I loved reading the names painted on shops and restaurants we passed on the road. I also loved how most businesses had painted on their wall, underneath their name, ‘We offer the following services…’, often followed by a long list of what seemed like quite randomly chosen goods and services, and ending in ‘etc’.
In Tanzania, and Zanzibar particularly (outside Stone Town), the names were quirkily aspirational:
Nice Hair Dressing Salon
Aalya Beautiful Salon
Bob & Bad Boy Ritzy Barber Salon
Tulifo Modern Butchery
In Zambia, things tended to take a more philosophical tone:
Reasonable Shop & Take Away
Reasonable Restaurant
No Money No Power Grocery
New Deal Tarven (sic)
Be Strong Enterprises
Be Strong Barber Salon
Tropics Depot – for all your stationary, food, signwriting etc etc
Just Imagine Investments
Hope Dot Com (internet cafe)
Sex Thrills, AIDS Kills (billboard)
Namibian businesses seemed to have less personality overall, apart from a couple of interesting ones:
The Dog Is Hot Bar
OK Food (actually a big supermarket chain, where we bought food to cook for dinner, and yes, it was acceptable)
But one of the best signs we saw was in Malawi:
Road Signs Save Lives (painted on a road sign)
Days 170 – 171, Wednesday 4th & Thursday 5th February 2009 (Cath)
According to today’s paper, Zimbabwe has just cut twelve zeroes off its currency. That means the Zimbabwean ten trillion dollar notes we bought from a street vendor at Lake Kariba for 1 USD each (twice the market rate) are now to be used as ten dollar notes, with new, more sensible-looking notes to be printed until the old ones are phased out at the end of June. At least with the old notes, which are beautifully printed but look like someone’s been leaning on the zero on the keypad and not noticing the typo, Zimbabweans could make some sort of real money for themselves by selling them to tourists as souvenirs for ‘hard currency’ (US). Very sad stuff.
I woke up to the alarm clock at 7 on Wednesday morning and freaked out when Al told me he’d agreed to go riverboarding today (which means basically doing the same life-threatening thing we did yesterday, but when you get to rapids with really big waves, you voluntarily get out of the raft and try to ride them using a sort of boogie board). He still wanted to try it so he went to see two of the others who’d signed up, but because they were both feeling a bit ambivalent about it, and they needed a minimum of four people for it to happen, and the fourth person wasn’t awake yet, they ended up calling it off. I felt a bit guilty for possibly helping to talk Al out of it, but I was very impressed by his hard core, try-anything-once attitude, which goes well with his new mullet. And he was (I think) not too disappointed, as he could still try it one day on a New Zealand river – saving up some XTREMEness for the future shouldn’t hurt.
So we all pretended it never happened and went back to our tents, which for once were in the shade and lovely and cool, and had our first camping sleep-in. The rest of the day was passed eating fried eggs for brekky, taking hot showers, strolling into town, using the internet (see the blog post we wrote on the day, below), having lunch with Emma at a restaurant with surly staff, and sitting by the pool picking fleas out of the fur of Choicy, the little dog. The two English gap-year boys (Luke and Alex) left this morning, on the bus to Windhoek, and we met their two replacements on the truck – Matt from England (well, we met him on the rafting trip the day before) and Ruth, from Ireland/England/America/Zimbabwe at one point. We had burritos for dinner, and an early night.
On Thursday we were up early for a quick cereal breakfast. We said goodbyes to Monica (heading into Zimbabwe for a solo three-week trip then home to Switzerland) and Vicky (going volunteering in Namibia, but will join us again in South Africa) before a taxi picked us up at 7:15 to drive to the border. There, we walked out of Zambia (after correcting the immigration officer’s date stamp, which still said ‘JAN’), and across the bridge (past the bungee ‘office’) into Zimbabwe. We passed old empty fuel drums, rusted and overgrown roadwork machinery, vervet monkeys and various pedestrians along the road, and soon after the immigration buildings we came to Victoria Falls National Park.
This map might give you some idea of the layout of the area, if you can look past the reflection:
All the land on the right hand side of the river is Zambia, and on the left is Zimbabwe (see the bridge towards the bottom right-hand corner). The Zim side covers more of the width of the falls along the First Gorge, and its views are very close-up. From the Zam side you see mainly the Eastern Cataract, but can also stand at vantage points further away for a wider, drier, perspective. The town of Livingstone is not visible as it is some distance from the falls, but on the left is the Zimbabwean town of Victoria Falls, founded on the tourist trade.
