Zimbabwe

One of only a handful of places in Africa where you are permitted to walk unguided among dangerous game, Mana Pools is a flood plain of ancient albida trees above the Zambezi where elephants, buffalo, wild dogs, and lions gather in extraordinary numbers during the dry season. The park has a mythological quality among serious safari travelers — the combination of wilderness access and wildlife density is unmatched anywhere in Africa.

Zimbabwe's largest national park and home to over 45,000 elephants — the largest elephant population in the world — Hwange's waterholes draw extraordinary concentrations of wildlife during the dry season, including species found nowhere else in Zimbabwe such as sable and roan antelope, painted wolves, and the southern giraffe. Night-lit waterholes at private lodges produce some of Africa's finest wildlife photography.

At 1,708 meters wide and 108 meters tall, Victoria Falls is the world's largest curtain of falling water and one of the seven natural wonders of the world. The Zimbabwe side offers the best frontal views along the rainforest path opposite the main falls, the Livingstone Island Devil's Pool above the falls edge, and white-water rafting on the Zambezi gorge below.

A landscape of enormous balancing rock formations — kopjes — sculpted over 2 billion years, Matobo is one of Zimbabwe's most ancient and beautiful landscapes, sheltering the world's highest concentration of black eagles and one of the largest populations of leopard in Africa. The hills contain thousands of San rock paintings, the finest in Zimbabwe, and the grave of Cecil Rhodes on Malindidzimu Hill.

The largest ancient stone structure in sub-Saharan Africa and the ruins of the capital of the medieval Zimbabwean kingdom that flourished between the 11th and 15th centuries, Great Zimbabwe gives the modern nation its name. The Great Enclosure's dry-stone walls — 11 meters high and built without mortar — are a remarkable feat of engineering whose purpose remains partially mysterious.

Zimbabwe's second-largest national park and arguably its wildest, Gonarezhou ('Place of Many Elephants') sits in the southeastern lowveld bordering Mozambique as part of the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park. The Chilojo Cliffs — red sandstone escarpments above the Runde River — are one of Zimbabwe's most dramatic landscapes, and the park's elephant bulls are among the largest-tusked on the continent.