Botswana to Zimbabwe & Zambia- the final leg

Many apologies for the delay in the final chapter of our current adventure! Here it is... (you may want to get the kettle on first, as it's rather long) When I last got in touch I was in Botswana, after which, we headed for Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe, arriving on 17th Feb at a fantastic hostel/campsite called Shoestrings, with a great bunch of regulars working and loitering there at the friendly bar, a beautiful garden and a swimming pool (rather dodgy looking & I never saw anyone swim in it, bar the two enormous great danes). Me, Fyf and our truck mates settled into a dorm and had a meeting with an activity organiser in the lounge and arranged a bunch of fun stuff to do over the next week. At 3 'o'clock we went on the 'sunset booze cruise'- a boat cruise on the Zambezi river with a free bar and another truck load of overlanders. Needless to say it was utter carnage and a great time was had by all, though I missed the sunset and didn't appreciate the wildlife. Afterwards we hit the bar at Shoestrings to annhialate (spelling?) ourselves further, resulting in my ripping half my clothes off and hurling myself into the dodgy swimming pool and thoroughly enjoying floating on my back in the water and absorbing the brilliant atmosphere, followed by leaping out and dancing around the bar dripping wet in my knickers and vest, much to the amusement of my travelling buddies.

In the morning I found myself very much battered and bruised, with lots of jewellery either lost or broken and of course with a very sore head. Luckily this was a condition I shared with the other girls and so we all headed out to get a full English at a cafe near by and try to get to grips with the Zim dollar. Breakfast for 8 people came to about 4 million dollars!!! the wadge of note was ridiculous. We soon learned about all kinds of corruption going on in Zimbabwe mainly due to the current ruling president, and the currency is one thing that needs sorting out. The whole country can only function thanks to the black market because the exchange rate is so unforgiving, so thats how we changed all our money. After breakfast we wandered the markets to haggle and barter for jewellery and trinkets, namely carved Nyami nyami's, good luck amulets made from stone or horn, resembling Nyami nyami, the serpent god and protector of the Zambezi river. Soon the heat and harrassment grew too tiring for us to bear so we went for lunch and to explore Vic Falls town, which is small, clean and brightly coloured. Quite charming and I rather liked it. It definately feels more like 'real' Africa, the further North you travel, as it becomes far less Westernised. By the evening and with the hangovers subsiding, we went out for a mean at the Kingdom, a huge posh casino in a huge hotel that also has resteraunts and stuff in it. You enter across a wooden board walk through huge pillars, water features and all kinds of over the top, brilliant bush and safari decor and inside theres marble everything, domed ceilings and gold decorations and fake ivory tusks, huge statues and all that business. Had not showered at this point for a fair few days as the showers and sinks at Shoestrings electrocuted you if you touched them (and I'm not talking a little shock here, I'm talkings muscle spasms, heart palpitations and loss of breath). I eventually learned to go in wearing my flip flops and stand on one foot so i could turn the taps with my spare flip flop to get clean under the freezing water.

On 19th Feb I was up very early to go on what was undoubtedly the wildest and most challenging horse trek of my life. Was collected from the hostel by the lady who ran the joint- aged, tough as old boots and completely crazy. She clattered up in a battered old land rover with the drivers door missing (the remaining ones held to with deadbolts), wearing a full length wax coat with a very grubby cockatiel clinging on to the collar. She was tiny thin, but nearly as tall as me. She had a surprised, wild look of insanity about her face, but with that innocence that batty old ladies sometimes have. She could obviously be fierce and no nonsense though, as we discovered when the landrover broke down a few yards down the road and she began barking and snapping impatiently down her mobile phone while simultaneously hollering out her door in Setswanese at some poor random boys on the road to give us a push start, which thankfully did the trick. My horse was a large grey arab thoroughbred cross named White Hawk. I was assured that although he was fast paced, he was safe. I was nervous having not ridden properly for a couple of years and being on an 'advanced' ride I would be in for a tough workout with a horse like this. True to his heritage, White Hawk went like a bullet. I rode behind our guide, Itale, using his horse as a brake barrier as we charged through the bush, followed by a polish girl and a second guide.

