Tag: River
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Canal footbridge Burano, Venice
Canal footbridge Burano, Venice. Click on the image for a larger view and for other options. -
African shoestrings – Zimbabwe Day One Hundred Harare
Our last session of paddling was a mere 6 kilometres to our final destination, Nyamepi Camp in Mana Pools National Park. All in all we had paddled a total of 58 kilometres and by the time we had finished we all felt strong and confident enough to have gone on for another three days. When we were asked later on what had been the best thing we had seen and done whilst travelling this always comes to mind. It had been one of the greatest experiences of our lives!
We were back in Harare at around 10 pm and settled into our very ordinary (especially at the price of US$65 per person) room in the annex of the Bronte Hotel. This was meant to be our treat but the room was tired and old and really was no more comfortable than an average priced motel found in anywhere in the western world. What was nice about the Bronte was the hotel lobby and gardens and we made sure that we fully enjoyed having our breakfast, a drink in the afternoon and a coffee after dinner in the tropical colonial style gardens. Dinner was actually the best event of the day (we had spent a good few hours at the Tanzania embassy obtaining our visas). The Italian Restaurant Fat Mama’s in the Russell Hotel was obviously the local white and ex-pats hangout and I could see why. Great food, great atmosphere and great prices!
The next few days were taken up with transport and what I call the bus rides from hell! What follows next is reality but not necessarily typical of public transport in this part of the world. Of all the people we met during our travels we were the only ones who seemed to cop the experiences that I’m about to describe. It just seemed to happen to us!
Bus ride from hell number one started with a pick up at our hotel, early the next morning, by the bus company Ute to take us the Mbare bus station across town. On his way (in fact out of his way) the driver went via Possum lodge and picked up two other unsuspecting white passengers.
The bus station was chaotic and frightening. People came from everywhere grabbing at our bags and us. Someone grabbed one of our bags and with me still hanging onto it, led us onto the bus and then asked for our passports. What then confused us was another guy sitting further down the bus also asking for our passports and at the same time shouting “Watch your bags, watch your passports, watch everything!”
This guy was obviously in charge and we held onto the passports until we reached him. The other guy mysteriously disappeared and there was no doubt in my mind that had we relinquished our passports to him that would have been the last we would have seen of them.
Once we found our seats we could see the chaos and crap outside the bus. I say crap because the diesel fumes were noxious and those working in the area had paper filters fitted over their mouths and noses.
The seats we had were one row from the back and directly behind the other white couple who seemed to have handled the situation a with lot more cool than we had. Our bags were on the seat behind and we had three seats all to ourselves. This wasn’t going to be so bad we thought as eventually the bus got going. But that was as good as it got! Fifteen minutes later it stopped at the bus depot to pick up double the amount of passengers and probably triple the amount of luggage. There is a rule in Africa; don’t allow your bags to sit on the roof of any vehicle ’cause there’s a big chance you won’t see them again. Even the locals hang onto their bags. This time despite our protests we knew we had no choice; there was hardly enough room for all the passengers let alone the bags.
I got out of the bus and stood and watched as they loaded the bags on to roof. The only other white guy, Andy stood next to me. Andy was a Zimbabwean and his girl friend Jenny was from South Africa.
“So what happens now” I asked
“I dunno” he said
“You’re the local”
“Yeah but I’ve never traveled on one of these before”
The bus driver, conductor and other helpers finished covering the bags with a huge tarp and tying it all down and we were beckoned back onto the bus.
Oh well I thought not much we can do now as we got back onto the bus.
We had now lost our spare seat to a small quiet man who spent most of the time dozing. His head flopped about as if connected to his body by a rubber neck and often ended up on my shoulder. We westerners are funny like that we cringe at someone encroaching on our space. I had to keep shrugging him off and I swear that if I had some rope I would have tied his head to the back of the seat.
The bus actually set off at 8.15 surprisingly only one and half hours late. It didn’t take long for part of the tarp to come away and start flapping against the side of the bus and on our first refreshment stop it was retied well enough to last around fifteen minutes before it started flapping again.
After that stop we acquired a rather sinister looking uniformed man who checked a few passports and then disappeared and then reappeared half an hour later to collect a Z$70 ‘border fee’ from everyone. It was the last of our Z$ and I had the feeling that we were being ‘had’ especially when no receipt was forthcoming even when asked for. This fee was apparently to ease the pain going through the Mozambique border post.
At the Nyamapanda border our passports were collected by this bloke and he made a sort of half hearted inspection of our bags before giving our passports and presumably money to the Mozambique officials. We had to wait around for about an hour whilst all this ‘officialdom’ was dealt with.
This was the pits.
The Zimbabwe side was not too bad but the Mozambique post was an old dilapidated shack with a couple of holes in the ground masquerading as public toilets a few metres away. They stunk! The stench was almost visible from 10 metres away.The whole area was full of persistent moneychangers, curio sellers, drink sellers and sellers of anything else they could rip you off with. It was the first of only two times that we were glad to get back onto the bus.
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Happier times -Dug out canoes at the Okavango Delta In Botswana Share this:
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African shoestrings – Zimbabwe Day Ninety-Nine Zambezi River
Later that morning with us bringing up the rear as usual we were paddling alongside an island to avoid a pod of hippos.
Suddenly a flurry of activity brings four hippos scurrying out of the bush and into the water just metres in front of Peter and Greg. They disappeared into deep water and four pairs of eyes popped up about twenty metres from us and watched as we tentatively crept past getting as close as we could to the bank.After such an exhausting morning (we had covered 20 kilometres as well) we were thankful for a stop for lunch and a couple of hours siesta followed by a swim in the shallows later in the afternoon under the watchful gaze of a few hippos.
Still by the time we had got to our overnight stop at a deserted beach we were all pretty much exhausted and aching. The excellent food and some elephants strolling down to the water’s edge for a drink a mere 150 metres away soon resuscitated us.
We were now in Mana Pools National Park and the hunting camps and other signs of humanity gave way to thorny bushveld and groves of Acacia and other trees. It was a full moon and as it rose it lit our campsite with a soft glow and turned a nearby perfectly formed thorny Acacia tree into a silhouette.The distant roar of a lion, the call of hyena and the munching of the hippos nearby seemed to be with us all during the evening and overnight. Despite our soreness, exhaustion and apprehension this was as good as it gets!
