Before You Arrive

We would rather you arranged it before you fly than left it to the airport. Zimbabwe issues visas through its own portal at evisa.gov.zw, processing takes about seven working days, so apply two to three weeks ahead. What you pay and which category you fall into depend on your nationality, so check the portal rather than a figure on a hotel website, including this one. You will need a passport valid for at least six months beyond your travel dates, a passport photograph, and proof of your booking, which we send to every confirmed guest. Print two copies of the visa and carry one with your passport.

It depends entirely on where you change planes. South Africa is not a yellow fever risk country, so the usual routing through Johannesburg or Cape Town does not raise it. Ethiopia and Kenya are, so if you come through Addis Ababa or Nairobi, or you have stayed in either country before flying on to us, expect to be asked for the certificate at immigration. The part that catches people out is that the certificate does not take effect until ten days after the vaccination. It cannot be sorted at the airport, or in the week before you fly. If your route touches a risk country, deal with it a month ahead. Once done it lasts for life.

Then the documents matter, and they matter most if you are thinking of a day trip to Chobe. Botswana requires an unabridged birth certificate naming both parents for any traveller under eighteen, and requires it even when both parents are present. Travelling with one parent, you also need a sworn affidavit from the absent parent. Travelling with neither, you need one from each. Abridged certificates are refused and families are turned back at the border every week. An unabridged certificate takes weeks to obtain in most countries and an affidavit cannot be produced on the road, so this is the one to start on today rather than next month.

Helicopter flights, sunset cruises, the Devil’s Pool swim on the Zambian side and the elephant encounter fill up, and in peak season they fill up early. Our front desk will build you an itinerary free of charge with no obligation to book anything, and you can book and pay online before you travel. Everything else can wait until you are here, and is often better arranged the day before, because we can read the river and the weather and you cannot do that from home. What reception cannot do is conjure a seat that has already gone.

That depends on how much you intend to do independently, so we cannot give you a figure without guessing. What we can tell you is what cash actually gets spent on here: taxis, tips, craft sellers, park entry if you are paying at the gate, and anything bought in town. Activities booked through us go onto your room account and are settled at the end, so they do not need cash. If you are unsure, ask us when you book and we will talk it through against what you have planned.

Entirely at your discretion and never expected. If you would like to, you can add it to your bill at check-out or use the staff tips box at reception. Whatever is left is pooled and shared equally among every member of staff, across every department, so a single gesture reaches the people you never met as well as the ones you did. United States dollar notes rather than coins, because coins cannot be divided or banked. Guides and drivers outside the lodge are separate and are usually tipped directly.

Victoria Falls sits at about 915 metres and is inside the malaria zone. United Kingdom travel health guidance puts the higher risk window at November to June, which is wider than the rainy season and wider than most websites say, and recommends prophylaxis for that period, with bite avoidance alone generally considered enough from July to October. Mosquitoes bite from dusk to dawn and the first ninety minutes after sunset are the worst of it. Please take your own doctor’s advice rather than ours, and take it well before you travel rather than the week before.

Send us your flight number and we will meet you. The airport is about twenty kilometres out and reception quotes twenty-five minutes for the drive, thirty if there are elephants on the road, which there sometimes are. The transfer is US$35 for up to four people and US$40 for five to seven, and here is the part that belongs on this page rather than any other: taxi fares are paid directly to the driver, in cash. That is the first thing you will spend money on in Zimbabwe, within half an hour of landing, and it is why the paragraph about small notes sits near the top. Local runs around town are between US$7 and US$12 on the same basis. If you are arriving after reception closes at ten at night, tell us in advance and the night guard will be expecting you.

More than most people ask for. An itinerary built around the days you have and the season you are coming in, at no charge and with no obligation. Activity bookings and payment. Airport and cross-border transfers. Restaurant tables in town. A cake, flowers or sparkling wine for an anniversary or a birthday, with a day’s notice. Dietary requirements passed to the kitchen, which matters here because dinner is a set three course menu planned around what the chef bought that morning.

One page, and it is the seasons page. The Zambezi is eight times bigger in April than in October, over the same rock, in the same year, and that single fact decides what your trip can be: whether you raft, whether you swim at the lip, whether you see the Falls or the weather they make. If you have not booked flights yet, read it first. If you have, read it anyway, because it tells you what to expect in the month you chose.