What We Should Expect to See Is What We Will See
A Journey to the Quiet Edge of Zimbabwe
“If you’re missing your seatbelt, you’re probably sitting on it,” the flight attendant said cheerfully, on what he told us was only the third run of this new daily route into Zimbabwe’s Eastern Highlands. As we taxied out, he added that the flight time would be forty minutes and that meal service would begin shortly after takeoff —a surprise, since a similar snack box back in Europe would come with a card machine and a €15 charge.
Below us, the land unfurled into a dry sweep of hills and dusted forests. I found myself thinking about the Zimbabwe in my head —the one most outsiders imagine, usually for reasons that have little to do with what the country is actually like. Recently, it had appeared in the final episode of The Grand Tour —Jeremy Clarkson clutching the Mutarazi Falls skywalk while Richard Hammond zipped past shouting, “Welcome to Zimbabwe!” as if they’d reached the edge of the earth. The moment was calibrated for drama, and soon the show settled into its usual theatrics —a VW Beetle launched off a mountainside— set against scenery so arresting the antics seemed completely unnecessary.
Now sitting there, I realized I hadn’t brought many other expectations of my own. I’d lived elsewhere in Africa and knew how quickly an outsider’s assumptions fall apart, but the Highlands still sat in my mind as a blank ledge on the edge of this country’s map. That was enough to make me curious, but not much more.
After our plane touched down, the flight attendant returned to the PA to thank us for flying and to remind us to check for our belongings. “If you leave something behind, like an iPhone 16 Pro,” he said, “the crew will assume it’s a gift for our wonderful service.” The cabin erupted in laughter and then applause.
The Eastern Highlands run along Zimbabwe’s border with Mozambique, a long band of elevated country made up of three main ranges: Nyanga in the north, the Vumba in the center, and Chimanimani in the south. Higher and cooler than the rest of the country, the terrain rises in long slopes broken by pine and tea plantations, pockets of indigenous forest, and views that open with no announcement at all. Where the west of the country pulls visitors toward safari circuits and the spectacle of Victoria Falls, the Highlands follow a slower rhythm.
For that first afternoon, the region existed for me mostly as an outline, a band of high country I had read about but couldn’t yet imagine. That began to shift the next morning as I traveled east over Christmas Pass and descended briefly into Mutare before climbing again toward the Vumba. The road rose through plantations and patches of forest, the landscape revealing its true shape. Views stretched out for miles into Mozambique, and a silence took hold.
At the Vumba Botanic Garden, a guide hopped into the vehicle. He was gregarious and explained that this was the oldest botanical garden in Zimbabwe. As we eased towards the parking lot, he added, “What we should expect to see is what we will see!” I laughed at the line, not realizing then how neatly it captured the negotiation I had already slipped into without noticing.
We stepped through the garden at an easy pace, following a short path past a few beds and older trees. It wasn’t elaborate, and the guide offered a few facts as we walked. What stayed with me was how informal it felt — a place tended just enough to show care.
Afterward, I stopped at Tony’s, a café tucked inside what looked like an ordinary hillside home. The place had been recommended with the sort of insistence that usually makes me wary, but the reputation turned out to be accurate in only the most unexpected ways. Inside, the rooms were bright and spare, white walls hung with colorful paintings and small arrangements of flowers set out with deliberate care. Tables were laid with silver teapots and porcelain cups, and the air smelled warmly of coffee and cake.
Tony appeared from the kitchen with the practiced ease of someone who has been doing this for years —cheerful, slightly theatrical, but not over the top. The cakes were beautiful and oversized, each one a small performance on a plate; there was something unmistakably personal about the place, as if it existed less as a business than as an extension of Tony himself.
Later, driving back through Mutare, the Highlands began to feel less like a line on a map and more like a place with its own tempo. The land rose and fell in long, manageable shapes, the light falling behind the hills before I returned to Musangano Lodge. Bigi and Gerd had been here since the mid-1990s, building the lodge slowly from an old farmhouse on a patch of cleared land. What began as a modest idea had grown into a place built almost entirely by local hands —contractors, carpenters, and gardeners.