Peter and Greg allayed our fears somewhat about hippos. Apparently like most wild animals they only attack only when they feel threatened. The stories of canoes being turned over are greatly exaggerated and usually caused by accident. In deep water a hippo may be right underneath the canoe and its occupants totally unaware, so if it decides to pop up and you’re in the way, bad luck!
These guys seem to know their stuff. Peter was from the Shona, the most populous people in Zimbabwe and Greg was a young white guy from a farming family. When talking amongst themselves they spoke Shona. It seems that even though English is the official language Shona is more commonly spoken. They also told us of our biggest danger. “We (meaning Peter and I) will stand guard overnight to watch for Zambians paddling across from the other side. They ‘ave been known to raid a campsite and steal belongings from the tents and canoes whilst everyone slept.” Greg said.
Great I thought, we have to watch out for crocs and hippos by day and thieving Zambians by night.
Our final full day at 24 kilometres was a lot shorter and allowed us to leisurely enjoy the sun rising over the Zambezi.
This was our best day!
The river was mostly a series of tranquil channels and the wildlife was everywhere. Lots of hippos to be seen but none that were close enough to trouble us; a herd of elephants on the Zambian side; more elephants near our lunch spot; waterbuck, buffalo and impala also darted in around the national park edge, whilst little bee eaters probed small openings they had created as entrances to their nests inside the cliff face of the riverbank. But the piece ‘d’ resistance was yet to come. Swimming in a shallow channel we dried off and under Peters leadership we approached, by foot through the water, a large pod of hippos. We got within four metres of them as they watched us whilst closely bobbing up and down, ears flapping and noses snorting. They were watching us as warily as we were they. I snapped away around ten shots only to realise that I had the camera still set for a much dimmer light. By the time I reset, the hippos were almost completely submerged and moving away. Curses!Ten metres beyond them an elephant descended the bank and paddled across the deeper channel up ahead to join his mates strutting on a small island. Later that afternoon we stopped our paddling and drifted as we watched more elephants frolic in the water just in front of us. Peter was pretty keen on ensuring that we didn’t get too close but some other canoeists were foolishly a lot closer and came very close to having their canoes turned into firewood.
Five kilometres on and it was time to set up camp for the last night on another sand island. First we had to navigate our way through a narrow channel with, you’ve guessed it, another pod of hippos in the way. No drama. Peter and Greg slapped their paddles against their canoes and off they went to safer waters.
On dry land we were all busting and Sue managed to grab the spade before anyone else and headed off to an inconspicuous place. She was had been so absorbed with finding a hidden spot that it wasn’t until relief had come that she realised that there was a hippo lying on the bank asleep a mere five metres away. Any alien who had no prior knowledge of humanity would have gone away thinking what strange toilet rituals we have once he saw this mad women running towards us waving a spade with one hand and holding up her shorts with other!
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Elephants in the Zambezi River walking across the river in Zimbabwe Share this:
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African shoestrings – Zimbabwe Day Ninety-Eight Zambezi River
We got to the Bronte at 5.00 am the next morning ready and waiting for our guide Peter and his offsider Greg who both turned up at 6.00 am with a driver Showee.
We were heading for Chirundu some seven hours drive away via Breakfast at Chinhoyi and picking up the final two other members of our group at Makuti, Peter and Susan. They were Aussies as well, like us travelling on a tight budget and (shock horror) were about our vintage.Chirundu is a small town set on the river and serves as a border post with Zambia. It’s here that the real business begins.
A leisurely lunch was followed by a lesson on Canoeing and some tips about animal behaviour. This last topic made us all sit up and listen. “Iiif you are feced with hippo, den puddle towards shallow water und keep you distance. Iiif a hippo charges und turns oover de canooo den geet into anoother”.
Great!
I noticed that Peter (the Aussie) had some bad scratches on his legs and arms. “Oh that. We were charged by a hippo in Matusadona and I jumped into a very thorny bush” he said.
This was getting worse!
Now it was time to get on the water. The canoes were twenty-foot Canadian style (whatever that meant) and we climbed in after all our bags and supplies were loaded into the middle of the canoe. If this baby turned over not only would we get wet but so would all our belongings.
That afternoon we covered 16 kilometres and it felt like 100! I had the rear seat so the art of steering was all mine to conquer and needless to say our progress was a series of zig zags along the fast flowing water.
This part of the Zambezi is around 800 kilometres downstream of Victoria Falls and 140 kilometres from the eastern edge of Lake Kariba and the infamous Kariba Dam. I say infamous because when it was built in the 1950’s, nature (in the form of the god Nyaminyami according to the local Tonga tribe) did its damnedest to destroy the project with three unprecedented floods and a heat wave causing the deaths of many workers and severe damage to the work in progress.
The river was wide with the seemingly uninhabited terrain of mountains and hills of Zambia on the north side and the steep riverbanks dotted with hunting camps of Zimbabwe on the south. In between both banks, islands of marshy wet lands split the river creating tranquil channels with lush grasses and lily like growth. With the current flowing with us it all seemed very easy at the beginning. But it didn’t take long to realise that I needed to get the hang of this steering quick smart to avoid the hippos that seemed to be lurking around every corner and the odd croc that lay patiently at the water’s edge.
By the time we reached our destination a small sandy island a couple of hundred metres from the Zimbabwe side, we were ready to rest.
As with the rest of trip there are no washing or toilet facilities here. A spade with a toilet roll at the water’s edge is as good as it gets.
After we erected our tents around the dining table and the fireplace, Peter and Greg presented a feast fit for kings.
Amazingly we had steak and fresh vegetables washed down with the local Myuku red.
Add that to the good conversation and the odd snort of a hippo and roar of a lion and I felt like we were in paradise.Not so Sue.
Her arms ached from the paddling, she was also concerned as to whether she could paddle the 38 kilometres the next day and she felt really worried about the hippos.
We later attributed the latter to the malaria tablets, Lariam that we taking. One of its side effects is anxiety and as you can see there was plenty to get anxious about.If Sue was worried about hippos the day before then the morning doubled her fear. Soon after we set off we rounded the bend and the channel narrowed.
Suddenly out from the tall grass on the left bank, rushed a huge hippo straight into the water towards the opposite bank.
