Waterhole sitting
The Hwange speciality. Park at a pumped pan, switch the engine off and let the park come to you. In the dry months everything has to drink.
Photo: Visit Africa Publishers
Zimbabwe · national park since 1928
Hwange National Park: the independent visitor guide (2026)
Fourteen and a half thousand square kilometres of Kalahari sand with no river on it, kept alive by pumped waterholes. This guide has the ZimParks fees from the source, every one of the 33 places to stay, and the roads as they actually are.
Photo: Faypearse (CC BY-SA 4.0)
The February 2026 ZimParks rates, not the outdated ones everyone copies
Every camp listed, from $23 pitches to fly-in lodges
Straight answers on fuel, 4x4 and where night drives are actually allowed
Every claim traced to a source you can check
Where Hwange National Park is, and which gate you want
Hwange sits in the north-west corner of Zimbabwe, between Victoria Falls and Bulawayo. Almost everything a visitor uses is along the northern edge, which is why the drive in is short and the drive between camps is not.
- 1 Main Camp Main gate, ZimParks office, accommodation and airstrip
- 2 Nyamandhlovu Pan Elevated viewing platform, the best-known day hide
- 3 Sinamatella Northern camp on the escarpment above the Deka
- 4 Robins Camp North-western camp, permanent water and big buffalo herds
- 5 Masuma Dam Exclusive picnic site and one of the park's best hides
- 6 Ngweshla Picnic site and prime dry-season game concentration
- 7 Cross Mabale turn-off Leave the A8 here for the 23 km tar road to Main Camp
- Pan with a hide or viewing platform
- Dam
- Gate or barrier on the map
- Tarred trunk road
Why this guide exists, and where the numbers come from
This guide is written by someone who overlanded much of Africa in his own Land Cruiser with a rooftop tent, and for whom the national parks were what stayed. The information about them online was usually missing, wrong or years old: fees from three tariff sheets ago, camps that had closed, roads described by people who had never driven them.
So this guide runs on the park authority's own tariff document rather than a copied operator page, on thirty-year climate normals rather than brochure weather, and on what the camps tell us directly. Every claim carries a date. Where ZimParks is silent, so are we, apart from saying that it is silent.
Nothing here is for sale. Listing a camp is free and no position on any page can be bought. Some outbound links earn us a small commission, and that changes neither the order of a list nor a single figure on these pages.
Found something out of date? Tell us and it changes the same week.
Three ways to spend a day in Hwange
Hwange has no river, so the game goes to the pumped water and so do you. That single fact shapes every activity in the park.
Game drives
Self-drive is permitted on the main network and the tracks are flat and sandy. What you find is a matter of which pans are pumping.
Photo: Visit Africa Publishers
Night drives and walks
Both are guided only and both have small print worth reading before you book, because not every camp can offer them.
Photo: Visit Africa Publishers
Where to stay in Hwange National Park
Thirty-two places to stay, from a ZimParks campsite to a fly-in concession. These four are not the best four; they are the four that mark out the range.
The cheapest way in
ZimParks Main Camp
Run by the park authority itself, at the main gate, and the reason a Hwange trip can cost a fraction of a Botswana one.
Mid-range, in the park
Robins Camp
A former ZimParks camp under private lease in the north-west, where the buffalo herds and the predator reports are.
Walking and guiding
Camp Hwange
A small owner-run camp on a private concession, built around walking rather than driving.
The top end
Verney's Camp
Fly-in, fully inclusive, and the benchmark against which the rest of the park's rates read.
Everything you need to plan a visit
Entry fees
The 2026 ZimParks rates, including the split that halves your fee if you sleep inside the park.
See the fees →Lodges & camps
From $23 camping pitches and sleep-out platforms to the fly-in camps on the private concessions.
Browse lodges →Getting there
Three hours from Victoria Falls on tar, a charter flight, or the weekly overnight train.
Plan the route →Wildlife
One of Africa's biggest elephant populations, a major wild dog stronghold and the lions of the Cecil research area.
What you'll see →Best time to visit
Why August to October beats everything else here, and what the green season offers instead.
Pick your month →Things to do
Waterhole hides, sleep-out platforms above the pans, walking safaris and where night drives are actually allowed.
See activities →Our own research
We priced every park in Africa
We collect the official tariff of every park we cover, convert it, and hold each one to the same standard day. Twenty-nine parks are in the index now, the famous ones included. These three pages come out of that table.
The most expensive safari parks in Africa
Ngorongoro charges $278 for a standard day and $148 of that is the descent into the crater. The ranking straight down, with the line item behind each number.
See the ranking →The most expensive parks for self-drivers
One person, one car, no one to split the vehicle fee or the campsite with. Uganda's foreign-vehicle tariff turns the order upside down.
See the self-drive ranking →Africa's most expensive published safari beds
The highest nightly rates any camp in our network puts in writing, and why the real top of the market names no price at all.
See the rates →Latest updates to this guide
Every change to this guide, dated.
- 2026-09-13 Twenty new pages: what a trip actually costs, the park's history from royal hunting ground to Cecil, health, camping, flying in, Victoria Falls as gateway, the green season, Hwange or Mana Pools, and a page for every month of the year. See the page
- 2026-09-11 Repaired the outbound links to Verney's Camp and Deteema Springs after Machaba moved its site to new addresses. See the page
- 2026-09-08 Added hire-car and flight links to the getting-there page, marked as paid links because they are. See the page
- 2026-09-06 All outbound lodge links on this site are now nofollow, so a listing here is information, not a traded favour.
- 2026-08-15 Rewrote the Victoria Falls road section after the resurfacing news; drive times updated. See the page