Join the vulture club
alternative livelihoods.
Known for its rich birdlife, including the wailing trumpeter hornbill, the park is a “little jewel”, says Charles as we stop to admire dung beetles, sable antelopes and a dazzle of zebras gently resting against one another.
Then all too soon it seems the elephants are heading back to the hills, we’ve polished off all the G&Ts and I’ve just one more evening left in Zimbabwe.
High time to drum and dance, I decide, so I slip on a chitenge (a brightly patterned sarong) and join in the show at Safari Lodge’s entertainments space, The Boma.
A four-course traditional
African meal, drumming and dancing and an optional session with a fortune teller were all on the menu. I passed on the proteinpacked mopane worms and the smoked crocodile, but got stuck into sadza, a ground maize porridge that’s practically a national dish, while other revellers tucked into buffalo curry.
I could have drummed all night, the band and dancing were such fun, but like so many good times in Zimbabwe this passed in a flash, too.
Hope is certainly springing in the Falls – and if there are angels in the mix I reckon they are green.
THEY are the perfect guests, never late for a meal, eating everything and squawking their appreciation.
Vultures, waste management supremos, are endangered thanks to man-made threats such as electrocution by power lines.
At the Victoria Falls Safari Lodge, however, they have become a star attraction. Guests are treated to the stunning sight of 300 and more congregating for daily lunchtime feeding.
The Vulture Culture Experience, a collaboration involving the Lodge’s owner Africa Albida Tourism, conservation programme VulPro and the Victoria Falls Wildlife Trust, uses leftover food from the estate’s restaurants.
Designed to aid vultures’ survival and help monitor numbers, the supplementary programme aims to persuade them to steer away from meat that has been tampered with.
Any bones remaining are left for hyenas to crunch up, helping boost their calcium levels.
And it’s quite a show!