Steering and stopping a two berth canoe was still beyond Peter’s and my capabilities as first our canoe, then Peter and Susan’s jackknifed into the bank. We both came to a halt facing back the way we had just come, a few metres from where the guides were waiting patiently in their canoe.
Peter (the guide) opened his hand, drew it down his face and took a deep breath. “OK” he said, “You can’t turn around here so you’ll both have to go back and turn around keeping as close as you can to this bank”Peter and Sue set off first and successful negotiated the turn. We (well actually me) didn’t do so well. We ended up with such a huge turning circle that before we knew it we were heading directly for the spot in the water where the hippo had last been sighted. There was nothing we could do except, as I yelled to Sue
” Paddle for fucks sake just paddle!”
Which is exactly what we did as the canoe passed right over the top of the hippo as the others watching in amazement or was it amusement.
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Hippos in the Zambezi River watching canoes in Zimbabwe Share this:
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African shoestrings – Zimbabwe Day Ninety-Three Masvingo Zimbabwe
The next day was one of those days. Our early morning game drive yielded very little wildlife. It was our last opportunity to see wildlife in Hwange as we then commenced the 630 kilometre journey to Masvingo in the southeast. On the way out we flagged down by a ranger who asked us to drop off a couple of youngsters at the main road. No problem we thought. Except when we got to the main road they didn’t have a clue as to where they were. We obviously couldn’t leave them there and drive away with a clear conscience, so we ended up taking them into the actual town of Hwange 10 kilometres in the opposite direction, where they lived. This must have distracted me because it wasn’t until we had traveled a fair distance towards Bulawayo that we realised that we did not have as much fuel as I had thought. We found much to our dismay that there was not a single open petrol station between Hwange and Bulawayo. We were now sweating on whether we would have enough to reach Bulawayo. We did of course but as soon as I turned the key to drive off after gratefully refueling, you’ve guessed it, nothing happened. The battery lead had again come adrift. After again some basic repairs we were back on the road still sweating but these time about the battery lead. Worse still it was now getting late and that meant driving in the dark.
So what, you say!……………… Well, driving in the dark in somewhere like Zimbabwe is a challenge. Firstly, once out of the cities and major towns there is very little street lighting. Secondly, there are lots of pedestrians on the road who are not easily visible as they mostly wear dark clothing and are obviously black skinned. Lastly, the other vehicles on the road had at best, blinding headlights and at worst none at all but most seemed to have only one headlight working which meant that it was impossible to tell whether the vehicle coming in the opposite direction was either a motorbike or a car on the wrong side of the road!
Our intention had been to book a night at a place called Clovelly Lodge in Masvingo on our way. Do you think we could find a pay phone that worked? No! It wasn’t until we reached Masvingo itself that we managed to ring them, find out if they still had a room free and get directions. Needless to say we got there somewhat stressed and it didn’t help that we were immediately pushed into the dining room where dinner was now being served up (it was full board).
Clovelly was run by Bruce and Iris an elderly English couple who basically felt that the current situation in Zimbabwe was becoming intolerable for any whites to stay. At the same time they were trapped. Their assets and money were now worth very little outside of the country and that made it very hard for them to leave. Now of course with all the recent publicity of white farms being hijacked by black war veterans, I often think of people like Bruce and Iris and wonder of they ever found a way out.
By this time we had verbally booked a Canoe safari on the Zambezi to start in a few days time, so it was with great interest that we listened to a couple of German guys who were also staying there. They had just finished that same trip and had cut short their stay in Africa to fly home on account of one of them being badly bruised down one side of his body. Apparently they had been sleeping in their tent when a hippo trampled right over the top of the tent and poor old Klaus. Peter on the other hand slept through the whole thing and didn’t realise what had happened until the next morning when he awoke to see his mate writhing in pain and the tent collapsed and torn down one side. “What the fuck were you doing last night?” he had asked.
We later found out that hippos have their own paths from land to water and if by chance you happen to be between a hippo and water on one of these trails then he (or she) is not going to politely side step around you. That is apparently what happened to these guys. Fortunately for us they had used a different safari company so we could hopefully presume that there was little chance of that happening to us.
Now there was a reason we were in Masvingo. The town itself is just one of those typical small towns that can be found almost anywhere else with wide streets crisscrossing in the style of towns and cities established in the late nineteenth century. Its only real claim to fame is the general consensus that it was the first white settlement in Zimbabwe but that is not, in today’s political climate, much of a tourist attraction. What we were there for was not actually in Masvingo but 25 kilometres south. The Great Zimbabwe National Monument is one of Southern Africa’s greatest historical ruins.
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Two hippos grazing by the side of the Zambezi River in Zimbabwe Share this:
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African shoestrings – Zimbabwe Day Eighty Seven Bulawayo
In Canada I was asked how Niagara Falls compared to Victoria Falls. I said bluntly that whilst the Zimbabweans had made a bit of a mess of the town the area around the falls was still protected and in a natural setting. Somehow the North Americans had turned the falls into a Disney meets nature theme park and built something ugly on almost every square inch of land around the falls.
And that is the great thing about Victoria Falls. Surrounded by rainforest created from the mist that the falls generates, you can imagine that what you are seeing now is pretty similar to what David Livingstone saw when he stumbled across it in the mid 1800’s. As I explained previously last time we had been here the water level had been a lot lower. Now the falls were torrential and mist was everywhere, not enough to spoil the view as on the Zambian side but enough to get us wet again. Probably the most dramatic view is to be had from Cataract View. This requires a climb down a steep stairway into the gorge and it’s from here that we found the classic view found in all good coffee table books. There are many other view points along the path that parallels the falls. The closer ones were a waste of time but the ones further away enabled us to get a sense of scale and that’s when you realise how awesome this place is. Its as if there are billions of tiny droplets of water dropping 100 metres into the gorge, each one independent of each other and then coming together as one seething mass of water on impact at the bottom. We stood and watched this incredible creation of nature for sometime before leaving and finding somewhere to toss some fluid down into our abyss and watch the world cup cricket.
