Baines’ River Camp is located on the banks of the mighty Zambezi River, adjacent to the Lower Zambezi National Park in Zambia and opposite Mana Pools, a World Heritage Site on the Zimbabwe river bank.

History of Baines’ River Camp

Named after John Thomas Baines, the famous English born artist, explorer, naturalist and author who spent much of his life in Central and Southern Africa. Love of adventure took Thomas Baines to the Cape Colony in 1842, where he served as an artist with the British Army during the Eighth Frontier War (1850-53). His success as an artist, led to his joining an expedition to northern Australia in 1855 and a subsequent invitation to take part in a Zambezi expedition under David Livingstone in 1858, on which expedition he travelled down the Zambezi as far as Tete. In 1861 Baines accompanied the British hunter and explorer James Chapman on his travels from South West Africa (Namibia) to the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi river, a journey on which his drawings and his book Explorations in South-West Africa (1864) were based. With his fame established, Baines opened a studio in London in 1865. Returning to Africa in 1868, he led an expedition to explore the goldfields of Matabeleland (Rhodesia/Zimbabwe), where he won mining concessions that were later acquired by Cecil John Rhodes. Baines’ accurate maps, scientific data and illustrations of his travels, the scenery and the people he encountered were published posthumously, The Gold Regions of South-Eastern Africa (1877).

Today the memory of Baines lives on in the numerous illustrations he made on his journeys and the Zambezi river remains largely unchanged and unspoilt since the time he explored the middle and lower Zambezi over the period 1858-1863.