The chalets sat among slopes of regenerated Miombo woodland, spaced far enough apart that each felt like its own clearing. As the last light disappeared from the horizon, they spoke about the early days, teaching at a mission school, coming to know the communities around them, and imagining a place where travelers and locals might meet –Musangano literally translates to ‘meeting place’ in Shona.
Listening to them, I saw how different the reality of the Highlands was from the version I’d brought with me. I’d come in primed for skywalks, cliff edges, and a schedule that tried to fit the region into a few days. But the Highlands didn’t hurry for anyone; their rhythm was slower, deliberate, and impossible to rush.
The next morning, we set out early for Mutarazi Falls. As we climbed higher, the road narrowed into a long, well-groomed stretch of dirt—new, level, and apparently designed by someone with an unshakable belief in speed bumps. Every two hundred meters, another one rose like a small wall, each nearly two feet tall, the kind that requires you to slow not out of courtesy but self-preservation. Nyanga’s slopes opened and closed around us, dry this time of year, the colors washed out to a quieter palette.
At the headlands, a short path cut through a pocket of forest and tall grasses before depositing me at the skywalk: two suspended bridges stretching out over the 753-meter drop, the zipline extending even farther into space. Unlike Clarkson, I was harnessed in, but stepping onto the cable bridge with or without the harness is still a rush. I looked down at the thin white seam of the falls sliding along the rock face, then out toward the Honde Valley, which unfolded all the way to Mozambique.
The view was immense, but it was the quiet that held my attention. A light breeze, the softened rush of water somewhere below, and little else. No commentary or theatrics, just an unexpected, just a fragile hush suspended over the edge. I tried to carry that quiet with me as we jolted back down the road, the speed bumps working with real commitment to shake it loose.
When the tarmac returned, we stopped at the Cecil Rhodes Museum. Set back from the road and built in 1897, the house felt smaller than the shadow its history casts — stone walls, two rooms, a handful of furniture and curiosities. Stepping back outside, the air still had that sharp highland clarity, cooler and thinner.
That difference long predated tourism. The Highlands had always been an escape —first for traders fleeing the heat of the lowlands, later for colonial settlers searching for familiar climates. Even now, the idea persists.
Outside the Rhodes Museum, a large chalkboard hung on the wall with “Some Recent Fly Fishing Results” written in oversized lettering. It was the kind of sign that suggested a quiet, ongoing ritual, not an attraction. Trout fishing is one of the region’s odd inheritances. Introduced around 1900, the fish took to the cold streams, and their presence ended up shaping the Highlands far more than anyone intended. Clubs formed, dams were stocked, and over time, the trout became part of the region’s identity. Golf followed a similar path —courses carved into the hills not because the country needed them, but because the cool climate made the idea feel natural.
Farther down the road, the slopes steepen toward the Honde Valley, one of the few places where tea and coffee grow side by side. The fields fall away in stacked terraces, each row a different shade of green, and much of the production runs through small-holder operations rather than the large estates common elsewhere on the continent.
By the time I returned to the lodge, the day and region had arranged itself into a clearer picture.
The next morning, we drove deeper into Nyanga National Park, where the Highlands rise into long-backed grassland ridges. Mt. Nyangani appeared almost unassuming from a distance —less a peak than a lifted shoulder of land— but locals will tell you, without ceremony, that this is not a mountain to treat casually.
Guides speak of Mt. Nyangani with a mix of practicality and respect. The warnings come first: the weather turns quickly, and the mist can disorient even experienced hikers —though most of those cautions seem better suited to the wet season than to the dry, bright days when I visited. Then come the stories —never quite offered as fact, never quite dismissed. Hikers who vanished —and there have been several who have indeed never been found. The belief that you shouldn’t point at the mountain. The quiet rule that you never pick anything up from the ground, no matter how tempting it looks.