We were a bit disappointed with our coupe on the train. We’re not sure whether it was the luck of the draw or the fact that we booked second class but we didn’t get the wood paneling, red velour upholstery and brass of a bygone era. Instead we got metal paneling and grey dull upholstery. Most trains in Zimbabwe run overnight on long journeys and run very slowly! It took ten hours to travel a distance of 439 kilometres or twice as long as it would have done by car. But we had, so we thought at the time, some good reasons to travel by train; it would save on accommodation, it was cheaper to hire a car in Bulawayo than Vic Falls and I liked trains. Whilst I’m not in the train spotter league, I find it quite comforting to sit or lie down listening to the rhythmic ‘clatter de clatter’. I was to be disappointed, just as we would nod off to the gentle swaying of the carriage the train would stop at some imaginary station in the middle of nowhere and then spent the next thirty minutes shunting. Add that to the fact that the doom and gloomers had been at us in Vic Falls, warning us to keep our windows locked to guard against straying arms that appear at stations and whip away your possessions and never to leave your coupe unattended, and you can see why we got very little sleep. To add insult to injury we discovered that hire cars cost the same in Bulawayo as they do in Vic Falls after all!
Louise from Burkes Paradise Backpackers met us at the station at around 7 am and whisked us away to a reasonable size house on a reasonable size property away from the centre of town. Louise and her husband Colin were caretaker managers whilst the owner Alan Burke was away and whilst they were pretty helpful they were obviously new to the game. As with white South Africans white Zimbabweans were fearful for their future under the current regime. Certainly they had good reason, Zimbabwe’s economy was in tatters, inflation was out of control and there was no money to pay the souring national debt or anything else for that matter. Of course since we left the country it’s gone from very bad to chaotic with the well publicised grabs of white owned farms that have resulted in crop failures of massive proportions and therefore very little left to export. The Z$ is worth nothing outside of Zimbabwe, so those who choose to get out, leave with very little unless they were smart enough to have some investments overseas. To a lot of whites still there, Zimbabwe is their home and has been for a least a couple of generations so leaving the country is the last resort.
Not that they’ve been there all that long. The remarkable Cecil Rhodes managed to obtain mining rights from the Ndebele tribe for his British South Africa Company as late as 1888. From then on the area that is now Zambia and Zimbabwe was settled by whites and the long running conflict between black and white that still continues today was born. Eventually after ten years of fighting between the Shona and Ndebele on one side and white settlers on the other, Southern Rhodesia started to push for self-government, which was eventually achieved in 1923. Thirty years later, along with Northern Rhodesia (present-day Zambia) and Nyasaland (present-day Malawi), it became part of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland. This federation lasted a mere ten years, when the other two countries obtained independence as Zambia and Malawi. Rhodesia, as it was now called, started negotiations on their independence. But with no plan to involve black Africans, the Poms rejected this proposal. Eventually the white government led by Ian Smith got pissed off by this and declared independence anyway. It wasn’t until 1980 after a lot of bloodshed, two different governments and Britain regaining control, that free elections were held. Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) won the election easily and the rest as they say is history!
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Victoria Falls from the Zambia side Share this:
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African shoestrings – Zambia Day Eighty Six Victoria Falls
Apart from the shopping and of course the many energetic activities associated with the falls itself (like bungy jumping, white water rafting, absailing etc) there is one that takes you back to a long gone era of British colonialism; afternoon tea on the terrace of the Victoria Falls hotel. This colonial style building had for years been the centre for Europeans up until independence. It was here that local white farmers, townsfolk and well off visitors would gather for spot of ‘tiffin’. Certainly it has lost none of its atmosphere even if it has its colonial clientele. Nowadays well off tourists (mostly Americans) stay in its well-appointed and stylish rooms and budget tourists like us frequent it for afternoon or morning tea and if really feeling extravagant, dinner. Of course it does have prime position overlooking the Zambezi gorge just downstream from the falls.
I couldn’t help imagining, as we ate our cucumber and smoked salmon triangular bite sized sandwiches, men and women in hats, striped jackets and full length full dresses playing croquet or just lazing around on the expansive and immaculate back lawn. Black waiters dressed in black trousers and white dinner jackets, hovered at our beck and call and delivered the three tier silver tray full of sandwiches, scones, finger cakes and on the side the obligatory tea. It was wonderful even though I don’t like cucumber or tea and cheap at an all you can eat price of US$4 each.
Across the other side of the hotel is the train station, another relic of the Edwardian past. We had to catch a train here to Bulawayo the next day and we thought it a good idea to book. We had wanted to book a first class coupe, which sleeps just two but had to settle for a second class that sleeps three. Not a big issue we thought at the time. The train left at 5 pm the next day so we had 24 hours left in Vic. Falls.
Despite the number of tourists that increase as the years go by there is still plenty of wildlife in and around Vic Falls. On our last visit we twice come across wild elephants whilst walking and cycling just outside of town and had also seen a family crossing the Zambezi upstream from the falls. This time round we saw plenty of elephants on a night time game drive and then the following morning we actually rode on some as well!
Elephant riding is an experience not to missed. The Elephant camp is in a location too remote to find ourselves, so we were picked up and taken there early in the morning and given tea (again) and biscuits just in case we couldn’t survive a couple of hours without sustenance.
Richard our tour leader introduced us to the elephants as their riders put them through a series of exercises. Fortunately we didn’t need to follow suit! Next it was time to jump on and that’s easy. A platform has been erected just for this purpose.
Settling in behind the rider (they very wisely team novices like us with riders who really know what they’re doing) I thought how well cushioned the saddles are. Now I always thought that elephants were big heavy brutes that destroy everything in their path as they move around.
Well that myth was destroyed within the first five minutes of riding! Incredibly they just glide through the bush effortlessly and quietly leaving no trace behind them. Apparently it’s the muscles in their feet that move around to cope with the weight displacement. So it’s just a steady swaying movement as we followed Richard who was on foot and carrying a rifle with both hands behind his neck. The rifle is for our protection just in case a lion or leopard gets too near. Even though he’s never had to use it yet he still believes it’s better to be on the safe side and that sounded like a pretty good practice to me.Richard was one of those “boy’s own” characters that seem so commonplace in the ex British colonial Africa. A tall, solidly built, good looking young man he spoke with that sort of cultured Zimbabwean English accent that’s also very close to the accent spoken by South Africans of British ancestry. He would have been born and brought up during Zimbabwe’s war of independence and most likely, as with so many others of his generation who stayed and toughed it out, he was taught how to fire a gun before he could read.
