AFTER his travel diary following a visit to Zimbabwe in November 2009 [DAY 1; DAY 2; DAY 3; DAY 4; DAY 5], Scott Ramsay returned recently and travelled for four weeks in the western parts of the country, discovering deserted tourist attractions, plenty of welcoming locals and more than a few roadblocks.

Want to find out what it’s like to travel in Zimbabwe at the moment. Can you have a good time in the country? Are visitors welcome? Is it safe? Is there fuel? Is there food? How bad is the poaching?

A troop of baboons greeted me at the turn-off to Camp Amalinda. Manager Billy Dally was next to greet me, this time at the entrance to the lodge. “Whenever things get stressful around here – this is Zimbabwe after all – I go watch the baboons for an hour,” Billy laughed. “They always make me laugh!”

Amalinda is just a few kilometres from Matopos National Park, and wildlife moves freely through the camp. Where there are baboons, there are leopards. “The Matopos supposedly has the highest concentration of leopards in Africa,” Billy told me. “We see them right on our patios sometimes. One of our guests recently spent a few hours watching a mother leopard and two cubs on the boulder next to her room.”

Colossal boulders dominate the Matopos. Piled high as if a giant was stacking marbles, these rocks dot the earth for 100 kilometres around. The dramatic landscape invites habitation, offering shelter from the elements, and the beautiful Camp Amalinda makes good use of the natural architecture. Each of the nine disparate rooms is designed around a collection of boulders, and each feel like the luxurious lair of a leopard.

The natural caves have proved attractive not only to tourists in the modern era. Hunter-gatherers have favoured the region since the dawn of humanity, using the thousands of shelters as their homes – and spiritual shrines. Consequently, the largest concentration of rock art in the world is found in the Matopos, and it is this feature – allied to the region’s religious significance - that helped the area to earn World Cultural Heritage Status in 2003.

Local archaeologist and guide Paul Hubbard picked me up to show me some of the impressive rock art in the area.On the way, he explained how these are some of the oldest rocks on earth, laid down by volcanic activity close to four billion years ago. Then, however, the altitude of the ground level was three kilometres higher than the present day. A few billion years of weathering and erosion have reduced the rock to present-day elevations.

“All these standing boulders we see will eventually be reduced to sand,” Paul told me. “That’s still a few years away though, of course.”

We stopped the Land Rover and trekked a few kilometres along a faint path, heading uphill through riparian forest. Streams were running strongly from the summer thunderstorms. After a steep hike up a vast granite dome, we eventually made it to Bambata Cave, a national monument. The size of a small house, the cave provides 270 degrees of protection from the elements, and all the way around the walls are hundreds of Bushmen paintings, some dating back at least 9,000 years.

Paul explained how over many millennia the ground level of the cave has risen 15 metres with the deposition of soil and firewood by the inhabitants. So much so, that the artwork we see today was once far higher up on the wall. Bushmen constructed scaffolding out of branches, and like Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, painted art of spiritual significance for all to see.

“They would probably have used this cave much like renaissance artists used churches,” Paul said. “The artists were painting something spiritual, something beyond simple aesthetic beauty. And they wanted other people to see the paintings high up, and out of reach, so that the art would last.”

According to Paul, Bambata is also the site of the discovery of Zimbabwe’s oldest known, securely-dated art object: an 8,500 year-old stone engraved with a grid design. Even on its own, Bambata would make the Matopos special, yet it is just one of hundreds of rock art sites in the region.

The nearby cave of Pomongwe hosts the oldest art in Zimbabwe – at least 13,000 years old, which is not surprising given that it’s also the longest continuously-inhabited cave in the world. Astonishingly, for 100,000 years up to 1896, Pomongwe had been used by humans.

All the rock art include a prodigious variety of animals: wildebeest, zebra, kudu, cheetah, impala, rhino, roan, sable, giraffe ... but the lengthy, continued use of the Matopos by humans has impacted the natural environment. By the 1960s, when the Matopos National Park was proclaimed, hunting and agriculture had reduced the wildlife to near local-extinction levels.

Since then, the wildlife has been reintroduced somewhat successfully, including a sizeable population of black and white rhino, both currently under serious threat from poachers.