We were fortunate recently to be invited to Stretch Ferreira Safaris by the owner himself. I know him from school and he’d extended the kind invitation a while ago and it turned out they had a slack 3 nights at the end of July and could fit us in. The camp is in a prime spot on the edge of the Zambezi River in Mana Pools National Park in the far north-west of Zimbabwe.
It’s certainly Zimbabwe’s glamour national park and not without good reason. The trees are massive, the game is plentiful (usually) and one can camp right on the banks of the big river. Hippos grunt and splash the night away and sunbathe in the day. In summer it’s oppressively hot but winter is cold at night and warm during the day and dry, which is discouraging for the tsetse flies and mosquitoes.
This last season the park had received very poor rains so there was no grass close to the river and a lot of animals had moved off to find better grazing (the browsers were less affected but a lot of tree leaves were out of reach so they’d also moved off). Still, it was a great break from the stresses of Zimbabwean life, absolutely no cellphone reception and we had a great time. Stretch (real name Andrew) promises to get his clients up close and personal with the elephants that he’s known for many years and he didn’t disappoint. Most of the bigger males have names; JB who’s very chilled, The Donald (Trump) who’s bad tempered and Boris (Johnson) who’s a bit of a clown.
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- A white-fronted bee eater contemplates breakfast by a pan. Many of the pans are already dry.
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- An elephant and egret opportunist at the Mana River mouth in the sunset
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- Boswell (with the big tusks) and his entourage. He is one of an increasing number of elephants that have learned how to stand on their back legs to get to branches. This makes him popular! He occasionally does get annoyed and someone pushed their luck too far and got an ear splitting blast.
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- Boswell sizes up a suitable branch.
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- And up he goes! A pity about the tracking collar but I suspect an animal this magnificent might attract poachers and who knows, they might be put off by the knowledge that he’s being watched.
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- A lone buffalo. Normally Mana Pools is thick with them but this is the only one we saw.
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- Mum will look after me. This cow came to investigate us and had to be told to back off. Which she did.
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- Stretch teaches the finer points of tracking wild dog (now called painted wolves for some absurd reason) to learner guide Angie.
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- Dusk on the flood plain of the Zambezi; an elephant and her calf graze in the evening light. They do sometimes get stuck in the mud with disastrous consequences.
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- A great egret forages along a sand bar.
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- A red-billed hornbill gives a beady eye.
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- Impala were about but not in the numbers I’m used to seeing. Maybe the drought had forced them to look for easier feeding. Stretch was supplying donated bales of grass but so far only the waterbuck, zebra and buffalo were eating it.
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- The trees at Mana Pools are big, very big. One of the reasons it qualifies as a World Heritage site.
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- You can look an elephant in the mouth so long as it’s friendly like JD and your guide knows his elephants. Stretch has known some of these elephants for more than 20 years
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- JD up close. He was not as friendly as usual; possibly due to being recently collared. He will quite often run his trunk over visitors.
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- The business end of JB’s trunk. Hairs ‘n all.
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- What an extraordinary appendage a trunk is – such fine control and strength all in one.
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- Lion paw prints. They evaded us this time much to Stretch’s disgust. They’d been very close to our camp in the night.
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- Elephant calves always look so sad. I hope they are not. We saw quite a number of very young calves such as this one which was odd considering the drought conditions. They still have another month to go before the Faydherbia albida pods drop and provide a welcome source of protein.
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- A grand old warthog. He must have been a considerable age to sport tusks this large.
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- A saddle-billed stork fishes at the Mana River Mouth. It caught a small fish which was immediately stolen by a fish eagle but I just missed the critical moment.
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- Yellow-billed storks hang out at a pan.
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- Morning veiw from Stretch Ferreira’s camp – looking upstream along the Zambezi River
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- Looking downstream from Stretch’s camp early one morning.
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- Two relatively young baobabs on the road out of Mana Pools mark the spot were a game ranger was ambushed and murdered in the bush war.
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- Warthogs and guinea fowl early in the morning. It was surprisingly cold for one of the hottest places in the country come summer.
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- A fine waterbuck bull. They don’t normally hang around to be photographed so Stretch surmised he might be guarding “his” bale of hay that was nearby.
Zimbabwe Absurdity 
How were the stars at night? Special enough for an enthusiast to travel a thousand kms?
The stars were great but lots of big trees in the way. Most of Stretch’s guests are foreign so do travel a long way but mainly for the game and ambience.
Thanks for sharing your lovely visit to Mana. My first visit was terrifying – way back in about 1968 – the ablution block had just been built. We had a fold-out camper van and my Dad chose a lovely site to set up camp under an enormous tree. Another couple were camping in a tiny tent on the edge of the bank. In the middle of the night all hell broke out as it turned out we had parked right in the middle of the elephants’ track down to the river. Baby elephants were tripping over our guy ropes, adults were spraying sand over the top of the tarpaulin….. very very scary. The poor innocent couple on the top of the river bank were nearly squashed during the elephants’ trek down to the river!
I had and exciting encounter years ago when camped at Mucheni 1 with Gary Goss. In my enthusiasm to get a good photo of elephants passing by (before the days of telephoto lenses) I got too close. Fortunately there was just a lot of noise and dust. We told Norman Monks the next day and he thought it was hugely amusing and left use with the advise never to surprise elephants!
Many years away from Zim, but Mana remains one of my all time favourite places.
Yes, it is special