62. Zimbabwe Matopos National Park

This post is of a single day. We were getting to the end of our trip, 10 months in, and we had seen wildlife only in a national park in Nigeria, and “speeding” by in trains in Tanzania and Zimbabwe. We decided to splurge and pay for a “safari” into a reserve 35 km south of Bulawayo. I can now go to the internet to know that it is the oldest national park in Zimbabwe, and now referred to as Matobo National Park.  At the time is still had Rhodes´ name.

I remind readers that we had a camera with slide film, and only a normal fixed lens.  We had been taking pictures for 10 months without knowing if any were going to turn out.  In this day and age of digital super cameras, instant quality control, and 16 giga tiny memory cards it is almost impossible to imagine. People are now also accustomed to a generation of top quality wildlife shosw, which in turn require many days of filming and editing. We greatly enjoyed the “bushmen” paintings and I cannot imagine why we do not even have a bad picture of them.  I have therefore cheated and included some images from the internet.

Bulawayo--Rhodes Matopos National Park, Zimbabwe Wednesday, 29 June,1983

(HELENA) We have been in such a good mood here in Zimbabwe that we up and decided to sign up for a Safari tour (Carry me back!) that eventually cost $58 for the two of us. We found in the info I was given, a tour of Rhodes Matopos National Park (one day) which includes game-viewing (reputedly good) a visit to a cave with Bushman paintings and, not least, a visit to Rhodes’s grave at “View of the World”, which in spite of all the connotations is supposed to be one of the most beautiful places in Zimbabwe. A BIT steep, but an attractive combination. Ah yes, it includes a “picnic lunch”.

We had been told that our driver would pick us up between 8:45 and 9:00, so since we are without a timepiece, we kept checking with the gatekeeper. Partly to be funny and mostly because it was what we had to wear, both of us set off decked out in khaki, Dan in shorts and shirt, and I in slacks and shirt. We were actually at the gate by the earlier time, so we had to wait 15 minutes for our --yes, folks-- our honest-to-goodness ZEBRA VAN.

 

Dan, Zebra safari vehicle and khaki

You can be sure that we did not feel terribly comfortable riding along with a guide-chauffeur, but we decided to try hard to enjoy the outing. Two is the minimum for a tour, and since business is very slow, we were the only ones.  We drove south for some 45 minutes. Our first stop was at a prep school housed in the old home place of Most Honorable Cecil John Rhodes. As Dan said, quite a pad for a bachelor. We did not go inside, but it was a huge white mansion, complete with a fair sized chapel. On a nearby hill was a thatch roofed open-sided structure called his summer house where he would often take his meals in the summertime. It commanded quite a view of his farm, now used as an experiment station. His body spent a night there on its way from Cape Town, where he died, to Matopos, his burial place.

The view from Rhodes summer home.

 Our guide, Kumalo (which happens to be the name of a tribe from around here) then gave us a choice of seeing first the game reserve or first the grave and Bushman paintings. It can be pretty tiring to be on the look-out constantly for some glimpse of game, so we decided to start with that. It was about 15 minutes farther to the entrance where Kumalo paid a small fee to enter. While we waited for the formalities, we saw two rangers ride up on very nice horses, one young white woman and one young black man. To me that is at least superficially encouraging.

None of us had a watch; we could tell that Kumalo was much taken aback to be guiding two tourists with no watch. We spent more or less 2 1/2 hours in the game park section. Close to the start we saw several sable, a large member of the antelope family, in the distance. After that good start, we proceeded to see NOTHING moving for the next 45 minutes.  Pretty disappointing, but at least we could observe interesting balancing rock formations.

We began to feel better when we stopped beside one of the lakes and saw first one, then a small and a large, and finally another large hippo, waddle out from amidst tall grass and submerge themselves in the lake. The show they put on for us was across the lake, but it was neat to see the first hippo dive with a big splash, come up for a loud snort, and submerge again. We spent a while there just watching, hoping that they would come over to our side. One cannot get down from the car, and we did not have binoculars, so we had to content ourselves with observing at long distance. How we wished for a telephoto lens! Dan took a couple of pictures anyway. After all, we are on safari.

 

Hippos playing across the lake

Helena on Safari, Mtopola Dam reservoir.

After a time things improved slightly. We spotted a herd of impalas with one male and about 15 females. I love to watch their ears perk out while they watch us. We saw another male impala by himself. He was closer to us but in among the trees. Next was a group of warthogs strutting about.  Kumalo told us that the next animals we saw were kudus.

 

A distant Kudu

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Our time was about up (we guessed) and it seemed that we were about to head out of the park when Kumalo decided to try getting a little closer to some zebras and wildebeest that we could see clear across the meadow. I, cynic that I am, suspect that he left the best for last on purpose so that we would go away feeling a “glow of satisfaction”. He was right; we proceeded to drive quite close to some 7 giraffes and 25 zebras. They are amazing animals!

Perhaps the Africa that everybody imagines, but took us 10 months to find.

We got out of the car and walked up some stairs to the wildlife look-out point. It overlooked a big herd of zebras together with a herd of wildebeest. Infinitely better than going to a zoo, even if you never get very close.

Wildebeests and zebras.

So, with a “glow of satisfaction”, we left the game reserve and headed for the other side of the park. A lot of the game reserve is very rocky and hilly. There are a lot of scrubby trees dotting the hillsides and the grassy parts. All of it is very dry. Kumalo told us that matapos signifies “rock” or “rocky”.

It was almost l300, but before stopping for lunch, we got down to see some of the cave paintings. We had to climb a steep rock to get there, but was it ever worth the effort! The red paintings we saw were as realistic as could be. There were zebras and giraffes that were excellent likenesses. All we could find out from the caretaker was that they are thousands of years old.

Cave art in what is today Matobo National Park, images taken from the internet.

 

Lunch was eaten beside another man made lake in the presence of a most un-self-conscious baboon. Dan and I were relieved when Kumalo took three trays out of a chest in the back of the van. We may be stooping to package tourism, but I do not think we could take eating separately. It was a rather strange but delicious feast they had prepared for us. We had only half a bun with butter, but to go along with that we had four kinds of protein (chicken, ham, cheese, and egg) and six fruits (apple, orange, banana, fruit salad, tomato, lettuce). Whew! I think he thought it was funny the way we saved our oranges and apples. Apples here cost $.30 apiece.

Our last stop was at Rhodes’ grave. It was quite a climb up to the top of a huge rock. He is buried in the rock at the very top. The place is surrounded by several huge balancing rocks and commands a beautiful view of the area in all directions. Hence the name, View of the World. They made quite a production of bringing his body there, and several places we have seen pictures of the crowds that saw him off. He is not alone up there as he shares the rock (lower down, of course) with two other men and with a huge monument to the memory of the white men who were killed at a battle at Shangani River. It was strange, embarrassing, and interesting to be visiting these “white” monuments in the presence of a black Zimbabwean guide.

Kumalo dropped us at the post office, a beautiful old building built in an unusual style. The very bottom is granite, followed by several layers of red sandstone, topped by white plaster walls. We were pretty tired, so we walked back to the caravan park, wrote till dark, and turned in for another very chilly night. We have taken to covering our sleeping bags with our sheets to get a little extra warmth.