With the Zambian poncho debacle now a distant memory, we hired raincoats. They just looked so much better than ponchos – I mean, they had sleeves and everything. And they did do a slightly better job, especially since they faced a tougher test, and with higher stakes because the air was quite cold this time with no sun directly above us. But as we left the park (and confirmed that it was indeed not rain, but purely the waterfall spray condensing and falling, soaking everything within 100 metres of the gorge), we had trouble finding dry patches on our clothes. We were very thankful for the dry bag once again, and didn’t even let it anywhere near cliff edges this time.
Wet
Wet
Wet
Two things caught our attention immediately as we walked into Victoria Falls town. Firstly, there were warthogs grazing on the grass in front of a petrol station! Secondly, as our presence became more widely noticed, almost every single person we saw was desperately trying to sell us something, inviting us to their restaurant for lunch, or simply begging for money. I have never felt so useless in the face of so many people’s expectations – we had hardly any money (in terms of US dollars cash, the kind that matters), and we’d already given a lot of it to the border authorities and the national park office, i.e. the government responsible for these people’s situation. I felt so stupid for not going to a money changer in Livingstone yesterday to get some more hard cash. Coming and buying things is one of the only sure ways to help individual people here - it must have been devastating to them when overland trips like ours removed Zimbabwe from their itineraries. At least Oasis trucks are going to start coming back, with the trip after ours due to be one of the first.
The supermarket in town was half empty, with whole aisles full of one type of grain, a small toiletries section with one type of shampoo, and a full liquor aisle with one type of wine taking up a whole six shelves. It didn’t accept payment in Zimbabwean dollars – all prices were given in the more stable South African Rand.
So it was a surprise to see a modern, well maintained building with a fish pond, manicured lawn and sweeping driveway, still staffed by its (hopefully decently paid) employees but otherwise empty, apart from a lot of coloured lights:
‘The Kingdom’ casino – ‘opened by His Excellency, the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe, R.G. Mugabe’
After lunch, we were picked up by a man who usually runs day tours in the area – he seemed pleased to have the business – for a drive to the border with Botswana. He was surprisingly optimistic about the prospects for change in his country, because the next week Morgan Tsvangirai was due to be sworn in as Prime Minister. He hoped that, because Tsvangirai’s party was to be given the critical Health and Education portfolios, they might be able to slowly make changes despite Mugabe’s continuing power. Hopefully it can happen while there are still people like our driver around, who are old enough to remember much better days and how things worked, well-educated enough to be able to get the systems working again, and motivated enough by living through the bad times to push hard for change.
Filed under: Zambia
Day Whatever, Wednesday 4th February 2009 (Cath and Al – written on the spot)
We just had our first African sleep-in. Usually it’s too hot, too loud, too light, or we’re packing up our tent at 5am in preparation for a big day on the big truck. But today the conditions were perfect. Our tent was in the shade in a quiet campsite, we had nowhere to be, and we were a little tiny bit wrecked after rafting and nearly drowning in the Lower Zambezi River yesterday.
The last four weeks have been incredible. We will write something about Egypt properly soon (i.e. sometime in the next four weeks), and then start writing about Africa properly too, but here’s a little something for now, just to show we’re not intentionally abandoning this blog.
Our Official Highlights of Africa So Far, Roughly In Order (at the halfway point):
- Seeing zebra grazing on the median strip five minutes after leaving Nairobi airport
- Visiting an elephant orphanage where there was also a 12 day old rhino (meanwhile, realising how much poaching still happens here qualifies as a lowlight)
- Not witnessing any robbery in ‘Nairobbery’
- Vast amounts of wildlife in Ngorongoro Crater and the Serengeti
- Swimming in the bright azure waters around Zanzibar, and in murky green lagoon waters with turtles
- Relaxing (a polite term for doing nothing), suntanning/burning, playing volleyball, swimming and watching lightning storms on the shores of Lakes Malawi and Kariba
- Walking through villages, being swamped by kids wanting to see photos of themselves, seeing schools and health centres struggling along with no electricity and not enough paraffin for lamps, waving to women pounding cassava (almost no nutritional value, smells like egg, but it fills the stomach) and then having long conversations back at camp, trying to solve Africa’s problems – no luck yet.
