72 HOURS IN VICTORIA FALLS
A weekend of adventure is only a hop, skip and jump away, writes Paul Ash
THURSDAY 8AM
THIS is a civilised time to fly to another country — early enough to get the best out of the day but not so early that I have to set off in darkness to catch that lonely 4.50am airport train. By 8.30am I am having a cappuccino and staring at the fastjet Airbus, which has had an earlier start than I’ve had. By midday we have bounced through Harare and are en route to Victoria Falls. It feels a bit like flying to Cape Town, only with Africa’s greatest landmark waiting at the other end (rather than its secondgreatest). Below us, Zimbabwe is a green swathe.
“If you need some water down south,” my Zimbabwean fellow passenger says, nodding at the swollen, brown streams we can see coursing across the land below, “maybe we can help.”
By mid-afternoon I am sipping a welcome drink on the terrace at the Elephant Hills Hotel, gazing at the magnificent view which includes the spray from the falls rising over the forest like smoke from a runaway fire. The river is almost at flood levels. Any hope of going rafting disappears with the spray.
In the evening we board a doubledecker riverboat for a sundowner cruise on the Zambezi. For an hour or two we putter upstream. Hippos grunt and splash, a couple of crocodiles leer at us from the muddy banks. Off to the west, thunderheads rear into the African sky with the promise of more, lashing rain.
“Nothing like an African thunderstorm,” says one of the guests. We stare, transfixed. Back at Elephant Hills, monkeys have made off with my fruit bowl. (Yes, I had been warned.) Sleep comes to a backdrop of the distant rumble of the cataract.
FRIDAY 6AM
EARLY starts are no hardship when your alarm is the chatter of vervet monkeys and birds squabbling over fruit. Today we are going to Botswana — really to Chobe, one of the continent’s finest game parks. First, though, we have to drive to the border, an hour or so west of the falls through a national park. Save for a pair of hyenas sloping home after a night of scavenging, all is quiet. At the Kazungula border post I manage to fall out of the stationary bus. It is an echo of the last time I was in Kazungula, 30 years ago, when I fell off a truck on a school trip and broke both arms and a leg. (Perhaps because I needed to be taught a lesson, our teacher-chaperones let me make my own way home from Botswana. Ah, the laissez faire 1980s, eh?) Today I have broken nothing but my cred as a competent traveller.
We are met by a guide in an open game vehicle and a glorious morning follows. Chobe is a wet, blistering green. There are elephants everywhere, gorging themselves on summer’s bounty. There are hippos too and lots of fat, glossy antelopes doing high kicks in the greenery. No sign of any predators — right now, this is elephant country.
Lunch is on the terrace at a safari lodge that feels like it stepped out of the 1970s — all thatch and ceiling fans cranking slowly under high roofs. We eat while the Chobe River glides past.
Afterwards we board another opendecked cruiser and head upstream. The river is where you begin to understand Chobe. Rows of trees line the banks, their branches reaching down to the water. There are elephants everywhere. We see them chomping the grass, hear the crackle as they strip bark off trees. There are more hippos and crocs. A small herd of buffaloes wade in the shallows and a lone impala ram stands daintily on an emerald-coloured island.
In the late afternoon we head back to Victoria Falls. I manage to make it through the border without falling off anything. Back at the falls, we check in to The Kingdom at Victoria Falls, a large resort which with its domes and pillars and suites looking out into the perpetual green of the rainforest, feels like a scene from the Jungle Book, only one involving a luxury hotel. At sunset, a thunderstorm lashes the town. Amid the crash of thunder, I hear the beat of a steam locomotive working hard uphill. Figuring it must be making its way from the famous bridge over the gorge, I rush to the station just behind the hotel and am rewarded with the sight of an elderly but glossy steam engine tugging a string of dark-green coaches into the yard. It is the Victoria Falls dinner train, returning from its run to the bridge. Its dining car is packed with rosy-cheeked tourists reliving a piece of history, when trains used to pause on the bridge over the Batoka Gorge and the spray would settle on the hot steel roofs.
A young woman is in the cab of the engine, pulling the whistle cord and thanking the driver. As the whistle shatters the quiet, I remember a July night in 1980 when my brother and I stood on the same station platform and watched the crew of a snorting iron horse make ready to depart with the southbound Victoria Falls Mail. Memories are made of this.
SATURDAY 9.30AM
We are at the gates of the Victoria Falls National Park, fussing with our plastic ponchos without which, our guide assures us, we will get soaked. Starting at the statue of David Livingstone gazing over the Devil’s Cataract, we make our way eastwards along the edge of the falls. The ground trembles beneath our feet and we are lashed by torrential spray as the Zambezi River thunders into the Batoka Gorge at 500 million litres per minute. The spray — the smoke that thunders — rises into the air. From the air it looks like a bushfire; down here we can barely see through the rain.
“No wonder they call this a rainforest,” says one of my companions.
Victoria Falls at full spate is a doubleedged sword: at low water, you can see the 100m-high cliffs and the deep cleft of the gorge, but you will not see much in the way of a waterfall. At high water — like today — you can see very little, save for those moments when the turbulent air parts the mist and you glimpse a curtain of water churning into the depths. For my money, and even though I would remain damp for the rest of the day, I will take high water any time. The sound is the thing you will remember.
SATURDAY 3PM
THE graceful steel bridge that spans the Batoka Gorge is Victoria Falls’s other wonder. Inaugurated in 1905 (the story goes that a leopard was the first living thing to actually cross the bridge), it opened Central Africa to the railway pushing up from the south and it remains the finest monument to the great and now all-but-forgotten dream of the Cape to Cairo railway.
The best way to get to grips with the bridge is to take the tour. We meet “the engineer”, who tells us about the many trials the builders faced, how they built the spans on each side of the gorge and levered them into place.
Then he straps us into full-body harnesses, each with two safety lines on a carabiner, gives us a quick safety briefing (never be completely unclipped from the safety cable because it is a long way down to the river) and off we go — under the bridge. We clamber down to the walkway that runs beneath the roadway and make our way across the river while our guide tells us how
the bridge was built. Baboons and vervet monkeys, sheltering from the rain, stare then grudgingly clamber out of our way and perch on spindly girders. Nearly 130m below, the Zambezi churns past like a muscular brown snake. I manage to not dent my head on any of the protruding steel bits and reach the other side safely.
As exciting as the tour is, it still feels like something is missing. So at sunset, I am the last lamb-to-the-slaughter of the day, standing in yet another harness with various ropes attached, feeling the yawning gulf of the Batoka Gorge beneath my feet.
“Three, two, one and you go,” says the guide, as he removes the safety rope and shuffles me to the lip of the platform so that my toes poke out into the void.
“Three, two . . . ” I don’t hear the “one” as I step out into space and feel gravity suck me to the centre of the earth. It is a 100m free fall spiced with terror, then an oomph as the ropes take up the slack. I swing out over the furious river, whooping partly from delight and partly because the climbing harness is not sitting so nicely in my groin. Later, as they haul me back up to the bridge that I have walked over and under and then jumped off, I feel like the embrace is complete.
SUNDAY 11.30AM
ASLOW start befitting an otherwise adrenaline weekend-fuelled I have a languid breakfast then walk back down to the bridge to watch my companions confront their fears before stepping out into the void on their bridge swing. We watch the cyclist traders bring vegetables across the river and go back with loads of cooking oil and sugar. All too soon, our driver is waiting to whisk us to the airport, back past the signs that urge us to Beware of Elephants, back onto our Airbus and back home. We land at 8.30pm. It is Sunday night. I am still in time for the last train home. — Ash was a guest of Legacy Hotels and Resorts and fastjet