It isn’t the strangeness of the tales that stays with you, but what they suggest about the place: that the mountain is treated as a presence with its own terms and not a peak to be conquered.
By early afternoon we continued toward World’s View, climbing gradually until the road ended at a broad outcrop of granite. From there, the land fell away in vast slopes and folded valleys, the horizon stretching so far in every direction it seemed unbothered by its own scale.
If Mt. Nyangani holds the Highlands’ fables, then World’s View offers their counterpoint. One suggests depth; the other breadth. Together, they make it clear the region was never meant to be reduced to the extremes I’d carried with me. As the afternoon light opened across the slopes, that mix of myth, openness, and restraint felt like the Highlands’ true signature.
By the time I reached Mutare, the Highlands had already begun to rearrange my sense of what this part of Zimbabwe was supposed to be. The city sits close enough to the Mozambican border that you expect some degree of frontier energy: trucks, raised voices, or a steady pulse of movement. And while the trucks were there, waiting patiently in long queues for paperwork and customs, the life of the border turned out to be gentler than I imagined.
Most of it played out on the sidewalks: men set up beneath multi-colored umbrellas offering passport photos and stamping documents —everything a person at the edge of a map may need. One boy sat cleaning the lens of his camera with the concentration of a surgeon, pausing only for a brief chat about our respective cameras.
Later, at a market, I spoke with women wrapping up their produce stalls before the sun went down. Everyone was friendly and conversational, moving at a pace that matched the late-day heat.
What I hadn’t expected to find in Mutare was an emerging art scene. I’d heard about MutARE Tales, a collective of young artists trying to carve out space for themselves in a region where creative work isn’t always taken seriously. We didn’t meet in person —I spoke with one of them later by video call— and what struck me was the steadiness of their belief in the power of what they were doing.
They talked about the practical challenges —materials, funding, the usual obstacles— but what stayed with me was their commitment to building something communal. More than eighty artists, some self-taught, some trained, all rejecting the idea that art is a luxury. They wanted Mutare to be a place where creativity could take root. It felt like an inversion of the “edge of the map” story: instead of culture thinning out toward the borders, it seemed to be gathering there.
On the outskirts of the city lies Africa University, a pan-African institution with flags from across the continent lining its entrance. We drove through quietly, passing students between classes, and a vigorous game of football on the fields. What I saw in Mutare Tales and at Africa University was a shared determination among young people to build something real here, not somewhere else.
On the first day, before Christmas Pass and the Vumba, I had been shown the orchid house at La Rochelle. Peter, the young horticulturalist, had been tending that collection for years. He spoke gently but with unmistakable pride about propagation, humidity, the slow coaxing of a species that refuses to be hurried. At the time, it felt like a pleasant detour. Now, I see it as something else: a reminder that things grow because somebody stays long enough to let them.
The city itself carried the same lesson. For all its proximity to the border, Mutare felt loose, almost unhurried. Nothing in the Highlands matched the images I had brought with me; nothing needed to.
And that brings me back to the sentence I had laughed at when the guide in the botanical garden first said it: “What we should expect to see is what we will see.” At the time, it felt like a tautology. In the Highlands, it became a correction.
If you come expecting spectacle, you’ll miss the work that takes decades. If you come expecting disorder, you won’t notice the ordinary competence of people building lives at their own pace. And if you come expecting a single story, you’ll fail to see the hundreds unfolding steadily around you —artists forming communities, people who have stayed long enough to build something lasting, a man tending orchids. Because beauty, in this corner of Zimbabwe, is still worth the patience it demands.
In the end, the Eastern Highlands didn’t change my expectations.
They taught me how to let them go. ⛰️
My visit was supported by Zimbabwe Tourism Authority, but the impressions are my own.
We were Zimbabwe a few weeks ago visiting the falls. Your description of the eastern part of Zimbabwe is. excellent. it makes me want to go back. Thanks for sharing.
"a reminder that things grow because somebody stays long enough to let them." Love that