- Being invited to a service in a mud-walled, thatch-roofed church, sitting on planks of wood for pews, and listening to an amazing choir sing
- Celebrating Australia Day with some backyard cricket in a campsite surrounded by zebra and antelopes (and some sneaky buffalo hiding behind some zebra)
- Watching a hippo splash around and yawn in the water below our camp, then hearing suspicious grass-chomping sounds just behind our tent later that night
- EXTREME days in Livingstone: walked with and patted 2 year old lions and 5 month old cubs; saw and got soaked by Victoria Falls; narrowly got away from some big hungry baboons; dropped our bag containing passports, camera, money and shortbread over the edge of a lookout above a cliff in the Vic Falls gorge, where it got caught on a branch so that Al could inch down 2 metres and retrieve it; crammed 8 people in a small sedan and sped off at 130km/h to get away from an angry striking taxi driver who was trying to grab the steering wheel and pull us out; Al borrowed some clippers and gave himself a fully sick mullet, and still hasn’t chopped it off; rafted down the Zambezi in high water, with me falling out on a Grade 3 rapid, getting sucked under the raft then being pulled back in coughing and spluttering, just in time for the boat to flip over on the Grade 5!
- Meeting some awesome people on the truck from Aus, NZ, Norway, England, the US and Switzerland, and an ok guy from Germany.
Tomorrow we’ll be in Botswana and are very excited about canoeing through the Okavango Delta. We’ve been eating extremely well while camping, despite our guilt at using a lot of ingredients that are only available at the big Western-style supermarkets in big towns, and we’re tanning (in patches, but slowly and steadily) and feeling healthy, if a little unfit and sore after yesterday.
We are allowing ourselves to think a lot more about home now, and are looking forward to so many things we’ve been missing. I hope a lot of people are ready to join us for a few dinners at Japanese restaurants, and fish and chips on the beach…
Filed under: Zambia
Day 169, Tuesday 3rd February 2009 (Cath)
The title might be brought to you by the letter Z, but the day itself was all about the letter X… that is, X for XTREME!
We had signed up to go rafting on the Zambezi, so this was planned XTREMEness, unlike yesterday when all we’d planned was a gentle walk with a couple of baby lions. Even though we’d been told that the first ten rapids in Batoka Gorge weren’t raftable (I don’t know a better word) at this time of year because of the high water levels, the prospect of the crazy white water we’d be facing on the remaining 18km stretch was still enough to keep me awake for a lot of the night before. I’d like to say it was excitement, but it was pretty much pure terror. It hadn’t abated by the time we climbed aboard the red rafting truck early in the morning, but it was easier to be optimistic once we were out on the road with the sun on our backs and the wind in our hair.
The guides seemed reassuringly professional
After a similarly reassuring safety briefing (‘flipping is compulsory! Go hard or go home!’) we faced an unexpected challenge – the walk down into the gorge wasn’t so much a walk as a climb about a thousand steps down a rickety, wooden, almost horizontal ladder which had been built over the uneven rocky ground. I never would have guessed, but it turns out horizontal ladders are a lot harder and much more annoying to use than vertical ladders, especially when you’re wearing Havaianas that are threatening to break. My bare feet handled it a lot better, but it was a relief to finally reach the cool, refreshing river.
We had about thirty seconds to enjoy a relaxing swim, before having to choose if we wanted to go in the raft which would ‘go hard’, or the raft which would go ‘not so hard’. Al and I were divided on this issue. We ended up in the raft containing two girls (me and Keryn) and one man (Maik) who weren’t ashamed to admit they didn’t want to ‘go hard’, and the two girls’ obliging boyfriends (Al and Matt), who swore they would have been a lot more XTREME if they were on their own.
Either way, we were all about to be swept along by the same Zambezi, and through the same Grade 5 rapids. For those unfamiliar with rapid grading, here is a guide I have ripped straight from the Wanderlust website:
Grade I The calmest level; rivers of this grade will have long sections of flat, slow-moving water, with minor ripples
Grade II A few eddies and small drops
Grade III Numerous rapids, irregular waves and some moderate drops
Grade IV Long, difficult rapids with highly irregular waves, steep gradients and a powerful water flow
Grade V This the highest grade of rapid you can pay to raft, with unpredictable and more violent rapids. As top paddler Alan Kesselheim puts it, “Grade V means wild turbulence. Very powerful and conflicted current. Life-threatening consequences in the case of a mishap.” Yikes.
