THE SMOKE THAT THUNDERS!

21^st May – Day 234 – Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe

Staying put in Victoria Falls town for a couple of days was nice after all the tarmac we'd seen in the past three days. The town itself is obviously built for tourists and doesn't have all that much to offer apart from the nice lodges and a couple of decent places to eat. But just as obviously people come there to see one of great natural wonders of the world, and so did we.

Dr. Livingstone, they presumed? "YES", said the statue.

The day we went to see the falls was a very nice and sunny one which is an advantage since you will invariably get soaking wet at this time of year when the falls are at their most plentiful in terms of the amount of water that flows through (yearly average is 1 000 000 litres per second but we unfortunately don't remember the wet season average). We managed to soak our camera to that extent that it wouldn't recover even after two days of trying to “dry it out” in the sun. Somehow we managed to get the pictures out of it at least. After a tour of the falls we popped a bottle of bubbly in the afternoon sun as well while trying to dry ourselves out.

The mighty falls.

The smoke that thundered turned out to be water vapour.

Voyagers in the mist

Slippery when ultra soaked.

But they found the rainbow!

Late afternoon we embarked on one of the river boats that cruise in the upstream of the Zambezi river. Supposedly you get to see wildlife from the boat but that's not the point so much when your ticket entitles you to free drinks for as much as you can down during the 2 ½ hr cruise. In our case the departure of the boat was delayed by more than an hour because of a party of Chinese people who were also booked on the same cruise were nowhere to be seen. We enjoyed our beverages to the fullest while waiting for them to arrive, cursing them under our breath. Once they finally joined us, we found out that it was the Chinese ambassador to Zimbabwe and his friends and varied work related acquaintances, one of which had lived and worked in Finland as well. The ambassador himself took a great liking to T in particular as they had a chat while going to the bar for a refill at the same time. Sooner than we noticed, the ambassador joined us at our table for some casual conservation about the role of the Chinese in Zimbabwe and in Africa all in all. He was very impressed about our long and eventful journey as well and insisted on taking photos of the young couple (sorry parents but I think that was us). The boat eventually returned to its docking point and we had seen two hippos, a beautiful sunset and were in a very happy mood.

Yeh folks, it's a hippo eat hippo world

Before sobering up too much we moved onto some fine dining to honour our last night in Zimbabwe. The next day we'd be crossing into Botswana and onwards to the Caprivi Strip in Namibia to start another looooooooooooong bus journey down south to Cape Town via Windhoek. I was keen on seeing how the older generation would manage some of the style of travelling we'd been doing for the past eight months. They clearly deserved some pampering before that.

Photo credit: Chinese Ambassador, Harare, Zimbabwe