The Waterfall/river is the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe so why not take my backpack and cross the border to see what it looks like from the other side. It is actually and fully good excuse to get another visa in your passport or to visit the famous country of Zimbabwe. The foreign ministry warns for low cash flow, unstable electricity, no banks or ATM and more or less a big lack of everything but that didn’t stop us and after exchanged some US dollars we crossed this beautiful bridge and walked into Zimbabwe.
We only stopped in Victoria Falls which is a very touristic place and we didn’t see any of the problems everybody warn us about, I guess its worse if you continue further more into the country but here we could find banks, ATM’s, restaurants and cafés for every kind of wallets and many places accepts credit cards. We stayed at the shoestring backpackers which is supposed to be the party place number one but the closest party we found was some loud music.Of course we had to check out the waterfall from this side too and now then I can compare then I guess you could say that the Zimbabwe side gives you a lot better overview and nicer scenery while Zambia side is cooler since you can walk out and actually swim in the waterfall. Zimbabwe side is way more touristic and you can see that both in the number of people who are here but also on the prices of everything, its more expensive here. After their hyper inflation where the prices doubled every 15 hour they no more have any own currency and instead relay on the us dollar. You can discuss if thats good or bad but for sure it makes it easy to remember how much things really costs.
We now can this waterfall inside out so when we saw signs about white water rafting it was done, into the office and book a ride and after we signed all kind of papers it was game on. They informed us about this is a class 5 rafting but since neither me or Jonathan has any idea what that is we just said yea, no problem in a true african spirit. Class 5 is obvious the real deal and according to Wikipedia the scale is from 1 to 6 but we did survive. At one place our guide stopped us and asked if we really wanted to do this rapid, everybody on the raft was quite so I said “no problem so far so lets go” and yea, gnarly it was.
Once we were getting closer to the rapid our guide told us that we will absolutely not going on the right side, if we do we will die. The middle is gnarly as fuck so we want to aim for the left side, of course we ended up at the right side even if we paddled like crazy towards the left. Lucky for us we got stranded on a huge rock and could steer/push ourselves out towards the middle and after a huge drop we tried to climb an even bigger wave. If there is one spot you don’t wanna fall off this is the place and yea, I’m not sure exactly what happened but suddenly I was under water, tumbling around between rocks and really strong currents and just before i reached the surface I was sucked down again for another spin. Lucky for me I’m a lousy surfer and have some experience from this kind of shit so I just stayed calm and waited for me to get out of the current and pretty much at the same time it felt like my lungs would explode I got my head over the water and could grab a deep breath before going down again. After this experience the rest of the rafting felt kind a boring and today I’m covered in bruises besides the soreness in muscles I didn’t even knew existed.
