Norma Jeane’s Lakeview Resort  is built around the tin-roofed homestead of Murray MacDougal, the man who conceived and drove the construction of Lake Mutirikwi which it overlooks and the lowveld sugar estates. Known for its beautiful gardens, home-style cooking, comfortable accommodation and friendly service it is well-situated for a first or last stop-over in Zimbabwe if you are travelling to or from South Africa and handy for the Great Zimbabwe World Heritage Site monument. Norma Jeane’s Lakeview Resort has eight hotel rooms, with dining and a resident’s lounge and four fully equipped self-catering family lodges all have views across Lake Mutirikwi. In addition, nine budget rooms have communal ablutions, kitchen and braai facilities, a camp site has an all-weather boma. The restaurant serves delicious, home-style full breakfasts, a la carte lunches and dinner is a set menu. The beautiful gardens create a birdwatcher’s paradise and there is bass fishing in Lake Mutirikwi, as well as boat cruises, sailing and skiing.

Norma Jeane's is named after Mark Sparrow's wife and not the legendary screen siren, Marilyn Monroe. Murray MacDougall, whose home it was, dreamed of getting water to his 300 000 acre concession and in 1924 completed his first weir on the Mutirikwi River. It took him another 7 years to complete the canal (tunnelling through rock by hand) and by 1938 he was so successful in turning the barren land into verdant green sugar cane fields that he formed the Triangle Sugar Estates and opened his first mill – producing 96 tonnes of raw sugar in the first year and thereby transforming Zimbabwe’s lowveld.