What is on offer in the beautiful and wonderful land of Zimbabwe!!

Zimbabwe has many attractions to offer and to visit them all in just one visit could be impossible. There is more to see and experience, but the following are just the great places to visit whilst in Zimbabwe.

Victoria Falls (the smoke that thunders) is Zimbabwe's number one attraction. The falls measuring a huge 1.7km wide and drop between 90m and 107m into the Zambezi Gorge is always providing visitors breath taking scene of the African rainbow you have never seen. With the size and sound of the magnificent waterfall, it is hard to think that anything else exists in the surrounding jungle. Zambezi is, however, packed with wildlife. You may spot warthog, crocodile, hippo, or even elephant, buffalo and lion - but do not get afraid, these are creatures that we have lived with for centuries.

Hwange National Park, Mana Pools NP, and Mutirikwe Game Park are the easiest to reach out of all of Zimbabwe's game parks and offers the biggest variety and concentration of game.


Lake Mutirikwe boarders the Great Zimbabwe Ruins is the biggest man-made dam Zimababwe and takes you 3omins to reach to the sub-Saharan Africa's greatest archaeological site, built of stones without cement. This site will make live an African life in the 18th century as it has stood the challenges of weather over centuries. It's also an astonishingly peaceful place to relax for a couple of days of camping and exploring.

Chimanimani National Park is home to Zimbabwe's wildest and most rugged mountain wilderness. There are no roads in the park, however, there are many hiking tracks that offer the best bushwalking in Zimbabwe.

Matobo National Park is the best place in the world to see white rhino. The Matobo Hills near Bulawayo also shelter hundreds of amazing caves and rock paintings.

Mana Pools National Park is one of the only parks where visitors are alowed to venture out alone on foot. Access to Mana Pools is difficult, the best way to arrive here is by canoe safari along the Zambezi River.

Lake Kariba is a favourite amongst Zimbabweans, we will offer you a chance to see the powerful crocodiles of Africa. Around the lake you can find great fishing, boating, game viewing and camping. But before Lake Kariba you can visit Chinhoyi caves, with its ancient cave pool.

Vumba National Park is famous for the beautiful forests and botanical gardens. Vumba offers excellent walking opportunities and expansive views across nearby Mozambique.

Domboshawa and Ngomakurira are located just 30km from Harare. They offer brilliant hiking over stunning lichen-covered domes, you can also see as well as the opportunity to see lots of rock paintings.

Bulawayo Museum of Natural History includes information on the geology, palacontology, anthropology, zoology and history of Zimbabwe. This is a must see and is definitely Zimbabwe's best museum.

Mzilikazi Arts & Crafts Centre is located just outside Bulawayo. It displays the amount of artistic talent to be found in Zimbabwe. Such craft centres are all over Zimbabwe, you are spoiled for choice.

We offer group tours around Zimbabwe,

Try us for an unforgettable thrilling and welcome experience!!

We welcome you!!

Dandemutande Shanyai Tourism
P O Box 291821,
Mellville
2109, Johannesburg, ZA

Mobile: 073 234 6376
Fax: 086 688 4740
Email: lgmatizi@gmail.com
HTTP//www.dandeconnect.co.za,
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Great Zimbabwe: ancient beauty and artistry to see and a place to visit

Riddle of Great Zimbabwe
by Roderick J. Mcintosh

Among the gold mines of the inland plains between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers [there is a]...fortress built of stones of marvelous size, and there appears to be no mortar joining them.... This edifice is almost surrounded by hills, upon which are others resembling it in the fashioning of stone and the absence of mortar, and one of them is a tower more than 12 fathoms high. The natives of the country call these edifices Symbaoe, which according to their language signifies court.--Viçente Pegado, Captain, Portuguese Garrison of Sofala, 1531

Sometime in the early fourteenth century the people of Great Zimbabwe began building the Great Enclosure, completing the structure over the course of a century. Scattered remains of the Valley Complex, just north of the Great Enclosure, can be seen in the foreground. (David Coulson)

When Portuguese traders first encountered the vast stone ruins of Great Zimbabwe in the sixteenth century, they believed they had found the fabled capital of the Queen of Sheba. Later travelers surmised that the site's impressive stone structures were the work of Egyptians, Phoenicians, or even Prester John, the legendary Christian king of lands beyond the Islamic realm. Such misguided and romantic speculation held for nearly 400 years, until the excavations of British archaeologists David Randall-MacIver and Gertrude Caton-Thompson early in this century, which confirmed that the ruins were of African origin.

