Also lions, elephants, buffalo and all other African game. For anglers, however, tigers take priority. Not the furry variety, but tigers with steel-blue scales, blood-red fins, and needle teeth.  The lightning-fast, high-leaping African tigerfish is reckoned by many to be the world's premier freshwater gamefish. And the mighty Zambezi River, with its 300 km (180 mile) Lake Kariba forming the border between Zimbabwe and Zambia, is where these tigers hang out.
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Zimbabwe also has several other tropical gamefish, including exotics such as rainbow trout and the best largemouth black bassing in Africa -- ten pounders are common, the record stands at 13 lb. But there's much more to Zimbabwe than fishing. Its wildlife areas are well managed, its infrastructures functioning, its people charming. From the misty mountains of the Eastern Highlands to the dry heat of the Great Rift Valley; from the mysterious, brooding stone ruins of a vanished civilisation at Great Zimbabwe to the green mopane forests of the Whange Game Reserve, Zimbabwe offers a delightful taste of the real Africa. THE ZAMBEZI RIVERSouthern Africa's mightiest river, the Zambezi is born on the Zambia-Angola-Zaire border, flowing eastwards for 2,500 km to the Indian Ocean just north of Beira in Mozambique. Two of the world's largest man-made dams, Kariba in Zimbabwe and Cahora Bassa in Mozambique, straddle this river that explorer David Livingstone used as his main route into the heart of Africa, in the process naming the world's mightiest waterfalls after his queen, Victoria. The tigerfish rules supreme in the Zambezi. But there are over 100 fish species in the river, many of angling interest. The yellow-belly and thin-face bream of the Upper Zambezi eagerly accept lures; the giant catfish, or vundu, of the Lower River will test any angler. And oddities like the chessa, nkupe, bottlenose or Cornish jack are unique to this system. The nature of the river changes constantly on its long journey, from a wild torrent plunging though lunar landscapes to a lazy flow meandering through grassy floodplains. Along its course, from northwestern Zambia through Namibia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and Mozambique, there are a wide variety of riverside lodges catering for angling and/or gameviewing, many of them offering guided boat fishing. |
