Month by month
Gonarezhou in January
January in Gonarezhou is mostly a door closing. The park shuts completely to tourists on 10 January and stays shut until 1 March, so the real question is not what January is like but what you should be doing instead of visiting.
If you only want the answer
You get nine days of the wettest month of the year, then the gates close on 10 January. Treat January as the month you plan and book, not the month you go.
The closure comes first
Every year the Gonarezhou Conservation Trust closes the entire park to tourists from 10 January to 1 March. Those are the Trust's own exact dates, and there is no partial access, no birding exception and no way around them. If your dates fall after the 9th, you are not visiting Gonarezhou in January, full stop.
The nine days that remain open are open in name more than in practice. The remote and bush camps have already been shut since late November, several internal roads close in the wet season even while the park itself is technically open, and the Save River sand crossing after heavy rain is a serious 4x4 problem rather than a scenic one.
What those nine days actually look like
On the thirty-year average, January is the wettest month on Gonarezhou's calendar: 98 mm of rain across roughly 11 rain days, with days at 31.9°C and nights barely dropping to 21.9°C. The Runde runs high and brown, the grass stands tall enough to hide anything smaller than an elephant, and the game that concentrated so obligingly on the dry-season pools has dispersed across more than five thousand square kilometres of green bush.
There is genuine beauty in it, and the birding is rich, but you would be working hard for every sighting in a park that is about to lock its gates behind you.
The useful thing to do in January
Book. Gonarezhou has no online booking portal; everything runs by email through reservations@gonarezhou.org, with gbc@gonarezhou.org for the two six-tent bush camps. Those bush camps hold twelve guests each at absolute capacity, so the dry-season weeks you actually want are decided long before the dry season arrives.
A January email asking for July, August or September dates is one of the more sensible things you can do with this month. A January flight to Buffalo Range is not.