The largest ancient stone construction south of the Sahara, Great Zimbabwe was built between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries by the ancestors of the Shona, one of Zimbabwe's many Bantu-speaking groups. The ruins cover nearly 1,800 acres and can be divided into three distinct architectural groupings known as the Hill Complex, the Valley Complex, and the Great Enclosure. At its apogee in the late fourteenth century, Great Zimbabwe may have had as many as 18,000 inhabitants. It was one of some 300 known stone enclosure sites on the Zimbabwe Plateau. In Bantu, zimbabwe means "sacred house" or "ritual seat of a king." An important trading center and capital of the medieval Zimbabwe state, the city controlled much of interior southeast Africa for nearly two centuries.

Given the sheer scale of Great Zimbabwe compared to its precursors, archaeologists have been at a loss to explain its sudden appearance on the southern African landscape. Interpretation of the site poses a particular problem because it was stripped of nearly all its in situ cultural material during the nineteenth century by treasure seekers and those who, believing the site to be of foreign construction, wished, in the words of turn-of-the-century excavator Keith M. Hall, "to free it from the filth and decadence of the Kaffir [South African] occupation."

A series of residential and ceremonial enclosures, the Hill Complex, built ca. A.D. 1250, sits atop a granite dome that overlooks the rest of the site. Construction of the interior of the Great Enclosure began sometime in the early fourteenth century; its outer wall was built nearly 100 years later. The smaller Valley Complex, dated to the early fifteenth century, was the last of the architectural undertakings. (Lynda D'Amico) [LARGER IMAGE]

It is precisely for this reason that Great Zimbabwe has come to serve as a proving ground for one of archaeology's newest subspecialties, cognitive archaeology--the science of penetrating the ancient human mind to glean information about the religion, ideology, and politics of past cultures. These forces, scholars contend, are what propel cultures forward, from scattered hunter-gatherer populations to organized states whose political rhetoric and ideology serve as vehicles for expansion. Since clear evidence for belief systems is rarely visible in the archaeological record, especially when dealing with nonliterate societies such as Great Zimbabwe, it must be inferred from beliefs of descendant cultures, historical accounts, and telltale symbolism encoded in architecture, space use, and a site's relationships to the surrounding landscape.

The abundant grasslands atop the plateau were ideal for cattle grazing, but the poor soil would not have supported agriculture on a scale required to sustain Great Zimbabwe's burgeoning population, necessitating imports of grain and other staples from distant tributary sites. Moreover, we now know that the plateau's rich gold deposits, to which the city's initial prosperity has often been attributed, were not exploited until perhaps a century after its founding. The question posed then is "Why here?" How could such an influential power develop in an area so ill-suited for large-scale human habitation? Could cattle wealth and trade alone have afforded the inhabitants of Great Zimbabwe a superior way of life, or was there something else, a political or religious ideology, that gave them a competitive edge over neighbors and enabled them to harness the manpower necessary for the construction of the site?

These questions lie at the heart of a three-way debate between archaeologist Thomas N. Huffman of South Africa's University of the Witwatersrand, political historian and student of Shona oral tradition David N. Beach of the University of Zimbabwe, and historian Eugenia Herbert of Mount Holyoke College in Massachussetts. Each has examined the stone-built landscape and posited a different scenario to explain the ascendancy of southern Africa's greatest precolonial city.

Roderick J. Mcintosh teaches archaeology at Rice University and is on ARCHAEOLOGY's Editorial Advisory Board.

© 1998 by the Archaeological Institute of America
www.archaeology.org/9807/abstracts/africa.html