Singita Pamushana

Zimbabwes economy depended on tobacco and tourism. In that spasm of calculated madness a decade ago, President Robert Mugabe destroyed both. When 2,500 white farmers were turfed off their land, the tobacco industry collapsed. The brutality with which it was done deterred all but the bravest of visitors.

People are strange, one tour operator told me. The violence against the farmers and their workers put a lot of tourists off. But when television showed their family pets being killed, 98 % of bookings were cancelled overnight. The tourists are starting to come back now. The politics of Zimbabwe are still poisonous but the country has reached the stability of stalemate. Mugabe retains power through fraud & thuggery. The opposition was first beaten to a pulp and then sucked into a unity government and neutered. Mugabe may not even have needed to rig the last elections but he did anyway. Hes 90 and says hell live to 100.

The tourist revival is being spearheaded by the dispossessed. Everywhere we went, the places seemed to be run by former tobacco farmers, or their sons and daughters. They work hard and keep their heads down. They cant, or wont, leave the land they loved and lost.

You can see why. It was is the most beautiful country in Africa. When it was part of my patch as a BBC correspondent, we used to spend most of our vacations there. My children got soaked in the rainforest created by the Victoria Falls, thrilled there was no fence between us and the thundering chasm (there still isn't). We canoed down the Zambezi past 30,000 hippo, camping on the riverbank among elephants and rhino. We stayed in a tree house in the Hwange National Park listening to buffalo scratching themselves all night on the trunk below us. We roughed it, graciously, in the bush camps by Lake Kariba, and on hiking trips through the Eastern Highlands. The place was magical and the people, even after a long and bitter bush war, were friendly. It was a much kinder, easier place than South Africa where we were living.

That, or much of it, is still true. The economy may have been ransacked & ruined. A nation that once had the highest standard of living in Africa now has among the lowest. A country that fed much of the region cant feed itself. Millions of people have left the country; among those who remain, only one in 20 has a job, & life expectancy has fallen from 60 to 36. But there are small signs of improvement you can buy things now that they have swapped Zimbabwean dollars for US ones (only after the exchange rate had reached 308 trillion to 1).

It is still a great place to visit, and you don't help anybody by staying away. You have to see Victoria Falls at least once in your life and it is much better from the Zimbabwe side. You could join the trickle of tourists returning to the well-known glories of the Zambezi valley, Mana Pools, Hwange. But if you want to taste the real Africa, and see how a little high-level tourism could do a lot about poverty and official neglect, go to the southeastern corner of the country. Go to the Lowveld.

The real saviour in Zimbabwe comes in the unlikely guise of a New York hedge fund manager. Paul Tudor Jones is worth more than $4bn, according to Forbes, and is spending quite a lot of them on the Zimbabwean Lowveld. He has bought an old cattle ranch the size of Berkshire, abutting Gonarezhou, and turned it into the Malilangwe Wildlife Reserve. Its all ringed by an electric fence and patrolled by 80 rangers. At its heart, in a magical setting on a rocky promontory overlooking the flooded Nyamasikana gorge, is the most luxurious lodge in Zimbabwe, possibly in Africa. Its called Pamushana and is operated by the South Africa-based Singita group.

Everything about it is breathtaking (including the price). Each lodge is a minor palace of rough-hewn stone and elephant-grass thatch, vibrant with Shangaan artifacts & design. You can watch the hippo playing in the 1,500 acre lake below from your own private infinity pool. The food is sublime, the service almost overwhelming & the wine cellar (pretty well everything is included) would not be out of place at the Ritz.

Around it is 150,000 acres of untouched, and now heavily protected, bush, mopane forests and acacia woods, studded with leopard lookout outcrops of sandstone and granite. Malilangwe holds one of the largest concentrations of black rhino left in Africa. On a short trip through the rainy seasons dense vegetation we nearly stepped on a lionesss tail & were seen off by a tumescent, 6 tonne bull elephant, livid with lust. There are birds to blow a twitchers mind; 9 different owls, 11 kinds of hawks, 14 species of eagles.

Its a different kind of tourism, says Mark Saunders, executive director of the Malilangwe Trust & former tobacco farmer. Tourism as philanthropy low-impact stuff with the profits, & much more besides, used not just to preserve the wildlife, but to save the human communities on its borders.

Malilangwe feeds 19,000 children every school day. At hundreds of feeding points around the conservancy, local women dish out a special porridge, imported by the trust, with enough nutrition to keep a child going for a day. It costs $35,000 a month. The trust pays for irrigation, it has refurbished the local Mwenze school & subsides the Chizvirizvi clinic where 3 nurses deliver 30 babies a month. Saunders is relentlessly positive. He talks of working with the government, of officials it is possible to deal with, of a brighter future for Zimbabwe, its animals & its people. His is a personal victory of pragmatism over pain.

I asked Luke Bailes, the chief executive of Singita, why he was gambling on Zimbabwe, with its political risks & a tourist industry where even the best lodges run at 20-30% occupancy. He said it was because Zimbabwe had many of the finest destinations in Africa, which is true, & that the business was unlikely to be confiscated becau

Singita Pamashana has the most luxurious villas scattered of the hillside with wonderful views to the Malilangwe Dam below. The lodge has a very African feel with local design infused throughout the lodge but with all the luxuries you would expect from Singita. Whether you want to while away a morning on your deck watching game come into the dam below through the telescope, explore the dam by boat or explore the 500hr reserve on a game drive guests are not stuck for things to do here. We were also lucky enough to see 10 white rhino in a mornings game drive, which thanks to the extensive anti poaching team in the reserve are thriving.

With beautiful villas designed for couples and also families (there are 2, 3 and 5 bedroom villas) there is an option to suite most people and enough of a variety of activities that everyone would be kept happy.