My elephant was called Manna and my rider was Sopi. Sopi was quite chatty and told me that they had eight elephants in all. They use them in rotation and were purchased for Z$500 from a nearby park that were about cull these beautiful beasts. Most of them are males; it seems that their temperament is more suited to this type of work than females. Elephants live for around 60 – 70 years and during this time they will wear out four sets of teeth. After having seen them eat at the end of the ride I’m not surprised, they chew as if their lives depend on it which in fact I suppose is true. It’s partially because of their feeding habits that the ride is only one and a half hour long. Apparently they get rather anxious and twitchy when they get hungry so it’s wise to keep it short and let us off before hunger gets the better of them.
The ride actually finished at a secluded spot where we also got fed but not until we helped the riders feed them. Both Sue and I bravely put our hands into our respective elephants mouths with some special feed which was their treat for being good little steeds (the feed not our hands). It actually wasn’t the hand I feared for the most, it was suffocation; their breath is terrible! But not quite bad enough to put me off my bacon and eggs!
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Dug out canoes at the Okavango delta in Botswana Share this:
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African shoestrings – Zambia Day Eighty Five Victoria Falls
We left Livingstone via the hostel shuttle that was masquerading as the back of a Ute and into Zimbabwe the next morning. The driver actually stopped at the border and took in our passports to the Zambian immigration office for stamping which was a bit disconcerting as a passport is considered the only thing that you should never let out of your possession. But he looked like a trustworthy soul and from the couple of grunts he had given us, he had this air of knowing what he was doing.
A good thing about the backpacker hostels is their network. At each one you can usually book ahead for the next one and even further ahead. In Victoria Falls we had booked to stay at a place named with obviously a lot of thought, 357 Gibson Road. It was a quite comfortable place run and owned by a Dutch couple Hans (who else?) and Elizabeth, full of Aussie travelers and cheap, which in Vic. Falls is a rarity in this age of mass tourism. There’s always a reason why a place is cheap and 357 Gibson Road was no exception. It was 25-minute walk to the centre of town. Now if you’re staying in Rome, Paris, Sydney or even Perth that’s great. In a small town that’s a long walk.
Fortunately Hans gave us and a couple of other Aussies, Greg and Leann, a lift via the local markets into town. Zimbabwe at that time and in fact as I write is in the process of having its currency nosedive into totally a dark void of worthlessness.
Great if you’re a traveler from almost anywhere but not if you live there. You can almost always tell how much a country has lost confidence in its currency, the good old US$ starts to become the currency of tourism. Zambia had already made that transition, we paid for our accommodation in US$ even though we paid by credit card. As John one of the owners of Fawlty Towers put it “You just can’t rely on the Kwacha (Zambia’s currency) to be the same value tomorrow morning as it is today”. At that time 1500 Kwacha equalled one Aussie dollar or US$0.60. It cost us 8000Kwacha (US$3.00) to travel the 11 kilometre distance from the falls back to Livingstone in a taxi! So in Zimbabwe the A$ was only worth 25 Zimbabwe dollars but we still felt like millionaires in the local markets.Hans left us to wander around whilst he went about his normal business of purchasing his weekly supplies. These markets weren’t the usual stalls and stands but a dusty, rambling and poorly maintained open-air shopping centre. There wasn’t a lot to look at except hairdressers. Every second shop seemed to be a hairdresser or a bitsa shop. You know one of those shops that sell a bit of this, that and anything else. It was at one of these shops that we all decided to stop and have Z$5.00 (US$0.12) cokes. We actually hadn’t planned to stop but we had to stay there until we had finished drinking so we could hand back the empties. Coke in most of these countries comes in the old coke bottles that have probably been around since it first came on the market early in the twentieth century. What worried me is whether the coke we drinking is that old as well!
As we drank at this rather poor excuse for a milk bar, we did the usual story swapping that travelers do. It turned out Greg was from Perth and had just hitchhiked from Mozambique and somehow got caught up with a drunken driver who stopped at every bar on the 500 kilometre journey. Mozambique is apparently not the sort of place you walk away from a lift unless you have a few months to spare or worse still a gun! This story was to have a lot more relevance to us later on than we realised at the time.
In the 4 years since we first visited Vic Falls it had changed a fair bit. Like any tourist town it always had its fair share of hotels and shops, now it had even more and a lot of them were more upmarket. It had even acquired the obligatory casino.
One place that hadn’t been touched was an area nicknamed curio row. It’s here that you will find almost any type of African curio but in particular rhinos, hippos, African figures and any other shape considered popular, all carved from soapstone or wood. The trouble is there are so many of them that it’s hard to be convinced that guy selling them from his stall (often a just a chair in a small section of a crowded car park) actually made them himself or represents his local village. Somehow I get the impression that it all comes from a huge factory secretly hidden away in the bush. But I guess for these people all that matters is that they sell.
And they do!…………. Tourists gobble them up and take them home and pepper them all round their home or put them aside and forget about them. In these times of globalisation you can find most of these goods in specialty shops in any big western city but usually at four or five times the price. So sometimes it’s often the price and the perception of negotiating a bargain with the seller, that attracts tourists rather than the quality or its origin. We as ‘discerning’ buyers found a small shopping centre around the back of the curio row and bought what we considered more original and quality goods (albeit at higher prices and no option to bargain) than what was on offer elsewhere.
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Victoria Falls from the Zambia side Share this:
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African shoestrings – Zambia Day Eighty Four Livingstone
Victoria Falls (known locally as “the mist that thunders”) is one of the great natural beauties of the world. A quirk of political geography has put just over half of the falls in Zambia but three quarters of the viewing area in Zimbabwe. Consequently the views from both countries are a lot different. After having been dropped off by the Fawlty Towers shuttle; we strolled into the Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park, where the Zambian viewpoints are located, past the many curio stalls that we decided we would look at later and straight into mist!
Let me see if can set the scene for you…………… Imagine if you can the mighty Zambezi, a wide stretch of water, sweeping down from its source in North Western Zambia some 900 kilometres away, plunging down a 103 metre high and 1600 metre wide precipice into a narrow gorge which turns at right angles on the Zambia border into an even narrower channel and out into a slightly wider gorge as if unaffected by its trauma of the last 2 kilometres of its journey. From a huge wide open river, the Zambezi hits Victoria Falls and changes its identity into a body of water flowing through a series of narrow and deep gorges. The Zambian viewpoints are all at the point of convergence of water from the Zimbabwean side meeting water from the Zambian side and then somehow squeezing into that first narrow channel. It is here that great volumes of water thunders down and then rises up in the form of mist, hence the name “The mist that thunders” and then drenches everything in sight including us! Last time we had been there the water level had been a lot lower and we managed to stay relatively dry in comparison. This time we only succeeded in keeping the camera dry as we wondered from point to point beginning to look like drowned rats.
