Victoria Falls hotels: glamorous or glamp
Spend big or spend little, Africa welcomes visitors of all stripes. Victoria Falls looks the same to both.
No need to spend a fortune visiting Africa’s wonders.
By all means, splurge if you want. But there’s also the other side of the coin, for when travel opens back up to southern Africa after the latest virus scare.
These world class lodges get big mentions in glossy travel magazines, even on Twitter.
I visited one at Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, The Victoria Falls Hotel. I walked the grounds, frolicked with the monkeys🙊, then walked back to the center of town to the fenced lodge/campground where our tour group stayed. No use lingering because despite its name, Victoria Falls Hotel has no view of the falls — just the spray.
Our 75-day, Nairobi to Cape Town tour stayed at many of these fenced, gated compounds. They are part of the overlanding Africa experience. Many of the tour groups use the same resorts.
Accommodation ranges from grassy sites to pitch a tent, to upgrades in comfortable cabins with en suite bathrooms. The compounds have shower buildings (called ablution blocks) for campers, and other amenities including restaurants, bars, TV rooms, internet, swimming pools, tours, etc.
Depending on the setting it may be possible to wander safely beyond the gates. The Victoria Falls Rest Camp and Lodges, where we stayed, was more walkable to the center of town and to Victoria Falls itself than other more exclusive lodges tucked in the woods, where we picked up other passengers for rafting on the Zambezi River.
Africa lets visitors pick their style, and pick their price.