Crack of dawn breakfast before we headed to the Zimbabwe border post.
All the rigmarole has been eased to allow day trippers from Zambia to cross into the main falls area easily, with money exchange forms distributed randomly, without a plan - none for me. And then we were through and a sign welcomed us to Zimbabwe.
Our first stop was the shiny-as-new Makasa Sun Hotel to book scenic flights, but that involved passing the falls gateway and walking away from the thunderous noise off the waterfall into the hotel and bank district. Bought tickets for flights at 3.30pm and then went to investigate the historic Victoria Falls Hotel. This colonial gem was painted pale “grasshopper” green, the hall leading through to a central area with swimming pools and a luxurious lounge that ended at a glassed area overlooking a terraced garden and paved area. The buffet lunch here costs the same as at the boring Makasa so I rushed back to tell everyone.
Changed money at the bank before at last heading out of the town and into the greenery of the falls park. Having been warned that the route was wet, Jim and I followed a group of huge South Africans through the thatched entrance, the noise increasing with every step. We emerged from thick forest at the foot of the “Livingstone Memorial Statue” standing majestically near the view over the cataracts.
Trying to describe the awesome “smoke that thunders” is almost impossible. Photos can't capture the sound, the movement or the percussive feel of the spray rising out of the gorge and words are inadequate - but I'll try. The water pours over three separate lips of a massive crack in the rocky plain, in an explosive raging mass of whites and browns, fighting each other in a barrage of sounds - layers of crashing and rumbling over a base roar like huge jet engines. Spectacular views reach up towards the cataracts, with Livingstone visible through the trees looking down on his falls, and down the gorge through rainbows and towering mist clouds. The churning wall of water plunging down the rock face opposite us looks like pulled hunks of uncarded raw wool.
Jim and I squelched the length of the Zimbabwe falls walking track, often caught in deluges of spray that pounded down on us like a full-pressure shower - we should have taken our soap and shampoo! Walls of cloud totally blocked our view in places, in others shifting and thinning to allow glimpses of the falls hitting and rebounding from the gorge floor. We stood watching the spray climbing up the walls, forced out of the narrow cleavage by the pounding water from the upper Zambezi, and drifting higher and higher into air as if defying gravity, then drifting away when caught by the wind. We walked from lookout to lookout, drenched from head to toe, the power of the downpour pooling water in the bottom of Jim’s "protective" camera bag. It was as if waves of rain were rolling across the gorge to engulf us, even more unlikely under the clear blue sky, We passed more sensible tourists wearing bathers and carrying umbrellas.
The rim of the falls gorge is lush and green, running with streams of water from the continuous drenching, the lush ferns, trees and vines dripping. Every facility in the park has been constructed with taste, so different from the exploitation of Niagara Falls I remember from ten years earlier. Here the paths are pebbled, the bridges made of unworked branches and the fountains and rubbish bins built into tree stumps so there is no glaring break in the texture of the forest. Gimmicky souvenirs such as plastic elephant dung and bottles of Zambezi water abound but are kept inside the shop and hotels and don’t extend onto the falls walk.
Jim and I walked all the way to Danger Point, the corner where the river exits the falls gorge and visitors can look vertically down walls of smooth black rocks to a narrow arm of stone flimsily reaching out into the turbulence. High-vis bright double rainbows arched over the water here.
We made our soggy way back out the main gate and into the curio shops, where we saw beautiful sculptures in stone and wood, the best since Nairobi. My favourites were the carved heads, many using the twisted, rough jutting pieces of raw wood to emphasis facial features – huge pieces carved out of stumps down to narrow branches. The unworked timber contrasting powerfully with the smooth domed skulls and rich grains reminded me of Michelangelo’s Escape sculptures.
Wandered from shop to shop, coming across Linda and Gary, and the Canadian team.
I stopped for a closer look at some men carving ivory in the back yard of one shop, seeing the initial sketches on the bone and noticing a stamped number, the government registration of culled ivory. The artists explained that people found with unstamped, hence poached, ivory face very high fines.
Then I came across a beautiful wooden bust of a nose-boned Zambezi Valley farmer which I bought with my trusty credit card from a friendly white Zimbabwean. (This is my favourite souvenir of this extraordinary journey and I still own it. He gazes out over my mess from the top of my sitting room bookcase.)
Finally dry, Jim and I made our way to the Victoria Falls Hotel for a gargantuan lunch feast of hot and cold buffet, desserts and cheeses, to wonderful light, airy background music from a band playing a collection of xylophone type instruments utilizing the different tones of hollowed gourds, drums and other percussion instruments.
Before we started eating, Jim lay his self-firing, self-winding Contax camera on the table to dry; it promptly did every one of its state-of-the-art functions untouched, blinking lights and making whirring noises, much to Jim's horror (surprisingly, it operated perfectly after this). Halfway through his meal Jim remembered his Tetracycline antibiotic and dipped into his pocket, pulling out a gluggy paper mess holding a bright granularly mixture of red and yellow sludge.
On Jim’s suggestion I visited the 80-year-old hotel's formal dining room. Tables set with pink serviettes stood on deep red carpet and beneath an arched and painted ceiling from which hung ceiling fans gently rotating like something out of the Indian Raj. Floor-to-ceiling velvet curtains hung at the windows.
Nikki returned from her five-minute scenic flight exhilarated, having roared over the falls and seen elephants swimming in the Zambezi. Our flight was equally fantastic, the huge South African pilot executing two circuits above the falls and up the river, giving views from both sides of the plane, the last time dipping the left wing into the water and almost pivoting on the spot, prompting loud exclamations from his passengers at the vertical view down the rock walls into the boiling pot below. Standing at the lookouts you can see, feel and hear the power and volume of the water but only from the air do you appreciate how the violence of the disruption to the river's flow. Above Victoria Falls the meandering Zambezi spreads across the flat plains, a massive 1.7km width of shallow water, peppered with islands. But then it comes to the lip of a 1.7km wide chasm rent through the plain, and thunders 100m to the rocky floor.
We didn't see any swimming elephants but we did see one grazing open ground near the water's edge. By then, though, Hawken was a whiter shade of pale, having left his stomach at the last falls turn.
Ater our too short 15-minute aerial perspective of one of the most spectacular wonders of the world we walked back to the Victoria Falls Hotel for a brief drink in the lounge, before returning to Zambia (I had forgotten that I had Jim's passport so it was lucky that a frantic Jim just caught as at the border). On the short walk to camp an 80cm snake reared up at Geoff and me, fanning its head like a cobra.
Wrote late, long after everyone else had gone to bed. Confused by Ann's anger that we have decided to stay another day here, because she was bored!
Caption: Rainbow Photo by paul milley on Unsplash, Sunset Photo by Sammy Wong on Unsplash
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