Day 15: Khama Rhino Sanctuary
- Heading south from Maun, we drive through the wide-open spaces of the Kalahari Desert to the Khama Rhino Sanctuary.
- This is a community-based wildlife project established in 1992 to assist in saving the vanishing rhino, restore an area formerly teeming with wildlife to its previous natural state and provide economic benefits to the local Batswana community through tourism and sustainable use of natural resources.
- We hope to spot some elusive rhinos on an afternoon game drive.
- Overnight: Chalets BLD.
Day 16: Zimbabwe Game Trail Accommodated Safari Ends
- Crossing back into South Africa, we make our way to Johannesburg, where the tour ends in the late afternoon.
- Distance/time: 630km, ± 7 hours, excluding border formalities & stops for sightseeing & lunch.
Book and enquire now for a stunning budget-orientated, accommodated safari.
This Safari is Tailor-made Rates On request
The Above Rates should be used as a guideline only.
- All rates are subject to availability
- Rates may vary according to season
- Lodging may change depending on your budget
- Vehicle type may change depending on your budget
- All rates may change without notice
- Single supplement may apply
- 13 nights, chalets, guesthouses & rooms and permanent tents, 2 nights tented camp
- Entrance fees
- Use of camping equipment (except sleeping bags & pillow)
- Transport in 4WD / safari truck & minibus
- Meals as per itinerary
- Professional guide
- Okavango Delta excursion
- Local Flights
- International flights
- Visas
- Items of a personal nature
- Meals not specified
- Insurance
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Zimbabwe Travel Topics
The Perfect Zimbabwe Honeymoon
Most honeymoons are an exercise in doing very little at considerable expense, and there is a great deal to be said for that. Zimbabwe simply arranges better company for it. Elephants come down to drink below the deck while you are still on your first coffee; the guide turns out to know which lion crossed the airstrip in the night; dinner happens on a Zambezi deck while the light goes orange and then goes altogether. Nobody puts Zimbabwe at the top of the shortlist — Kenya and the Cape get there first — which is precisely why the lodges are quieter and the guiding is better than it needs to be.
Top 10 Must See Attractions In Victoria Falls
Livingstone named it after a queen who never saw it, and the Tonga had been calling it Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders, for a very long time before he turned up. Theirs is the better name. Five hundred million litres a minute go over the edge in full flood, which is enough to soak you through a hired raincoat before you are halfway along the Zimbabwe footpath, and enough to hide the falls entirely if you have come in the wrong month. There is also a rock pool at the very lip of the drop that people swim in. We will come to that.
5 Best Lodges In Victoria Falls
You can see the falls properly in ninety minutes. The rest of the week happens wherever you are sleeping, which makes the choice of lodge matter more here than almost anywhere else in Zimbabwe. Some of them are town hotels with a shuttle and a buffet. Others sit far enough upriver that the loudest thing at breakfast is one hippo disagreeing with another. The gap in price between those two experiences is usually smaller than you would expect, and the gap in the holiday is not. Here are five I would put my own money on.
10 Reasons To Visit The Zambezi River
The Zambezi begins as a spring in a patch of Zambian woodland you could step across, and ends two and a half thousand kilometres later in the Indian Ocean, having spent much of the journey acting as the border of half of southern Africa. Six countries. One waterfall that needs no introduction, a dam that made an inland sea, and a stretch below that dam at Mana Pools where you are permitted to walk. It is also, at six in the evening with the light going, the single best place in this part of the continent to be sitting still.
Luxury Tented Safari Camps in Zimbabwe
"Tent" is a word working extremely hard in this part of the brochure. It covers canvas on a hardwood deck with a four-poster and plumbing that would pass in Kensington, and it also covers a bucket shower and a zip. What the two share is the actual reason to choose either: canvas does not keep sound out. You hear the elephants arrive at the Hwange waterhole at two in the morning. You hear the hippos settling their differences on the Zambezi. You lie there listening rather than sleeping, which is rather the point of the whole arrangement.
10 Reasons To Visit The Hwange National Park
Hwange should not really work. Most of it sits on Kalahari sand with no permanent river anywhere near it, and the reason elephants stand shoulder to shoulder at Nyamandhlovu Pan in October is that somebody is running a diesel pump. That decision was taken in the 1920s by a warden named Ted Davison, and it has been kept up, more or less, ever since. Fourteen thousand square kilometres of managed thirst. The Big Five are all present on paper, though I would not build a holiday around seeing the rhino. The elephants are an entirely different proposition.
Zimbabwe Travel Bucket List
For most of the last century the Rhodesian authorities preferred to believe that Zimbabweans had not built Great Zimbabwe. Phoenicians were proposed. So were the Queen of Sheba's architects. The stonework is Shona, laid without mortar, eleven metres high in places, and it is the only ruin I can think of that gave its name to the country containing it. That is the sort of country this is. The obvious things — the falls, the Hwange elephants, the rapids below the gorge — are worth every hour of the flight, and underneath them sits a second Zimbabwe that most itineraries never touch.
10 Reasons to Visit Victoria Falls for an Unforgettable Experience
The bridge was cast in Darlington, shipped out in pieces and bolted together over the gorge in 1905, and people now jump off it on an elastic rope. Victoria Falls has been like this ever since: a serious piece of natural history with an adrenaline economy bolted to the side of it. You can run the grade five rapids in the Batoka Gorge in the morning and be on a boat with a gin and tonic by six, watching the same water arrive flat and innocent above the lip. Both are honest ways to spend a day here. So is doing neither.