Jessie Goes….

The place we had stayed in Livingstone has to be up there in the top 5 worst places I have ever stayed.   It really didn’t matter because really it was just a bed to use, but its worth noting that in the budget accommodations to stay at, this place should be crossed off your list.

First, the shower barely worked…and of course was missing a shower curtain.  For some reason this had happened MULTIPLE times just to Katie and I on this trip.  Second, the security of the place was terrible.  We broke into our own room multiple times.   Our door was directly beside louvered windows that could be easily pushed in from the outside (they were rickety as can be) even if they weren’t missing a pane.     Katie and I were sitting in bed one evening and Justin in drunk form, came on in!  It really is creepy even when you know who it is to see a hand reach through the window, turn around and unlock the door!   Funny but creepy too.

The place was so insecure that I took to carrying my big camera around everywhere, which was a pain in the butt, and stashing various things through my backpack to ‘disguise’ them, as the safe didn’t work, and even if it did it wasn’t big enough to hold anything but a passport or two.

And of course, somewhere between the room, or the fact that I might have accidently checked it in my backpack at the Livingstone Airport on the flight between Zambia and South Africa, my little sony cybershot was stolen!   I really kind of hated that camera, but its more that I brought the thing specifically to walk around Jo burg and Capetown without a flashy camera, and now, right before its debut it is gone!   That and a few really good pictures from Florida forever lost.  grrrrrrr.  thieves thieves thieves.  So far I am out 300 bucks and one camera.    Times like these I really do hope there is a hell so people will go there who deserve it.    It would be a special kind of hell where it would seem like normal life, except for everytime you bought something with your hard earnings it would dissappear.   And no matter how you tried to protect yourself, someone would swipe it every time.    Most of the time you wouldn’t know it was gone until you looked for it and needed it.  And every once in a while someone would steal your identity so you’d have to spend 6 months on the phone with creditors explaining that it wasn’t you who bought 25 bottles of Channel #5 in Texas last month.

Anyhow, 🙂  be real careful staying in budget accommodations in this part of the world.   It will probably cost you more than you think.

Let me just start by saying I’ve been white water rafting before. Several times actually, maybe half a dozen. Some meandering, some exhilerating, one with members of my family bailing their boat into mine. One recently with a family who was massively overweight, couldn’t swim, and couldn’t balance to save their lives. The dad fell overboard getting in the boat, and managed to fall out several other times without the aid of any whitewater. But I digress.

You know you are not in Kansas (or Colorado) whitewater anymore when the rafting guides informs you that there will be four rescue kayakers with you to pick up the human detrius that gets knocked out of the raft.

Its cold in the mornings in Zambia, and still chilly in the open aired safari vehicle that gets us to the top of the river bank, which we then have to hike down. I have to say, they aren’t kidding when they say that the hike down is the hardest part. It is a good 15 or 20 minutes straight down the gorge. They have a rickety set of tree-branched latticework down some of the steepest part, which adds a little more danger and excitement to the descent.

Our raft set sail with half of my group of friends (the other half in another raft) all suited up in full helmets and lifevests wrapped tight enough to cause hairline rib fractures. Not 2 minutes into the ride, as we are practicing in a relatively calm little pool, Vinny our guide tells half of us to get out of the boat!!! brrrrrr. Then the other half! We are practicing rescuing and pulling our fellow man into the raft. The bad part is that it was a good way to start off cold. The good part is that already wet, you couldn’t get any wetter if you fell in now. And semi comforting that we all now knew how to get someone out of the water quickly, but semi alarming that it was obviously imminently going to happen.

So off we went through our first set of rapids. Justin, who was up in front of the boat, tossed in after the first couple of boat rockings… it was like one second he was there, and then he was gone…and we couldn’t see him! He was under the boat and quickly surfaced and we got some practice pulling him in. Methinks he wasn’t taking it seriously (as many an 18 year old might not!), but after that little scare he was a bit more alert about this! (and he managed to stay in the raft for the rest of the rapids).

As we glanced back on the first set of rapids we saw an entire raft flip. Its very dramatic to see, oars all over the place, little bobbing helmets up and down in the water getting swept away with the waves dunking them every few seconds. We rescued a guy that was swept way down the river as well as a couple of oars.

Because it is high water season we actually all have to get off after the 10th named rapid because it is considered toooo dangerous for us for numbers 11 through 15. The only thing is, we are climbing up a rocky cliff, all wet, holding an oar and in non climbing shoes. I jumped around pretty well, but I have to say, the climb around up and down the cliff was pretty dangerous too, I felt more ill at ease doing this than the rest of the trip down the river, and I like to rock climb. Maybe not so much for myself, but if anyone fell it was going to be some serious injuries, and a lot of people weren’t cut out for grasping thin ridges of rock and balancing. I guess we all made it though and were back in our rafts 15 minutes later.

