Victoria Falls and Zimbabwe

July 16th, Day 35:

We woke up in time to get out of our rooms at the hostel before we would get charged for an extra night and waited around for my brother to finish his early morning lion encounter that he had booked. While waiting, Eric and I played some pool and ping-pong and concluded that I was the superior pool player, and he the superior ping-pong player. However who had more of an edge at their respective game than the other was a matter of quite some argument and which still is not settled. All I can say is that I have been undefeated against him in pool since then as well.

When Jonathan arrived we packed our things into his truck and he set off for more of his tourist activities. He was scheduled for a gorge-swing (basically bungee jumping), and then a helicopter ride over Victoria Falls (a great opportunity for us to get some aerial footage!). Eric and I decided to keep things more to our budget since we no longer had the financial backing of my brother and father, as was the case at the safari lodge, and chose to spend the day bicycling around Victoria Falls.

The road to Victoria Falls was shockingly bad. The road to Livingstone and out of Livingstone was a nice paved road, but to my utter confusion they had never gotten around to making the one road that more tourists probably travel down than any other in Southern Africa even remotely decent. It was not only a dirt/sand road, but had enormous rocks all throughout it and ran for about 10 kilometers which made for some very difficult bicycling.

It was all worth it when we saw the falls. One of the seven natural wonders of the world, Victoria Falls is considered the largest waterfall on earth (thought by what measure I am unsure) and it certainly is spectacular. The entire Zambezi River suddenly spills over the edge of a sheer several hundred meter cliff, and the spray from the bottom is so strong that it creates rainfall all around the top of the falls. Eric and I decided to go shirtless rather than get soaked and went on a nice little tour of the falls, however while walking around we decided that we wanted to go check out the Zimbabwe side as well (Victoria Falls is on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe and each country controls half).

The two countries are separated by a single bridge across the gorge, but to go to Zimbabwe and back was too expensive for us because not only do you have to buy a Zimbabwe visa for $30, but a Zambian return visa for another $50. However, we were very curious about seeing what Zimbabwe was like after hearing all the horror stories about it, and also really wanted one of their visas in our passport (they look incredibly cool- great souvenir). We concocted a plan; we would tell the Zambian authorities that we were not leaving the country but were simply walking out onto the bridge to get a better view of the falls, and then when we were out of sight, we would hurry to Zimbabwe, get a visa, take a quick look, and hurry back.

After some confusing conversation with the Zambian authorities they agreed to let us onto the bridge. We hurried across and upon arriving on the Zimbabwean side we were greeted by some military men with heavy machine guns. We were starting to get cold-feet about our whole mission, until we decided to strike up a conversation with the guard and explained that we just wanted a visa in our passport because they looked cool. He turned out to be a great guy and thought our whole situation was hilarious so he pointed us to the gatehouse and we managed to get all sorts of great looking stamps and visas to fill two pages of our passport for almost no money! We concluded that Zimbabwe had a very unfair reputation from our extremely limited experience in it, and left in a great mood. We then passed back into Zambia without any problems and rode our bikes back to the falls. However, the thought suddenly occurred to me that we were unfortunately now illegally in Zambia and if anyone took a close look at our passport they would see that we had a Zimbabwean visa without a re-entrance stamp to Zambia. Oh well…

We had to hit the road to get some mileage in before sundown but decided to make a quick stop to bargain with the hundreds of vendors selling tourist trinkets on the edge of Victoria Falls. We had decided that we were going to use my brother’s tent once he left, and therefore figured we could trade our old tent for all the souvenirs we would ever want. My hopes were reaffirmed when I showed the people the tent and they all surrounded it, gasping at the thought of a “moveable house”, as they called it. When they asked its value, I told them that it was worth around one million Kwacha, which was its actual value and an amount that I thought would astonish them. Big mistake… they immediately explained to me that all of their souvenirs were worth 50,000 or 200,000 or whatever number they wanted to make up, and it was too late for me to play their game and claim my tents value at 100 million or whatever inflation rate they seemed to be using on their goods. However, we decided to make some trades anyways and managed to get a decent amount of things, but they ended up getting the deal of their lifetimes: a high quality all-weather tent for some little figurines and bags.

Finally, we hit the road. We were to bicycle as far as we could until it got dark and then wait for my brother to pick us up and take us to a place to stay for his last night visiting. The plan went well and we got into his truck and started driving towards the nearest town north of Livingstone. There were many fires by the side of the road and it was quite hard to see, when we suddenly crashed straight into a full road block across both lanes of the road. Frantically we got out of the car, furious that there had been no warning signs, when we were approached by two even more furious road-workers. They were screaming at us for having hit their wall, and demanded that we walk back with them so they could show us the “warning signs” that we wanted to see. The more we walked, the more annoyed we became. “There!”, one would angrily shout, pointing to a small traffic cone in the center of the road, “what do you call that!” We explained that not only does a small cone not indicate that there was a huge road block ahead, but more importantly it was impossible to see anything due to the enormous fire that they had built just beside the road block itself. But since tensions were rising and they seemed completely unable to understand the absurdity of their “warning signs” we decided to continue to the closest town and forget the incident ever happened.

Upon arriving in town we managed to find a small guest house. It was extremely cheap, and they even let me carry a mattress into the room and put on the floor to allow us to sleep three. Since it was my brothers last night, we even decided to have a few drinks at the guesthouse bar. This turned out to be a very interesting place.

The only patrons were the owner himself along with a few other men drinking, and one extremely drunk man, all of whom we found out were the local cops. We explained what had happened earlier that night at the road-block and the drunk policeman offered to write-up a police report. We told him that we appreciated it, but it might be better to wait until the morning when he was on duty. “What?!”, he slurred, “I am on duty!”. We laughed at this, but then some of the other less-drunk cops explained that it was a bit of a problem and reprimanded the other cop a bit, failing to realize the irony that the biggest problem was that cops were at a bar drinking while on duty in the first place. We then when to bed, it had been a very interesting day.