The dreaded grade VI…
There are grade VI rapids but, like 11 on the Spinal Tap scale, they should never be attempted without a serious death wish. They are the peak of technical ability and are strictly for experts only. Grade VIs often involve leaping off high waterfalls, where the only thing that stops you from dying is extreme skill – and luck. This is serious stuff, as Kesselheim states: “Grade VI cannot be attempted without risk of life.”
At least we were sticking to Grade V. Chances were we’d be fine!
This is the view of where we finished, but it gives you an idea of what the river looked like where we started. Calm and inviting, isn’t it? That’s what we thought!
There are no photos of the actual rafting for now, but I’ll try and add some screenshots from the DVD we have of ourselves, when I can find a way to play it on the computer.
All went well at first. It was FUN! Apart from experiencing a man overboard on the very first major rapid (The Overland Truck Eater, #11, rated Grade 5) – Maik went in, and said later he’d just thought it would be easier to jump in than to keep trying to hold on – the first few rapids passed without any problems. We even had a break at one stage, to swim in a long stretch of calm water, practising what to do if we were thrown out of the raft and drifted away. Even floating in the flat, brown river felt like a ride. With eddies spinning you in unexpected directions and towards rocks near the bank, you quickly learnt how helpful it was to keep your legs up and together in front of you. And how useless it was to suddenly worry about crocodiles when all you could do was swim against the current to slow yourself down until the raft caught up so you could get back in.
‘The Mother’ (#13), classed as Grade 4/5, was basically a series of waves and a really fun ride, which we made it through safe and dry (well, just a bit splashed). We also somehow got expertly through one called The Washing Machine (I think it was our guide’s efforts more than our paddling, which seemed to be hitting nothing but air a lot of the time). Then we reached rapids 16a and 16b, known as Terminators I and II. Our guide, James, told us this was a place where we should try extra hard not to fall out, because although we’d only be in a Grade 3 rapid, it was going to be followed quickly by a Grade 5.
So I fell out. It happened in slow motion, but as I went over the side I thought ‘just hang on to the boat, and you’ll float’. I did hang on to the rope around the side of the boat with my right hand, and in my left hand I held onto my paddle. I thought ‘this isn’t so bad – someone will pull me back on’. I pushed my paddle upwards for someone on the boat to grab, but the next thing I knew I was underwater, and it did indeed feel like being in a washing machine. I felt the boat above me but had no idea which direction I’d come under from, so I remembered our safety briefing and chose one direction to push myself in, feeling along the underside of the boat. It felt like I had chosen to go diagonally from one corner of the raft to the other, it seemed to take so long. I had a serious ‘after all that joking, maybe I am going to drown here’ thought, and it was not pleasant at all. But suddenly I saw light and breathed air again! I grabbed James’ outstretched oar and flopped onto the floor of the raft. Even if I’d had my paddle, I would have been pretty useless as I lay in shock, burping up river water and realising I was alive.
There wasn’t much time to think about it, because we were now in the Grade 5 rapid, and not exactly facing the right way! We hit a huge wave and the raft flipped upside down, dumping all of us into the maelstrom this time. We all managed to grab onto the side ropes fairly quickly and find out everyone was alright. The guides had found Keryn (who was terrified, especially after seeing what happened to me!) really quickly, pulled her out and sat her on top of the upturned raft. Of course, that couldn’t last long, as we needed to get the boat up the right way again – she had to get back in. We were all asked to move around to the same side of the boat, so James and the other guide could flip it over our heads while we kept gripping the rope. Under water and under the boat again was really not where I wanted to be, but it was over quickly enough and I bobbed up still holding the rope. Keryn was beside me, with a similarly white-knuckled grip. Soon I saw Maik and Matt on the raft above us, but I couldn’t see Al, and panicked that he might be underneath! But Matt told me he was just on the other side, so I relaxed and he pulled me onto the boat. Al (like the other guys, apparently) hadn’t heard the instructions so decided to let go of the boat, move backwards, and grab the other side of it, which was flipping towards him. It actually hit him on the head, so he went under for a second before pulling himself up as planned. His plan was of course risky, as he could have been swept further away, but he had a much calmer experience than I did – except when he realised I’d gone under the boat again, especially as he didn’t know I was just doing what I was told!
