Old Mondoro Bush Camp by Brian Jackman

Guests at Old Mondoro usually begin their stay with a few days of unadulterated bush luxury at Chiawa, Grant Cumings’ flagship camp higher upstream on the banks of the Zambezi. It was Grant and his father who put the Lower Zambezi on the tourist map a couple of decades ago, cutting the first roads and chasing out the poachers. Today, Chiawa is as good a camp as you’ll find anywhere in Africa, with five-star dining under the stars and a honeymoon tent (Tent No. Nine) with a shower built into the fork of a mahogany tree.

But once you have settled in and got the measure of this spectacular park with its huge bull elephants and mile-wide river, it’s time to move on to Old Mondoro, a 40-minute, hippo-dodging, speedboat trip down the Zambezi.

For lovers of the real Africa, Old Mondoro is as good as it gets. It is named after a legendary white Zambezi lion and is a genuine, no-frills bush camp with bamboo walls, bucket showers and paraffin lanterns. There is room for no more than eight guests at a time, and the only exception to the no-frills rule is the cooking, which maintains the same high standards as Chiawa.

The habitat, too, is different to that of Chiawa. The Muchinga escarpment is farther away and the bush is more open, with golden plains and dappled glades of giant winterthorn trees that makes it ideal walking country. During your stay you should see lion, buffalo and, with luck, leopard and even wild dog. But above all it is home to large numbers of elephants, including a dozen or more big, placid bulls that wander around Old Mondoro as if they own the place. Which, in a way, they do.