Eco escapes: safari magic

Our Contributing Travel Editor, green girl and SPA.Kitchen founder, Daisy Finder, rounds up the world's best ethical holidays. Fancy getting closer than close to nature with this safari trip?

At the riverside Ruckomechi Camp in Zimbabwe, you live so close to nature you can find yourself hardly daring to breathe at the open-air dining table, as an elephant nonchalantly munches acacia leaves a few feet away. Set on the bank of a remote tributary of the great Zambezi river, in Zimbabwe’s Mana Pools National Park, Ruckomechi ticks every box. Run by African-based Wilderness Safaris, its location couldn’t be lovelier or more remote, just feet from the riverbank, with a view across the opaque water to the hills of the Rift Valley escarpment. The camp is small: mahogany and acacia trees shade just 10 large canvas tents. A single old-fashioned enamel bathtub, surrounded on three sides by a thatched fence, lets you bathe while looking out over the river, but that’s just a quirky addition. Each tent has its own bathroom – openroofed, so you bathe under the stars – with a flushing loo, basin, and hot shower powered by solar energy.

Ruckomechi has just been refurbished, but in an unshowy, sustainable way. Sofas are now covered in denim linen, African artefacts decorate rustic side tables and, while the draped mosquito nets around four-poster beds look wildly romantic, they’re actually very practical, and let you sleep with the tent flaps open, safely unbitten. Lying there listening to hippos croaking in the river and the grunts and shrieks of the bush, there’s nothing like it. Total heaven. Adrianne Pielou

Doubles from £532 per person per night, based on two sharing a tent. For more information, visit wilderness-safaris.com