The canoe safari on the Zambezi — wild Zimbabwe at its most elemental, where elephants swim the river and hippos surface beneath the paddle
Mana Pools National Park (2,196 sq km, in the northern Zimbabwean lowveld on the south bank of the Zambezi River, opposite Zambia's Lower Zambezi National Park — together forming one of the largest and most intact Zambezi floodplain ecosystems in Africa) is the only major African national park where visitors may walk and canoe unguided among dangerous animals (the 'walk-on-your-own-risk' policy that Zimbabwe National Parks maintains for Mana Pools is unique on the continent — elsewhere, unguided walking among lion, elephant, and hippo is prohibited). The park's name comes from the Shona word…
The Zambezi Valley's human history predates any recorded culture: the valley was a migration corridor for Homo sapiens out of East Africa, and the Middle Stone Age archaeological sites (identified throughout the Zambezi lowveld, including at the Zambezi Escarpment above Mana) date human presence to at least 100,000 years ago. The Tonga people (the river people of the Zambezi — Batonga, the 'valley people', speaking a Bantu language closely related to the Lozi of Zambia) inhabited the Zambezi Valley continuously until the 1950s, when the construction of Kariba dam (1959-1960) flooded their ent…