Kariba

Kariba is the largest man-made lake in Africa and offers the best of both worlds with both land and water based activites.
Lake Kariba offers wonderful houseboat safaris.

The Matusadona National Park is one of the Zambezi valley's wildlife and wilderness treasures. Remote and rugged, this wonderful park encompasses Lake Kariba's most beautiful southern shorelines. Creeks and bays, a vast flat bush-covered plateau cut by numerous riverlines, and the wild, wide, 600m high Matusadona mountain range divides the Zambezi valley from the upland farmlands behind. The Park lies about 20km across the lake from the town of Kariba, and is bounded by two spectacularly beautiful rivers. In the west, the Ume, which meets the lake in a wide estuary and in the east, the Sanyati with its magnificent, steep sided, rocky gorge.

Many of the wild animals rescued from the rising waters of the newly-formed Lake Kariba by conservationist Rupert Fothergill and his teams during the much-publicised Operation Noah in 1958 were released into the Matusadona National Park. Today, it is an Intensive Protection Zone for the endangered black rhinoceros and one of the few places in Southern Africa where visitors may be lucky enough to see this magnificent animal in the wild. This park is a treat for visitors wanting to see Africa's other big mammals including elephant, buffalo, hippo, lion, leopard, cheetah, zebra and various antelope species.

A major attraction of the lake shores of the Matusadona is the fishing. The magnificent tigerfish, endemic to the Zambezi River, is a thrilling sport fish for avid anglers. Various other species including several types of bream make good eating and can be found in abundance among the drowned forests and shallow weedbeds all along the shoreline of the National Park.