About this guide
Who's behind Visit Matusadona?
An independent guide to a park on Lake Kariba, published by Visit Africa Publishers. We are not the park, not its official website and not a booking agent for it.
Not the official site
Visit Matusadona is independent. The park is run by the Matusadona Conservation Trust, a partnership of African Parks and ZimParks, and it has an official website of its own with a similar name. We have no connection with the trust, African Parks or ZimParks, and nothing on this site is an official statement from any of them.
For bookings in the park, write to the trust's reservations office at reservations.matusadona@africanparks.org. For the official picture of the park, African Parks' Matusadona page and ZimParks' park page are the places to start.
Who publishes it
Visit Matusadona is published by Visit Africa Publishers, which runs a small network of independent park guides across southern and eastern Africa. Behind it is an overlander who has driven many of these parks in his own vehicle and kept finding that the practical facts online were stale or copied from each other.
The method is the same on every guide: the authority's own documents first, operators' own rate sheets second, and a date on every figure.
Why Matusadona needed one
Three things are routinely wrong about this park online. Most pages quote the ZimParks gazette fee when the trust that runs the park charges a higher levy. Many suggest Kariba Ferries as the way in, when that ferry sails to Mlibizi at the far end of the lake and never stops here. And the area of 1,470 km² that almost every source repeats looks like a transposition of the 1,407 km² in the Parks and Wildlife Act.
Beyond that, much of what is written about Matusadona dates from before 2019, when it had different camps, different management and a different wildlife story.
What we do when the sources disagree
We show both and say which is which. The two fee systems sit side by side on the entry fees page. Where lodges contradict their own agents, as Fothergill does on park fees, the listing says so. Where no official figure exists, as for 2026 camping rates, we give the last published one as history and say plainly that it is not a quote.
We also leave out what we cannot source: no current lion count, no month-by-month lake cycle and no closed season for anglers, because we found no official figure for any of them.
How we list places to stay
Listing a property here is free. Where we could not establish who owns a lodge or a boat, it carries an 'Owner not confirmed' badge rather than a guess. Owners who spot something wrong can write to us and we correct it the same week.