Best hotels in Gonarezhou

Chilo Gorge Safari Lodge sits just outside Zimbabwe's beautiful, though tenuously surviving, Gonarezhou National Park. Stashed in the dense forest atop a sheer gorge to the park's north-eastern border, the lodge overlooks the Save River and the valley below. This rambling, thatched estate has enjoyed a dramatic renewal in the last few years, undergoing significant cosmetic changes. Quite frankly, it's a gorgeous, romantic location and an ideal base from which to explore this region of Zimbabwe. The lodge has played an important role in the preservation of the national park, which owes its existence, in large part, to Chilo's founder, Clive Stockil. Decades ago, Stockil partnered with the local Shangaan communities and spearheaded community-linked conservation.

Gonarezhou National Park is part of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP), a massive Pan-African Park that includes South Africa’s famed Kruger National Park and Mozambique’s Gaza. It lies in the southeastern corner of Zimbabwe bordering Mozambique. Around 5000 Square km, it is possibly the wildest and least visited park perhaps the most untamed safari escape in Zimbabwe. Gonarezhou’s dramatic landscape features magnificent red sandstone cliffs – the Chilojo Cliffs – that overlook the Runde River valley. A spectacular backdrop to the bushveld with its broad, sandy riverbeds and baobab trees, this stunning scenery lends the Park a remote and rugged allure. Relatively inaccessible with only a few roads this is not a place for the faint of heart for the best way to see it is on foot along the way of many ancient elephant tracks. Fortunately few operators have risked setting up here as yet and the best way to visit this ‘forgotten corner’ of Africa is on a mobile safari, free to roam to far-flung corners and enjoy untouched parts of the Park.