The rest of my fellow safari friends were in another boat that took an extremely dramatic front end flip on the rapid after we got into the boat. On video it was even more dramatic! We however, had managed to stay in our boat (for the most part, Justin keeling in not counting) so far. We were third in line to shoot down the following rapid. Boat number one, rowing along, looking good, looking good, then in an instant, total flippage, people all over the whirlpools. The boat following right after having seen that, looking serious, but looking good, looking good, looking… FLIPPED, and here we go! crap. I thought for sure we were going in, as this invisible flipping area (which didn’t look all that suspect, like some of the major rapids) had claimed two rafts in a matter of 30 seconds. BUT…We made it! Not sure how. Its like whatever reached out and flipped them had sunken under the water to play another day.

All in all it was a lot of fun… some major fun rapids, only one girl out of the 5 boats who looked like she seriously could have drowned as she was caught way upstream in a whirlpool, but the safety kayaker eventually dragged her panicked self to safety. It was a good day!

The following day, and the following after that were extremely sore days…. I mean like legs so sore that I didn’t walk right! Yes I’m getting old, but I’m not that old! Fortunately, Katie, who is 22 reported that she too felt like her legs were going to fall off.

Dr Livingstone we presume? 

Once our group got through the border ordeal we headed for the Falls. Right through Livingstone, where we are actually staying. We are here in a ‘high water’ season, and because of very heavy rains the water is more massive then usual.Traditionally, Victoria Falls was visited by the Zimbabwean side, that side had some of the better views and the hotels and infrastructure was superior and right on the water. In comparison, Livingstone was just a town nearby, poor and with little tourist (or any other) infrastructure. Well these days, given the political issues and monetary issues, people are flooding the streets of Livingstone, and the town itself is struggling to build an infrastructure that can handle the tourists. Myself, and many others, won’t visit Zimbabwe, primarily because we refuse to give Mugabe the 100 US dollars it would cost to get in there. Products are cheap enough (where they exist, which isn’t many places as inflation is so rampant they can’t stock shelves), that many would never spend 100 dollars elsewhere in the country thereby leaving Mugabe as the primary beneficiary of tourism.

So, to sum up, minus walking across the bridge to the other side, which is generally free or really cheap, I will not be going to Zimbabwe. 

So back to Livingstone, the man, I mean, not the city. David Livingstone was looking for the source of the Nile. He was quite a bit off the mark, and frankly probably a bit off his rocker considering he hacked through jungle for months on end, contracting malaria, sleeping sickness and other issues, which should have killed him, and was the cause of his death some years later.I mean really! Was it that pressing to have to figure this out? Patience would have yielded better medicines, superior road building technologies, and GoogleMaps. It gets some stuff wrong, but by and large does a great job of spotting the Nile.

So, of course, it probably didn’t take much to discover that this wasn’t the Nile – for instance it was running the wrong direction, but he did “discover” the Zambezi River and the Mosi-oa-Tunya (the Smoke that Thunders), and promptly renamed it Victoria Falls after the Queen, in a most original move.

These falls were then, and are now, the worlds largest waterfalls – the stats:
-There are seven major gorges, most of which rise about 400 ft high and are nearly vertical drops.
-This is twice the height of Niagara Falls
-It is about 5700 feet wide, which is about 30% wider than Niagara, and to visualize, about 17 football fields back to back.
-In high season about 10x the amount of water falls versus low season.

The area is ‘rainy’. Like a heavy rain, and going across the first footbridge it really hits you, as you have water cascading down beside you and then rushing right back up on either side of this bridge. Its the greenest area I’ve seen since being in Southern Africa too. Its hard to describe, but I’m glad to have seen it. And tomorrow, I’ve signed up to white water raft it!

Crossing borders is my favorite – there is nothing like watching the crossroads of 3rd world life, bureaucracy, ferries, produce, products, businessmen, truckers and the odd little face of a tourist or two toting backpacks and looking out of place. Some scared, some harrassed looking, and some barely noticing that they aren’t in Kansas anymore. There is always ample time to observe these myriad of things as the guantlet of forms and queues are processed and waited on, first on one side, then on the other.

Enterprising vendors make use of the bored masses by offering cold cokes and native trinkets all outrageously priced, and even then, they want the bottle back! Before boarding the ferry, entertainment was provided by a gang of Botswanan men physically threatening a man whom I assumed to be Zambian with throwing him into the river so (apparently) scum like him would get off Botswanan soil. We also got to look at the lines and lines of truckers who would be waiting days if not weeks to cross on the ferry, clearly deciding that the cost of the bribe to get yourself to the to the front of the line was still too high, and waiting a week didn’t much matter.

Zambian visas are now painfully expensive, particularly for Americans and Brits. It used to be that the Visas were $0. But as of Jan 2008 they went to $135. Its reciprocity, but the Zambian government doesn’t seem to realize that this could hurt tourism something fierce, and they also don’t seem to see the ‘I’m never going home once I get in here’ differences between the countries. I heard a rumor that they were going to revisit the Visa pricing issue soon. Probably like the day after I pay for mine.

Getting our vehicle through was the toughest part, it came on a different, later, ferry then we did, and seemed to have may more stops on the way to visiting legitimately than we did. Still, I think, all told, it took about 3 hours. Not terrible.