Shiwa Ng'andu
"Someone built a Tudor manor house in the African bush. It did not go entirely to plan. That's the point."
In the early 1920s, a British soldier named Stewart Gore-Browne decided to build a self-sufficient English estate in the remote highlands of northern Zambia. He chose a site on a lake — Shiwa Ng’andu, the Lake of the Royal Crocodile — 700 kilometers from the nearest city, and he spent the next thirty years constructing what amounts to a full-scale English country house: library, chapel, post office, tennis court, hot springs, and a staff of several hundred. He also planted an essential oil distillery, grew citrus, and produced a version of the good life that must have looked either visionary or deranged depending on who was assessing it.
He is buried on a hill overlooking the estate, in a full military ceremony attended by the Zambian prime minister. His descendants still live here.
The House and What It Contains
The house is large and slightly battered and smells of wood polish and old books and something mineral from the stone walls. The library still has Gore-Browne’s collection, ordered with the logic of a man who read eclectically and filed obsessively. Family photographs cover walls at irregular intervals — Gore-Browne with Zambian chiefs, with visiting British officials, with his wife Lorna who eventually left him for the impossibility of the life he’d asked her to live here.
A tour of the house is part visit, part cautionary tale, part genuine love letter to a failed utopia. The current owners carry the whole weight of this history with remarkable grace — they’ve heard all the obvious questions and they answer them honestly, including the questions about colonialism and what their grandfather’s project meant to the people it employed and the people it didn’t.
The Lake and the Walking
The estate sits at over 1,400 meters and the climate in the mornings is startlingly cold — I arrived in July and wore everything I had for the first hour after dawn. The lake is large and still, ringed with fever trees, and the walking in the surrounding miombo woodland is good: sable antelope graze in the forest glades, puku gather near the lakeshore, and the birdlife reflects the different altitude and ecosystem from the parks to the south.
The hot springs on the estate are fed by geothermal water at about 70°C, cooled in a series of pools to something approaching comfortable. Sitting in warm water in cool highland air at six in the morning, listening to the bush wake up around you, is a specific kind of pleasure.
Getting There
Shiwa Ng’andu is not easy to reach. The road north from Lusaka to Mpika takes around seven hours; from Mpika, a further hour and a half of deteriorating dirt track brings you to the estate gates. There is a landing strip but it requires a charter. The difficulty functions as a filter — the people who make it here tend to be genuinely interested in what they’ll find, and the conversation at dinner reflects this.
The guesthouse operates as a working stay rather than a resort; you share meals with the family, help yourself to books from the library, and wander the estate with more freedom than any fenced safari lodge would permit. It’s the kind of place that makes sense of a travel style I didn’t entirely know I had.
When to go: April to October, when roads are passable. The highland altitude means July and August can be genuinely cold at night — bring layers. The dry season also makes the dirt tracks to the estate manageable. Avoid November through March unless you have a very capable vehicle and very flexible plans.