We have spent the day at Victoria falls, really beautiful and supposed to be one of the natural wonders of the world. As I said really beautiful and since its low water now we was able to climb around at the fall. Really awesome and I let the picture speak for themselfes.
We are still in Livingstone and even if I get the feeling like I know this little village now and how beautiful the Victoria falls are there are limits in stuff to do. Neverless we still havent seen the falls from above so today, well we rented a micro aircraft. Its very touristic, its expensive and worth every penny. What a lovely view and even if we just got a short amount of time in the air its totally worth it. We saw the falls, some crocodiles, elephants, hippos and as a bonus I was allowed to steer for a while, well until I almost crashed the plane. Once the plane started to doing some nasty maneuvers while I tried to figure out how to steer the captain took over.
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Really cool to get airborne with more or less a lawn mower on your back.
Cant really say much about Zambia since I only been here in Livingstone but the people are really friendly, its really really cheap and it doesn’t feel as unsafe as for in example South Africa. I dont think its an good idea to leave the hostel alone at night but the odds are much better here for you getting back alive, without getting robbed. Well tomorrow we leave for Botswana and hunting down the big five, I’ll guess that means I will be offline for a couple of days but stay tuned, I will be back.
Back in Livingstone, Zambia perfectly timed with the opening of Devils pool todays schedule was decided, lets go swimming. Devils pools is just as you can hear of the name a natural pool, just at the edge of the main waterfall and if you want and have some courage you can more or less sit at the edge and look out over the scenery. This is of course very season-dependent and its only available during low water. We were very unsure if it would open up during our time here but yea, they opened up today and we were among the first into the water.
Really nice and warm water and no sight of any crocodiles and it was for sure a nice feeling to swimming at the edge of a waterfall, especially the swimming there was kind a interesting because of the very strong currents but we all survived. I thought it would give a nice adrenalin kick to sit there, at the edge but no, guess I’m getting used to do stupid shit.
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.