After that, we loved floating down the next few calm bends of the river like we’d never loved floating before. The sun had never shone so brightly! The smooth rocks and green trees on the banks had never looked so beautiful, and dry!
James very kindly took us the ‘easy way’ down the next rapid. But eventually we had to face our fears and go XTREME again, to tackle the Grade 5 rapid number 18, known as ‘Oblivion’. We paddled hard! Hard right! Back left! Get down! And we made it. It was only later that we heard only one in four rafts makes it through without flipping. The raft behind us wasn’t so lucky, falling victim to a huge hole in front of a huge wave. We ended up with Anne hitching a ride on our raft for a while, after she drifted a long way in front of her own boat and got picked up by a safety kayak. I decided if I went in one more time, I’d try that rather than getting anywhere near the underside of the raft again!
It didn’t come to that, though – the last few rapids were weak (yep, I am pretending to be tough).
When we’d finished, and stood on the sandy banks at last, Al decided to go jet boating with a few of the others. I decided to stay out of the river, and headed up the gorge in a new cable car. It was hardly a safe and relaxing experience, as the driver kept both of the doors open (for some fresh air I suppose), but nobody on our trip fell out.
At the top (where the jet boaters eventually joined us) we scoffed down our beautifully prepared lunch, changed into dry clothes, and started to appreciate how fun the day had actually been, now that we were out of mortal danger!
The day was capped off with an ice cold beer on the truck home, and then a booze cruise on the Upper Zambezi (it’s remarkably calm above Victoria Falls!), where we spotted some crocs and hippos just before sunset, enjoyed some more cold beverages, and tried our hands at some mass bongo drumming.
Creatively ‘disguised’ mobile phone towers!
With the local brew, Mosi, appropriately named after the Falls
Cruisin’
Just another peaceful Zambezi moment
Filed under: Zambia
Day 168, Monday 2nd February 2009 (Cath)
The driver dropped us off at the entry to the Zambian side of Victoria Falls, then did a u-turn and headed back to Livingstone - continuing straight along the road leads you to the bridge and border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. Inside the park, we took a quick toilet stop near a big pillar, which turned out to be a war memorial:
Many Zambians (‘many other natives of the territory of whose names no complete record exists’) fought for the Allies in Burma in World War II, when Zambia was still known as Northern Rhodesia.
Victoria Falls was the name given by David Livingstone, but the falls’ official name in Zambia is the older, indigenous one: Mosi-oa-Tunya, which means ‘the smoke that thunders’. We could already hear the thunder, and as we walked further along the footpath towards the bridge, we could see more and more ’smoke’.
A rainbow!
Two rainbows! Okay, you win. (Well, I don’t want to be a sore loser, but I can see the second rainbow faintly in my photo too).
It was time to get up close, so we walked to the Eastern Cataract, where we hired raincoats and walked across the Knife Edge Bridge. I would highly recommend NOT bothering to hire a raincoat if you’re visiting in the wet season. We counted the money we spent as a donation to stimulate the Zambian economy, because we still got absolutely saturated. It was very lucky we had the ‘dry bag’ we’d picked up in an outdoorsy shop in Windsor – it completely protected our passports, cameras, money and those of a couple of other people (as well as some shortbread biscuits one of the other guys, Jono, wanted to keep dry for later).
The falls doing their falling, into the First Gorge (camera protected under a raincoat)
The Eastern cataract
While we stood at the lookout, leaning on the wooden fence rail and admiring this view, we had our lovely red dry bag at our feet. Posing for a photo, one of our legs knocked the bag, and it rolled off the concrete path, onto the grass on the other side of the fence. The grass here continued for about two metres down a gentle slope, before the ground suddenly dropped away to become a cliff, forming this side of the gorge. So, I was happy to see the bag stop moving and come to a rest on the grass. Just as I prepared to lean through the horizontal rails and pick it up, the weight of something inside the bag must have shifted just beyond a critical point, and the bag started rolling again! I panicked and started to climb over the fence, but Al held me back (probably rightly, as my track record with balance and heights is not the best), and we couldn’t do anything except watch as it rolled closer and closer to the edge. When it hit a branch at the cliff edge and stopped, I thought it was only a matter of time before we would be saying a final goodbye to our camera, and therefore all our photos, and our passports. Even if the bag stayed there, it was far too risky to try and reach it – or so I thought.