When the rains have been good its estimated about 5 Million cubic metres of water per minute passes over the falls and I’m sure it was all falling on top of us! There’s one particular point called appropriately Knife Edge Bridge. It’s a wooden footbridge that crosses from the mainland to a tiny island in the Zambezi. Walking across is about as close as you get to walking through the falls itself. Needless to say we could see nothing but feel plenty. In the end we gave up and found a trail that led down to the water’s edge downstream of the falls. It was called Boiling Point and it’s here that you can see a great swirling mass of water resembling a watery black hole generated by the pounding that is happening a few 100 metres upstream. It’s also here that the best view of the Zambezi Bridge is to be had. It joins the two countries and hosts two sets of customs and immigration, a continuous human chain crossing both ways and Bungy Jumping.
Look I hope that I’m not offending too many die-hard Bungy jumpers here but why? Why would anyone of sound mind and body attach an ankle to a glorified lackey band and jump off a 100 metre plus cliff, bridge or whatever, bounce up and down upside down for fun? A friend of ours did it and said that she had such an adrenalin rush that it stayed with her for a week. Well, let me tell you that’s one experience I’m happy to bypass. I get an adrenalin rush just from looking down (mind you that’s probably actually naked fear). Well anyway from our position I have to admit the jumpers looked spectacular jumping from the bridge. Small and almost insignificant against the backdrop of the huge gorge that houses both the bridge and the Zambezi but spectacular nonetheless.
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Victoria Falls and the Zambezi Bridge from the Zambia side Share this:
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African shoestrings – Zambia Day Eighty Three Livingstone
We were now into the final day of the Audi tour and the final trip was from Kasane to Livingstone. Somehow five of us, plus Chris and our bags, managed to squeeze into an old beaten up left hand drive Nissan Sunny and drive to Kazungula where we crossed the Zambezi by ferry into Zambia. After the usual slow border control process we were met fortunately by one of Chris’s offsiders in a minibus that was able to take our bags. We mere humans continued on in the luxury Nissan along 60 kilometres of what we presumed was once upon a time a flat bitumen road surface that had now been reduced to an ‘African’ track of potholes punctuated by the odd short stretch of almost smooth bitumen.
Our final destination was the quaintly and considering Chris was one of the owners, appropriately named Fawlty Towers backpackers in Livingstone. Actually it’s one of the better backpackers we had seen so far. It was like a mini resort without the poolside cocktail bar. A big private courtyard with a swimming pool was at the centre with most of the accommodation and functional rooms fronting it. A little of oasis of western culture in the heart of a very African town, somehow I felt that it had been designed to keep the residents away from the inquisitive locals.
Actually Livingstone itself was quite a nice place. Its located 11 kilometres from Victoria falls itself as distinct from the Victoria Falls the town. Four years previous we had stayed a few days at Victoria Falls and had hired a couple of bikes so that we could ride across the border and see the Zambian side of the falls and visit Livingstone. We did the former but we were put off the idea of the latter by the bike hire guys. “You must make sure your wife is always in front of you and close to you otherwise those Zambians will kidnap her. Livingstone is a bad place”. Needless to say four years on, it was with some trepidation that we actually walked into the main part of town.
We needn’t have worried! Whilst the Lonely Planet does actually mention incidents of the occasional walker being mugged between the falls and the town, there was certainly no indication of a wild town that was eyeing up every white female with a view of selling her at the local slave market. Mind you the Lonely Planet did mention the fact that due to the muggings bike hire had become popular which changed little as there were now reports of the odd cyclists being mugged. So even though the Zimbabweans probably laid it on thick there is apparently some truth to their warnings.
Livingstone was until the 1970’s the centre for the falls but the Zimbabwean town of Victoria Falls started to become much more popular as Zambia itself struggled with its own political and economic problems. Nowadays its making a comeback for those wishing to escape the frenzied tourist activity and more recently the unsettling political and economic problems of its Zimbabwe neighbour.
Mind you from a tourism prospective there isn’t a great deal to see in Livingstone itself so we contented ourselves with having lunch and a few beers with John & Alison at the rather colonial Pig’s head pub. We had a developed a sort of travelers friendship with John and Alison, probably because they were a couple like us and also because they too were heading in the same direction. John, as an Englishmen, was certainly pretty patriotic and for me that was honourable but more importantly it offered a good opportunity to bait him about his country’s pathetic imitation of a cricket team.
The food at the Pigs head was nothing special but was almost five star in comparison to the Funky Monkey restaurant where our group had our farewell dinner that night. It was awful!
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Lilies at on the Okavango Delta In Botswana Share this:
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African shoestrings – Botswana Day Eighty Two Chobe
Audi had arranged a local tour guide to take us on a game drive into Chobe that afternoon and then a game cruise along the Chobe River the next morning. Our new tour guide didn’t show for a while and in his absence, led by yours truly, we organised with the agents at Tebe camp, where we were staying, to swap the two tours around. After all, watching the sun go down on the water from a boat surrounded by animals sounded much more romantic than being stuck in a vehicle. Not too mention that early morning is a better time to go for a game drive.
Andre had now left us and returned back to Ngepi. He had done all right for his first time; nothing had been too much trouble and had often bent over backwards to make us comfortable. Humble that he was he was also a nice guy with it. The poor bloke was also just a little bit emotional when he left.
Our new guide was a different animal!
Chris was an Ethiopian brought up in Sweden (we actually thought that he was bullshitting when he told us that but we found out much later that it was true). With his long platted Bob Marley look alike hair and a fairly relaxed and casual attitude to his job; he was also an ‘expert’. Now I know he’s meant to be an expert certainly as a tour guide but I mean he knew it all and there was no doubting that the most important thing in his life was whatever worked for Chris. Which is why he was not too happy that we had rearranged the schedule. But we held fast despite his efforts to convince us otherwise.
The cruise was pretty bloody good!
