Chiawa Camp

The Story

The Cumings family were five generations into southern Africa by 1989, the year Dave and Jenny Cumings settled an empty reach of the Lower Zambezi to open the park’s first non-hunting safari camp. There were no roads then, and no rangers. They built the camp anyway, and in 1994 went on to co-found Conservation Lower Zambezi, the NGO that now coordinates anti-poaching, community and education work across the park. Their son Grant, a licensed Zambian guide since that first season, runs the place today with his wife Lynsey. The tourism and the conservation carry the same surname, and have done for thirty-five years.

That continuity is rarer than it sounds, and in our experience it shows in the guiding. Eighteen people at full capacity, on a stretch of Zambezi frontage that few camps can match for variety: drives, walks, canoeing, river boats, fishing and photographic hides, a fuller range than the typical safari camp works from one address. Safari Awards named it Best Safari Property in Africa in 2011, and its guiding team has taken the Africa title more than once since. The camp that pioneered the Lower Zambezi, still run by the people who pioneered it.

Location

Chiawa’s address is, more or less, the Zambezi. The Lower Zambezi National Park runs along the southern bank from the escarpment down toward the Mozambican border: more than four thousand square kilometres of riverine woodland, mopane, baobab and acacia, gazetted in 1983 and facing Zimbabwe’s Mana Pools across the water.

Through the dry months, July to October, the river concentrates everything that drinks, and the camp sits on the bank to watch it happen. Elephants come in herds of up to a hundred, often swimming the channels to graze the islands; hippos work out their disagreements at full volume; crocodiles hold the eddies. Lion and leopard sightings are High through the dry season. African wild dog, an Endangered species, is a Seasonal bonus, reliable from July to October rather than a promise. More than four hundred bird species pass through, and from September to November carmine bee-eaters nest in the banks, turning them pink and turquoise where the colonies gather.

This is national park, not private concession. Zambia does not run the Botswana model of exclusive traversing, so another operator’s vehicle may turn up at a sighting, though the Lower Zambezi is remote enough that this is the exception rather than the rule. We would rather you knew that going in; the camp does not pretend otherwise.

What Chiawa holds is the original position on the park’s main wildlife reach, and by mid-morning whatever has come down to the water is usually more than anyone expected. Access is by light aircraft only, then a short open-vehicle transfer to camp. The park closes from mid-November through April, when the rains return.

Rooms

Nine rooms, eight Safari Tents and one Safari Suite, each on its own raised timber platform under shade, each turned to face the Zambezi. The point of a tent here is not the fittings, which are comfortable rather than elaborate, but the thin canvas wall between the bed and the river: you hear the water through the night, and whatever moves along the bank. There is a super-king bed under its net, indoor and outdoor showers, a bath, and power around the clock from the camp’s own supply, which counts for something this far from anywhere. Tents I to VI were taken down and rebuilt at ground level in 2020, repositioned for more privacy than the original line allowed; VII and VIII were refurbished the same year.

The Safari Suite, built in 2017, is the exception. It takes a longer platform and a private plunge pool above the Chowe riverbed, where a channel of the Zambezi swings past, and it is built to a slower brief than the Tents: more time on the deck, the bath and the pool doing the work the game vehicle does elsewhere. If you want the river to come to you rather than the other way round, this is the room.

The eight Tents do without a plunge pool. Each has instead what the camp calls a bench-wallow, a private cooling spot set into the deck, and we think the choice tells you something: nine private pools would have been more apparatus than this camp wants. The Suite has the pool. The Tents have the quiet.

Communal Areas

The main lounge and bar is thatched and open to the river, with a viewing deck above it, so the social heart of the camp looks out on the same water your tent does, only higher and in company. A camp fire sits in front of it; a plunge pool on a timber sun deck faces the Zambezi; two more elevated decks are there for when you want the river without the conversation. By mid-afternoon in the dry season, every one of them is a good seat for whatever is working the bank below.

Dining is unfussy and tied to the day’s rhythm: breakfast around the morning fire, lunch out on the river barge, dinner by the fire under the stars. Much of what reaches the table comes from Zambezi Harvest, a local farming cooperative the camp buys from on fair-trade terms. Dietary requirements are handled without drama.

The footprint behind all this runs to more than seventy people across Chiawa and the sister camp, Old Mondoro, downstream. The communal areas do not feel staffed so much as run, and in our experience that is the difference between a family business with decades in one place and the polished alternative. By lunchtime it is quiet enough that the hippos downriver are the only argument within earshot. The Cumings family are often about.

Activities

Game drives are the core of it, and the camp makes one quiet decision worth knowing: it caps each vehicle at four travellers, on six-seaters built without canopies, so the sightlines run up into the trees, where the leopards tend to be, and out to the night sky. Bean bags ride on every vehicle for photographers. On night drives the spotlights run through a red filter the camp developed in-house, kept off the herbivores’ eyes and still strong enough to photograph by. We have sat through a great many safari night drives; this is one of the more thoughtful we know on the matter of light.

Morning walks go out with a Chiawa guide and an armed Wildlife Police Officer from the Department of National Parks and Wildlife, six walkers at most, twelve and over only. The pace is a stroll, the range an hour to three, the ground the open mopane and acacia between the river and the escarpment. These guides have been walking this country longer than most of the Lower Zambezi’s camps have been standing.

Canoeing is the mode that sets the Lower Zambezi apart from most safari country: a few hours on the current downstream of camp, a back-paddler doing the work, two or three to a canoe. We will be straight about the risk, because the camp is: crocodiles and hippos have bumped these canoes. There has never been a fatality, but the river is the river, flotation vests are not optional, and the minimum age is twelve.

Boat cruises run on a custom pontoon. The fishing is catch-and-release for tigerfish, the peak running August to November, on barbless single hooks and light tackle by the camp’s own rule rather than the park’s. Two photographic hides complete the range: Scouts Hollow at the water’s edge and a converted water-tank overflow above camp, both reached on foot with a guide and an armed escort.

The conservation is not a side note: a share of every booking goes to Conservation Lower Zambezi, the NGO the family helped found, putting Chiawa among its anchor donors year after year. The river makes that range possible, and the family makes it work.