Chobe and into Zambia!

July 15th, Day 34:

We finally woke up at a regular hour, around 9am on this Wednesday morning, and enjoyed the great breakfast buffet at the lodge. From there we packed up our bicycles and said our goodbyes to some of the people we had met at the lodge. We had a pretty ambitious agenda on the table for the day so we needed to get started. The plan for the morning was to drive into Chobe National Park, with our bicycles in the back of the truck, and try and get some action shots of us bicycling with animals and the great scenery that Chobe provides. I was a little skeptical of the plan as many of the park employees tell you that animals will not attack cars and trucks because they don’t see it as a prey, but if you get out, there is a chance they will think you are trespassing on their territory and react violently.

Aaron was really into the idea of bicycling with all the animals because it would enable us to get great footage with actual animals and our bicycles, but as mentioned earlier I wanted to stay alive on this day. It turned out to be a pretty calm scene in Chobe and we were able to get some good shots of us bicycling next to some animals. The animals tended to be pretty scared around us so there were no upfront confrontations that I was dreading. I must credit Aaron for the idea of going around the park with our bicycles, because it definitely allowed us to have some cool pictures and encounters with animals while we were cycling.

We departed Chobe around 2pm, and headed towards the border of Botswana and Zambia which was only around 15km from the national park. This was definitely one of the more interesting border crossing scenes I had ever seen. At the border, Botswana and Zambia are separated by a river that is maybe one kilometer wide, but the only way to get across is with little ferries that cannot take more than three cars or however many bicycles that is equivalent to. Luckily for us, the line for the ferry was relatively short and we only had to wait a few minutes to get on. This is in comparison to Aaron’s brother who spent a few hours trying to get across from Zambia to Botswana in order to reach us in Nata a few days before.

Border crossings are usually a pretty exciting time for a number of reasons. One reason is that we will only experience them five times throughout our trip, and they are also a sign of progress as we can check off another country on the map and move on to the next with the uncertainty of the unknown and the promise of new experiences that we will encounter along the way.

It is remarkable how travelling into a different country that is only a few kilometers away can be so different, but Zambia proved to be this way. One just gets a different feeling in Zambia than in Botswana or South Africa, it is hard to explain but you were in our shoes you this would be easier to describe. I think one factor is that Zambia is a lot more populated than Botswana, and the people are very lively and energetic. We noticed this about five minutes into Zambia as maybe thirty local students rode by in a truck meant for maybe ten shouting out a song we could not understand, but thoroughly enjoyed.

Anyway, we headed off on the road to Livingstone, home of Victoria Falls, one of the Seven Wonders of the World according to at least a few lists (there is no official list of Wonders, but Victoria Falls is usually on most lists of Natural Wonders of the world). We would be exploring the falls tomorrow so we needed to get to Livingstone tonight. It was about sundown and we were still a little ways outside the city so we took advantage of Aaron’s brother’s truck when we could no longer see and he drove us into Livingstone.

We happened to find one of the nicer hostels we had ever seen, something that you would think only existed in the movies or your dreams, but this hostel had pretty much everything minus a full-length basketball court with breakaway rims, a big screen television, and a T3 connection. Some of the highlights were an internet café, a swimming pool, a pool table, a ping pong table, and most importantly really cheap rates. We managed to spend no more than thirty bucks for the three of us there and enjoyed the pool and ping pong after we checked into our room. Aaron had my number in pool on this night, like on most nights, but he had no chance in ping pong, a sport I love and would have spent the whole night playing had I found anyone interested in joining me. We grabbed a bite to eat from the bar and went to sleep; the next morning we would check out the incredible Victoria Falls! By the way, if anyone wants to visit Victoria Falls, we stayed at the Jolly Boys Hostel.