From the boat we could see elephants and buffalo on the shore and hippos in the water, watching us with those beady eyes that live just above the surface, not to mention the abundant bird life.
The most impressive sight, though, was the sunset that seemed to happen just at the river edge. At home, in Perth, we get some pretty awesome sunsets over the ocean so when I say the Chobe sunset was pretty bloody good; I mean it ‘was’ pretty bloody good. I shot off a few shots after Sue had made the suggestion. One of these shots sits proudly on our dining room wall and when anyone remarks on it, Sue turns to me and says with great satisfaction “and you never wanted to take it!”
Driving through Chobe early the next morning was a totally different affair. Safari trucks are open in the back and at 5.45 am it was bloody freezing. Obviously the animals thought so as well because none of them were anywhere to be seen. We drove around for around an hour along dusty sandy tracks with Chris barking instructions to the driver up front and scratching his head as to why we hadn’t seen anything yet. The night before despite our rearrangement of the final leg of the tour, he had promised us an abundance of wildlife and so far his promise seemed to be pretty empty. Two lionesses saved his embarrassment. They were chasing a squealing warthog 100 metres away across a water channel. We stopped and watched as the two got closer to their prey that was running at great speed first one way then another. I turned to look behind us and to my amazement saw another interested onlooker, another lioness, a mere five metres away peering around our vehicle in effort to see what her mates were up to. We had unknowingly parked right in front of her!
After that the wildlife just kept coming! It was as if someone had sounded the wake up call because everywhere we went we saw something. A herd of buffalo chewing and nonchalantly looking at us quizzically, two hippos wondering around on the river bank, kudu and impala springing away as we neared.
Back to the water channel and we just caught sight of two of the lionesses walking away into the bush. We drove on back towards to the park gates and our campsite and then suddenly around the next bend, as surprised as us, were all three lionesses walking across the track and within spitting distance of the truck.
More buffalo and a crocodile were spotted near the waters edge and then reluctantly our time was up.
Chris was crowing. “See, I said we would see lots this morning” he said in his sort of British, Swedish and African accent. My remainder that it was actually our idea to do this early morning game drive was totally ignored as he continued to crow all the way back to camp.
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Sunset on the Chove River in Chobe National Park, Botswana Share this:
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African shoestrings – Botswana Day Eighty One Chobe
Eventually our time was up and we had to leave this pleasant existence. We were canoed back to the village of Jao in the early hours. This time we had the opportunity to wander around this traditional village, although I think the main aim was to get us to buy hand made baskets, not wander off on a photographic shoot that yours truly did. Actually the small quantity of baskets that were for sale had enormous price tags, so business was pretty poor for them that day. What was more interesting (baskets are way down my shopping list) was the way these people lived. Jao consisted of a collection of mostly reed or bamboo huts with thatched roofs but some of them were mud and others were constructed using tin cans as bricks held together by mud or dung. Most of these homes had an enclosed yard that we sneaked a look at, used for cooking and storing chickens and donkeys. One woman took a sharp looking garden hoe to her donkey that was getting to close to comfort to her toddler. This poor animal had scars from previous encounters and probably lived a life of misery, if a donkey can have such a thing.
The children were fascinated by these white camera-carrying tourists and posed quite happily in fact almost insistently for our cameras. Some of them had runny noses and sticky eyes which made us think their health was still a long way from being as good as children of the west.
We got back to Ngepi camp, after having to cram into the one motor boat with all our bags, camping gear and supplies when only one boat turned up, in the late afternoon.
That night we had a ‘treat’; the dancers of the Mbuknshu people put on a show of traditional dancing. It was boring and repetitive and was far less entertaining than watching the antics of an overlander group who had arrived at the same time as us. It’s sort of like watching Neighbours (in fact most of them were Aussies and Kiwis). There were usual ructions created by clicks, one night stands and show offs. One guy was so ‘cool’ that he sat on the edge of the table, dressed immaculately to look so casual, drinking neat bourbon straight from the bottle. Yuk!
We had our own ruction later that night as somehow I managed to spill kero from the lantern all over the floor of the tent. Within seconds we were out of that tent with our bags and then spent the next hour erecting another in the dark. To say that Sue was not amused is probably a bit of an understatement although she has dined out on it a few billion tedious times since!
The next day we were headed through the infamous Caprivi Strip. Infamous because over the years the five tribes that make up the inhabitants, the Caprivians, of this narrow 500 kilometre long extension of Namibia, have from time to time created unrest in their demands for autonomy. This particular time there a lull in the friction and minus Klaus, Ingrid and Anna we drove the seven hour length of the strip without any incident apart from the bone jarring badly maintained roads.
Our destination was Kasane in Northeastern Botswana. You might well be asking why didn’t we go straight from the delta to Kasane instead of back via Namibia. The easiest answer is I don’t know and don’t care. These guys obviously knew what they were doing and I for one was quite happy to follow their plan. However a quick look at a map of Botswana and Namibia explains all. Whist it’s a relatively short distance as the crow flies from the delta to Kasane it’s a bloody long way by road. A circumnavigation of central Botswana is required to get there by road.
Kasane actually sits close to the borders of four different countries. Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and Zimbabwe and more importantly is the gateway to Chobe National Park, one of the gems of African Game parks. This was going to be one of the highlights of our time in Africa. We had read a fair bit about Chobe and knew that it has probably the most varied wildlife in Africa on a setting that is as varied and scenic as it inaccessible. It was the inaccessible bit that convinced us to see it with a tour operator. Heavy-duty admission fee (US25.00 per person per day), heavy duty 4WD hire meant heavy-duty money.
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Sunset on the Chove River in Chobe National Park, Botswana Share this:
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African shoestrings – Namibia Day Seventy-Six Botswana/Namibia
At Rundu we saw for the first time since the Fish River now some 1200 kilometres south a riverbed that actually had water! The Okavango River separates Namibia from the infamous Angola and was at the time experiencing its highest water levels for fifteen years. Considering that no other river in Namibia, except for the Orange River that separates Namibia from South Africa, has water in it, this was a sight for sore eyes. Well every silver lining has a cloud! Ngepi camp is on the river about 50 kilometres east of Rundu and the only access road to the camp was flooded due to the high river level. This meant we had to leave our comfy minibus and wade the final stretch through the overflowing river, a river know to have the odd croc or two!
