Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe

Oliver is fully recovered from his bout with an African lurgy, out of hospital and back to playing Jedi knight with the barbecue tongs. A relatively quick but painful (certainly for the rest of us) recovery.

On the day of his release, we put our groggy, gaunt and grumpy Oliver into the car and drove the 8 hours to Chobe National Park in north-eastern Botswana where we met the Lloyds, camped overnight and headed off almost immediately the next day to Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe. We’re going to try to get back to Chobe somehow as we feel we missed out by not managing to see the park or spend much time there.

Zimbabwe has been interesting… To date, most of our trip has been to and through pretty organized places. Namibia and Botswana, though remote in places, are totally functional – at very least there’s food, fuel and ATMs. Then, woomph, Zimbabwe. As we were leaving Botswana we discovered that there was a fuel shortage in northeastern Botswana – and you had better have a full tank before going to Zimbabwe. The Botswanan truckers were telling us how we’d have to buy diesel on the black market in Zimbabwe. The only petrol station we found with any fuel had enough left for 100 cars and there was a queue of 50 cars, mostly from Zambia or Zimbabwe. We were fortunate that the diesel line was shorter.

There’s a conspiracy here in Zimbabwe where all the locals maintain the facade that all is normal and fine. They desperately need and want tourists to keep the place ticking over. When you ask how often there are power cuts, they respond “ooh, only once every two weeks or so”. But in the spirit of Monty Python dead parrots, every day the lights go out for up to 8 hours, the bakers don’t bake, the bank machines don’t dispense, the cellphone network fails, the fuel doesn’t pump etc. etc. Cooking oil is used to fill otherwise empty store shelves.  The resorts isolate their guests from all this with generators and specially-imported food supplies – if you’re camping you get the real picture. Every shop patriotically displays a picture of His Bobness on the wall by the cash till, complete with his bizarre Hitleresque moustache, presiding over the chaos.

The bits of Zim we’ve seen so far are really beautiful, it’s been very safe and the people are great – but there are clearly some huge challenges.

Victoria Falls (the town) is a bit of a typical African tourist town. The falls themselves are spectacular. And the whole spectacle is still very raw and unspoiled: no one has erected whopping great security barriers everywhere to protect you from yourself and there’s a refreshing lack of “mind the canyon” nanny-state reminders about the obvious dangers. What fences there are to prevent you from falling to your death are fashioned from twigs and dead tree branches.

The weather has been a challenge recently. When people said that summer was rainy season here, they actually meant “torrential season”. The weather cycles from massive thunderstorms to sunny in about 15 minutes – and can switch about 10 times a day. Our tents seem to deal with the rain very well, though there is certainly a lot of it. Yesterday the floor of our tent was like a waterbed – there were about 3 inches of water underneath it. Part of our tent setup routine now involves digging a drainage trench around the tent to redirect the massive amounts of surface water. Character building stuff!

We are now starting the disorganised phase of the trip. We know we are leaving Victoria Falls tomorrow but we’re not sure where to quite yet. Maybe back to Botswana. Maybe to Lake Kariba, further up in Zim. Maybe to Hwange (pr. Wankee) Park just south of Victoria Falls…