Al stepped through the rails, sat down, and started inching his way down the slope, one arm held onto by Jono. As Al got further down and Jono couldn’t reach without letting go of the fence, Jono in turn had his arm held by another of the guys, Owen. Gingerly, Al tested some footholds and found a secure enough one, so that he could lean forward and reach for the bag, making sure he’d be able to grip it strongly by the handle on the first attempt - otherwise he risked knocking it off the branch it was resting on.
He got it! And more importantly, he got himself back up safely too! And even more importantly, Jono’s shortbread was safe, and still dry! After all that excitement, and a couple of biscuits later, we all felt we had enough renewed energy to tackle the walk down to the Boiling Pot, where the water that has just come over the falls turns sharply around a corner. It was a fun walk down, with a few pools of water to walk through and lots of rock scrambling.
The Boiling Pot – note tiny people standing on the rocks on the left, one of whom is Al
People bungee off this bridge!
The water here forms huge whirlpools, and apparently is where things that have been swept over the falls are often found swirling – things like bits of boats, people, and sometimes even hippos. Luckily there were no such sightings today. On the way back up the hill, just when we thought we’d had enough excitement for one day, we encountered a group of baboons. Most of them were up in a tree, but one big one seemed interested in us, and started a bit of a chase, so we were back up the steps a lot more quickly than our fitness levels led us to expect. An alternative course of action COULD have been for Jono to drop the shortbread he was still carrying and let the baboon have it, but he’d just had to cope with nearly losing it over a cliff, and of course it turned out to be unnecessary anyway.
Having walked with and patted lions (forgot about that, didn’t you?), been soaked by some of the biggest waterfalls in the world, nearly lost our passports and precious photos, and narrowly escaped from baboons, all before lunch, we were looking forward to a short break.
It seemed, however, that fate wanted our day to be even more extreme.
As we left Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park, we ran into some of our other truck mates, who warned us to stay away from the centre of town, as a strike by taxi drivers had turned into a riot, and rocks were being thrown. Our plans to avoid it by going straight back to camp were thwarted by the fact that not only were no taxis available, but matatu (local minibus) drivers also seemed not to be working – whether it was in solidarity, or for their own safety, was not clear. A helpful security guard eventually offered to find us a lift, and after we waited for about half an hour just inside the gates of the park (he told us not to stand by the road, for our safety), he came through with the goods. He negotiated for a man in a private car to pick us up, but as he couldn’t legally take us from inside the park, we had to walk a hundred metres down the road, where he pulled over for us.
Squeezing seven passengers into a small sedan took a little while – long enough for an official blue taxi to spot us, drive on the wrong side of the road towards us and stop face-to-face with our car. Two men emerged and said with smiles ‘hello, here is a taxi for you, please come’. We politely thanked them and declined. Owen was still trying to shut his door (five people were squeezed into the back seat, while Al and I shared the passenger seat), so our driver told him to hurry up, just as the taxi driver tried to grab the door and pull Owen out. Luckily, adrenaline kicked in and he shut it, so the taxi driver changed targets, and lunged in through the driver’s window instead, trying to grab the steering wheel. Our driver decided it was time to go – he planted his foot on the accelerator, forcing the man to jog with us initially then finally let go, as we swerved very close to the second man with the taxi and, wheels spinning, zoomed off down the road. Once we’d all caught our breath, we told the driver we weren’t being chased and could probably slow down a little – he was doing 130km/h.
The ride through Livingstone was tense – even with our tinted windows rolled up, we were terrified another blue taxi would spot us. We were relieved (or was it slightly disappointed?) to see that things had settled down in town, and everybody seemed to be going about their normal business.
Camp felt like a little green patch of peace.
We took off our shoes and socks, which were still wet from the falls (that’s them basking in the sun, with the little dog Choicey), ate some cheese sandwiches, and I called Mum and Dad.
Meanwhile, Al felt the need to make his day even more extreme, and so the mullet was born.