The camp itself was a bush camp but with all the basic modern amenities in the form of open air toilets and showers separated by a bamboo walls and a pole barring the entrance to indicate if in use. Our tents had already been erected for us close to the riverbank, which was a lot steeper than where the road had passed it.
We were briefed on the next 6 days by Neil and then Paul and then after dinner Neil again. Neither of them were actually coming with us, Neil, a South African was the manager and Paul an American had just returned from the delta. I actually took an instant dislike to Paul; he took a holier than thou attitude as he explained that the tour was a local community based tour. By that he meant that the polers (I’ll explain this later) all came from the same village and using them to canoe tourists around the delta was a good way of helping the local communities and villages. He was quite right of course but he didn’t have to be such a prick about it!
We had heard that there were hippos and crocs in the Okavango but we didn’t expect to hear hippos chewing grass right outside our tents. Chomp! Chomp! They went all night or so Sue said the next morning. I slept through the whole thing!
At 7.30 am we were shunted onto an overland truck to pass through the flooded road and then loaded back into our minibus to drive onto our next destination, Sapepo on the Okavango Panhandle in Botswana. Crossing into Botswana was unremarkable except for one thing the Namibian border post building was a shameful shack in comparison to the brand new buildings at the Botswana post. Botswana is an expensive place to visit when it comes to national parks and reserves. It costs around US$25.00 per day per person in park fees unless you are part of guided group i.e. Safari. By comparison Etosha cost US$3.00! The Botswana government’s rationale is that they don’t want the mass tourism of Kenya so they spend very little on infrastructure in the parks and charge high fees to restrict the number of visitors. From our experience trying to independently travel through Botswana is not easy either, especially on a tight budget. There are many obstacles, like extremely limited public transport, and gaining access to the parks and reserves, so the vast majority of tourists end up touring Botswana with tour operators who know the country; but don’t stay any longer than they have to. So I guess so far its only partially working!
The Botswana/Namibia border was also the first place that we went through the passport swapping routine. This is not an illegal act of changing identity but simply changing nationality. So we gave Namibia our Aussie passport, that we had so far been using, for our exit stamp and Botswana our British passport for an entry stamp. Now bear with me why I explain why we did this. South Africa, Namibia and Botswana offer fee free visitors visas at the border for both Australian and British passport holders. Zambia charges British passport holders and Zimbabwe charges Australians however Zambia doesn’t charge anyone who enters the country with an official tour operator. This tour was going to leave us in Zambia from where we would cross the border into Zimbabwe. So why didn’t we just swap when we got to the Zimbabwe border? Well, a lot of third world countries don’t like this practice particularly if looks like it’s being done to avoid paying a fee (which it usually is of course). So it’s likely to be a lot less problematic if you choose to swap whilst in a group as the immigration officer is often too busy to check for an exit stamp from the adjoining country. As it happened the Namibian immigration officer did ask us on our way back a few days later, as to where our previous entry stamp into Namibia was. When we explained that we had used another passport he shrugged his shoulders and allowed us through. However as they don’t charge for visas I don’t suppose he cared.
Unfortunately the last part of this grand plan let us down. We knew that Tanzania required you to purchase a visa but it was cheaper to purchase in advance when traveling independently and we also knew that it cost US$50 for a British passport and only US$10 for an Australian. So when we went to the Tanzanian embassy in Harare two weeks later we obviously produced our Australian passports for stamping. We were politely told that they could only stamp the passport that we had used to enter Zim on. But we could take our chances at the border post when we arrived although there were no guarantees. Having experienced problems before at a Tanzanian border post four years ago we paid up and shut up and thus ended up worse off than if we had just used our Aussie passports throughout, which being the patriots that we are, was our preferred option.
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Ngoma bridge Border on the Chobe River Botswana and Namibia Share this:
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African shoestrings – Namibia Day Fifty – Fish River Canyon
There was, we discovered the next day, a second viewpoint. This had been recently found and developed by Louie and without doubt it was pretty spectacular.
Right on the bend of the gorge, the river was right underneath us, it was like looking down two canyons. Fellow guests, Alfred and Bridgett, had stayed in the more swanky lodge at Hobas, which was around three times the price, and had seen the hikers viewpoint, the main and most visited spot in the canyon. They reassured us that this spot was at least as spectacular, after we said that we wished we had managed to go to Hobas.Alfred and Bridgett were from Germany and whilst Bridgett spoke good English, Alfred struggled to understand us and put his thoughts into English. They both however were travelling in a classier style, they had hired a car and would have still been staying at the lodge in Hobas had it not been fully booked.
To go from there to this rather basic and rudimentary lodge with the singing owner was a culture shock in more ways than one.
They certainly didn’t know what to make of Gertrude.
Gertrude is Louie’s mum and stays with Louie for around 3 months at a time and gives him a hand. She means well but she was an absolute pain in the arse!
Her persistent chatter, interference and fussing in almost everything would have drove me to first degree murder had we have to put up with her for 3 months.
In some sort of weird way she took a liking to Alfred, continually making sure he was happy and this is the weird bit, reminding him he was German. She was a sort of female version of Basil “whatever you do don’t mention the war” Fawlty.
It was with some relief, particularly to Alfred, that another German couple Jurgen and Sabrina turned up to spread her attention.Louie may have been a rather average singer but he was a pretty good on the Barbecue. We had some good meals except one, Kudu steaks. Kudu are striking antelopes that are common around southern Africa and supposedly are good tucker. Sue couldn’t eat hers, mainly I suspect because of her love for any animal of the wild. I didn’t rush back for seconds. It had a strange soft liver type texture that made me wander whether it was ok! However there were no repercussions the next day so it must have been!
I don’t know how hot it got but it was unmercifully hot! During the day the sun just beat down cooking everything and worse still heating up this lunar landscape of dark rock. At night freed of the sun’s rays this rock almost glowed as it radiated heat making the night more uncomfortable than the day. We had hoped to do some hiking in the canyon but there was no way we were prepared to risk this sort of heat. But the heat didn’t stop the group of hikers we saw earlier, who eventually found their way to the lodge; actually Louie picked them up from a prearranged spot in the canyon. They all looked terrible.
After they had scrubbed up we got talking to a couple of them. They told us that they had run out of water at one spot and with a raging thirst drank from an old open livestock tank.
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Fish river Canyon, from a lookout, Namibia Share this:
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