More Victoria Falls

Posting that photo from Shutterfly yesterday prompted me to look up more photos from my visit to Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, in August 2006. For some reason I never uploaded these photos online, and I should, because right now they all live on a hard drive and they need a backup. Maybe I'll make that a weekend project.

I went to Victoria Falls as part of a trip through South Africa, Botswana and Zimbabwe with my Peace Corps friend Liz and her friend Jessica. We went with a safari company called Drifters, sleeping nightly in tents and rumbling around the countryside every day in a covered truck with open sides. Except for sleeping and eating, we pretty much lived on that truck, along with a bunch of Italian, Dutch and French people, mostly about our age. It was a lot of fun and we saw a lot of wildlife -- elephants, giraffes, zebras, antelope of all types, warthogs, wild dogs, you name it.

Victoria Falls came at the end of our camping safari, a rare opportunity to stay in a (modest) hotel in a town with tourist conveniences. As I wrote in my journal at the time, "I have never needed a shower so badly in my life!"

Victoria Falls are on the Zambezi River where it tumbles into a deep gorge along the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia.

Blogger Dana (aka Bug) also visited Victoria Falls when she lived in Zambia back in 1988, almost 20 years before my visit. She posted about it much later and mentioned the ubiquitous rainbows at the falls. We saw them too!

Here I am near the gorge. It is a massive, deep cleft in the earth, and there are no guardrails. You can walk right up to the edge if you're foolish enough.

A highlight of the trip was visiting the colonial-era Victoria Falls Hotel, where as I wrote in a blog post at the time, "you half expect Robert Redford and Meryl Streep to come strolling through the lobby, with all its Rhodesian memorabilia." Yes, I know, "Out of Africa" took place in Kenya -- but it's the same vibe.

We had coffee on that massive veranda and my memories are tainted by the fact that I was incredibly hung over from a party the night before. Despite the beautiful surroundings, I was in agony. I don't think I've had a worse hangover before or since. Something about that African beer!

The hotel is perfectly situated to look up the gorge toward the bridge that crosses into Zambia. You can see the mist from the falls at left, but you can't see the falls themselves because the gorge bends to the left after the bridge. To look up the length of the falls, you have to cross...

...into Zambia, which is said to offer the best overall view. Unfortunately this picture doesn't really capture it because I was shooting into the sun, but you can imagine the Zambezi River, on the right, thundering straight into that gorge.

(I still have that t-shirt, though it's quite ragged now!)

See that pedestrian footbridge behind me to the left? There are people walking right along the cliff on the Zimbabwe side. Again, no guardrails!

And just for fun, here's a photo of me with a chameleon we found while walking through town. I think it was just hanging out on a tree or a bush. We put her/him back after taking his/her picture.

The photo I posted yesterday, of me, Liz and Jessica at the falls, is indeed also one of mine. I haven't looked at any of these in so long!