Day Somethingorother, Tuesday 17th February 2009 (Cath – written on the spot)
Time has flown since our last post. We are now in Swakopmund, on the Atlantic coast of Namibia, but feel more like we’re in a hot, sandy, palm-tree-lined version of Germany, thanks to the persisting effects of colonisation. In physical appearance, the town reminds me of the Geelong city centre, but the language, a large proportion of the people, the cakes and the internet speed are very much German. More than a few things here feel not quite right, such as the fact that most of the people leisurely shopping and eating in cafes are white, while most of the people working behind counters and waiting tables are black, but there is a generally positive atmosphere, everything seems to work, and we are relaxing and enjoying it. As a special treat, we’ve even been able to upload some photos!
I’ll try to make this a brief rundown of what we’ve done since Livingstone.
Most importantly, Al still has his mullet:
(Braided for special occasions only)
We walked across the bridge from Zambia into Zimbabwe for a morning, where we got soaked at the viewpoints over Vic Falls, then had a quick wander through the normally touristy town of Victoria Falls nearby. It was mind-boggling that one of the first buildings we came across was a casino, with manicured lawn, huge fish pond, lots of slot machines and game tables, a plaque commemorating its opening in the 90s by Mugabe himself, and, unsurprisingly, not a single punter.
Meanwhile, on the footpath outside we were surrounded by people begging for money, trying to sell wood carvings and telling us about their restaurants which were open for lunch – the drop in tourism over the last year or so must have been devastating, on top of what these people are already having to deal with. It was a real shame not to be able to spend more time and money there. We didn’t see a single other white person on the streets of the town, just a few shopping at the supermarket (where the shelves were half empty, and otherwise lined with large quantities of a limited range of staple foods and toiletries).
From Vic Falls we were driven to the Botswanan border by a Zimbabwean man who was optimistic about Morgan Tsvangirai’s appointment as Prime Minister, and incredibly patient about the prospects for change in his country. As he said, they still have all the basic infrastructure and their health and education systems used to work well – they just need to be repaired and restarted, and that might just happen one day.
In Botswana, we spent an incredibly relaxing few days in the Okavango Delta, floating around on mokoros (traditional dugout canoes) and walking through long grass, successfully avoiding predators.
Gliding through the reeds in our modern fibreglass mokoro (this photo uploaded in less than 30 seconds!)
We had a go at poling mokoros ourselves, despite the crocodile and hippo infested waters. Not entirely sure why I headed straight for the reeds rather than the clear water path on the left, but it was fun.
Sunset over the ’swimming pool’
Gorgeous wet season sky!
A morning walking safari, passing a ‘candle pod acacia’ on the left – a favourite shady place for lions. ‘If we are threatened by a buffalo – run downwind and climb a tree. If we are threatened by an elephant – run downwind but don’t climb a tree. If we are threatened by a lion – don’t run, because only food runs.’ Given that there was no wind, we couldn’t see any climb-able trees, and we were not confident of winning a face-off with a lion, none of this advice was very comforting.
Al took a flight over the Delta in one of these – again, gorgeous wet season skies.
At least 70 elephants within the borders of this photo, and more just out of frame!
San rock paintings in the Tsodilo Hills, Botswana – 3000 years old
View from the Tsodilo Hills
I have finally overcome my excessive fear of hippos and simply love and healthily respect them again, after sitting in a canoe on a lagoon, watching a male and female hippo yawn, splash around and fight each other less than forty metres away. They were much more into each other (well, he was into her – I’m not sure if she felt the same way) than they were into worrying about us.
To justify my fear, the day before we headed into the Delta, we met this hippo on a Chobe River cruise – this guy was angry at having his afternoon snack time interrupted, and tried to charge the big boat we were on. I think the main reason my fear has subsided is that I am no longer likely to be near any hippos.
After the Delta was a long run of long days on the truck, crossing through the buffalo fence and veterinary control checkpoints (to separate export-quality cattle in the south from subsistence herds in the north) into Namibia. We had to get out of the truck several times and walk through a lot of old dirty-looking wet mats, apparently coated in disinfectant but looking somehow more likely to be harbouring foot-and-mouth than our thongs/jandals/flip flops/sandals were.
We visited a place called Treesleepers, where descendants of San Bushmen (who live modern lives but keep knowledge of their traditions alive) show tourists like us little snippets of their bush survival skills, like trapping, tracking, and identifying poisonous and useful plants. These are among the peoples of Southern Africa who speak with clicks – none of us could replicate the sounds our guide, George, made.
George making fire
Dung beetle party!
Etosha National Park gave us our last real chance to spot game, and despite it being wet season we did see animals – and not just any animals. There were the ubiquitous zebra and wildebeest, more giraffes than we had seen anywhere else, three male lions, a lioness eating a kill, a hyena with a pup, antelope locking horns, and (drumroll)…
A black rhino! It didn’t stick around for photos.
We also saw part of the vast Etosha salt pans, which were covered by water in a lot of places. We tried some cheesy perspective photos with the only prop we had available – Salt and Vinegar Rice Pringles, the most popular flavour on the truck.
And our campsite had a giant, modern, tiled pool, which made us feel like we were at a fancy resort, so we all went a bit silly and played overly competitive games and scared some children.
Because normal house cats just aren’t extreme enough for us these days, Al having a mullet and all, we visited some people with some pets that were more on our level.
She purred when we patted her behind the ears – so gentle (the owner was nearby with a rubber stick for distraction if necessary). There were two other ‘tame’ cheetahs, who suddenly seemed slightly wild when presented with fresh donkey meat later.
An 18 month old giraffe named Harold, who later ran, zig-zagging, after our truck with his tongue hanging out and legs flailing around.
As we drove further and further west and south, the landscape gradually flattened out and became less green.
A typical roadside souvenir stall – these women, of the Herero people, made some gorgeous dolls wearing their traditional dress.
A typical truck-getting-bogged scene (did we mention we’ve been following the rainy season since about Malawi?)
Sunrise on the Spitzkoppe rock formations – scrambling here was excellent, apart from leaving us with bruised palms and grazes. We were lucky to miss the two-metre cobra some others ran into (and then away from quite quickly).
That really wasn’t brief. We have only 8 more days of the tour to go, and then five days in Cape Town, before we move on to the next continent. Of course that is exciting, but we will be very sad to leave this one. So much more to write, but so much time we’d rather be spending outdoors!
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.