The four of us were on the hunt for buffalo, following tracks through dense vegitation with no apparrent pathway or trail, making tight twists and turns to avoid the unforgiving acacia thorns and pokey branches until I realized Itale was completely lost. It actually took me an hour or so to finally relax and begin enjoying myself, having goten used to my mount (and him me), and the challenging terrain. After that I had a brilliant time, laughing and giggling as we hurtled along or trotted at high speed through the exciting environment that varied from thick bush and jungle, open plain, mud bog and grassy swamp, scrambling up rocky slope with inclines I couldn't have managed on foot and jumping over streams and ditches. We never found buffalo in the end but at one point my horse fell down an aardvark hole, and we got so close to game such as waterbuck, impala, warthogs, guineafowl, hippos and a field FULL of maribu storks and lots of white backed vultures and kites that flew out of the trees and bush all around us, unimaginably close as we rode. We saw a buabao tree over 1000 years old, so huge that 20 people could have held hands around its thick trunk. These trees are hollow inside and were once used as prisons back in the day, by cutting a door in the side of them. We returned from the ride 3 hours later, drenched in sweat, me with a big macho cut across my cheek and deep, bleeding cuts on my knuckles from the acacia thorns, worn out but exstatic and hyper from the excitement of it all, and looking like I'd been dragged through a hedge backwards. Which I had.

On the 20th I went to see the falls. They were incredible. Nothing could have prepared me for the sight and feel of the whole thing. It was awesome. Made my eyes water, stomach jump and skin goose pimple. The noise and power were immense as the water pushed down through a relatively narrow gorge, the actual crack running as far as the eyes could see through the spray and mist clouding around us from the updraft, spitting up rainbows and soaking us as if someone had a hosepipe on us. We were able to walk almost the whole way along the front of the falls from it's upper level, in awe and imagining how Livingstone must have felt when he set foot here discovering this natural wonder for the first time in the western world. This was the day we bayed farewell to our tourleader, driver and one of the girls, and hitched a lift with a different truck that was heading north (which just so happenned to be the same truck that 3 of our companions had joined to travel as far as Nirobi) to get over the border into Zambia, where we stayed for a few days, exploring the town of Livingstone, playing with yet another currency and hooking up with some friends of Fyfs from last year when she visited.

From Zambia we took a micralite flight to see Victoria Falls from the air and it was smashing fun!! We wore suits as thick as sleeping bags but went barefoot, which was exciting as it added to the feeling of vulnerability in the opensided flying machines, which were essentially a go-cart with an outboard motor fixed underneath a giant stunt kite. We wore big earphones and a mic under our helmets so we could talk to our drivers and that was brilliant fun too. The driver pointed out to me the falls had formed over a million years ago, a few miles further than it is today, behind a sharp zig zag of hundred meter deep gorges(below. the actual fallsy bit os on the far right).
We flew about 1500m high in the sky and the view was brilliant. I just couldn't take my eyes off the immense falls. We flew low over Livingstone island on the brink of the falls and then over some more land to spot herds of Cape buffalo, elephants, and as we went over the golf course there were impala and waterbuck grazing on it, which was quite a bizarre sight. Could see herds of hippo in the Zambezi too. When we landed I was able to appreciate just how fast we were going (VERY!) and it was really exciting.

The following day Fyf went white water rafting (her alternative to my white-knuckle horse riding!), while I explored the town and on the 22nd we said goodbye to the remaining girls from out overland truck tour and relocated to a different hostel and on the 23rd we walked back over the border into Zimbabwe, sweating and straining under the weight of our enormous backbacks as we crossed the bridge over the falls...which was amazing, and we stopped for a while to watch people bungie jumping off it, like Fyf did last year before winding our way back to Shoestrings backpackers, to spend our last few days in Africa partying very hard indeed. oopsie! me and Fyf ready to pay our bar tab after a three day party madness!!

The 24th saw us on yet another type of bush safari- on elephant back! It was excellent, again, riding allowing us to get very close to the other animals, and one of the elephants had a tiny tiny baby which was adorable. The ride was very early but the package included a slap up breakfast after our ride so it was all good. The place housed orphaned and captive bred elephants only, and some of them are orphaned when their mothers get killed by trains.

Look how big the elephant is!! I thought I was going to fly right off the back!!

Those last few days were awesome. We met such brilliant people, including a couple of blokes we'd first met in Zambia, and had some really interesting conversations. We learned all about the ways of life in Zimbabwe, and about the polotics and corruption going on, meeting a white S'African hunter who'd been evicted from his family farm property under a new law and who had some amazing stories to tell. By midnight on the 26th we were at Vic Falls airport for our internal flight to Johannasburg, which draws us near to the conclusion of the story, which is written in full a few posts back, titles "freezing greetings from England" for those of you who are very confused by the backwards and scrambled entrys at the moment!!

A great many thanks to everyone who has followed and/or been a part of my stories over the last 7 months it has been a truly memorable, worthwhile and mind-broadening expreience. I am back in Cambridge for now, and hope than anyone in the area will soon be in touch to catch up before I move back to the farm in Oxfordshire (I'm accessible on my old phone number, email me if you haven't got it!!).