Walking among wild animals in Mana Pools - Zimbabwe

Monday18.03:

Mana pools, a national park at the Zambezi river, was our last destination we planned to visit in Zimbabwe. A 2 hour bumpy gravel road lead us to a wildlife campground at mighty Zambezi river. We gave a lift to one of the rangers who patrols the vast area of the park to find poachers. When they find one they kill them he told us to our shocking surprise.
At 4 pm we arrived at the camp and immediately continued for a game drive on a nasty off road track with elephant herds crossing our way.  I saw my first water buffalo and plenty of marabous resting on dead tree branches.

We got a little bit lost due to the common complete lack of direction signs. Therefore it was already dark when we arrived back at our camping spot right next to the Zambezi river. We cooked our pasta while listening to the the loud concert of the jungle orchestra (hippos grunting, cicadas chirping, lions roaring and baboons crying out for our food). Thousands of insects gave us a hard time. We barely managed to escape from them into our safe rooftop tent.

Tuesday 19.03

As the first wake up call I managed to reverse the car (now named Symba) into a huge tree which was hard not to see. Now the left plastic bumper is also bent in and needs to be replaced. Great! To my excuse I was heavily distracted by my side passenger. 

Mana pools is the only wildlife park in Africa where you can leave the car for a walk. We did not dare to do this on our own. Instead we went for a one our walk with a park ranger and his loaded Kalashnikov. He did not need to use it.

Then it was time to say goodbye to Zimbabwe we managed to cross the whole country in a little bit more than a week. It is a beautiful country with again extremely nice, open, and helpful people.

Except maybe at the border in Chirundu. It is a so called one stop border. In one building the Zimbabwean and Zambian customs officers work together (unfortunately a little bit too close). After they stamped out our Zimbabwean visa the Zambian officers said we are missing the police clearance sheet for our car. The first time we heard about this document. After four hour discussion and a so called neutral agent who basically collected the bribes to get us in we crossed the border 1 minute before it closed at 6 pm.

Exhausted we stopped at a camp ground directly at the Zambesi river