March 4-5
We begrudgingly left Cape Town and continued on to our next big sight: Victoria Falls! With just 4ish days in the area, we were getting a lot of country bang for our buck. We flew into Zambia, drove over the border to Zimbabwe and then spent some time on a day trip to Botswana. So three countries, four days, but could do them all without packing our bags any additional times.
When we arrived in Zambia, we did our usual visa dance: walk up to customs, they ask if we got our visa in advance, we say no, they deep sigh and tell us how much it costs, we tell them we don’t have any cash, they tell us we can pay in USD, we tell them we don’t have any USD, they deep sigh again, we ask if we can use credit card, they deep sigh and say the machine isn’t working well (or they don’t take it at all), they try to run the card, it doesn’t work, they try again, it doesn’t work. At this point, either Michael tries to convince them to let him go out past customs to an ATM or the card magically works on the third try. I don’t remember what happened in Zambia… most of our customs experiences are starting to blur together. Not all of them – we had an extra special experience two days later in Botswana.
After leaving the airport, we needed a taxi to our hotel. We had picked up some local Zambia currency, kwacha, (the only currency available at the airport) and went out to see what the drivers had to offer. Good news: there were taxis. Bad news: they only take you to the border. Then you have to get a second taxi. So that’s what we did and that’s when things got a tiny bit messy. We got out of Zambia customs, and were told it was about a mile and a half to the Zimbabwe customs. So really we were going to need 3 taxis to get this job done. We had been told that we couldn’t use kwacha for Zimbabwe taxis, so we changed it all except for the 20 kwacha we needed to get to the next customs stop. We asked around and were told it was going to be 40 kwacha to go that mile. Nope. So we started walking. And it started raining. Michael was about ready to cave and go back when our taxi driver pulled up behind us. 20 kwacha it was. We don’t usually feel like we win when negotiating with taxis. But that felt like a win to me. Another round of customs, another taxi and we were at our hotel for the next couple of days.
It wasn’t terribly late, but we were exhausted, so we hung out at the hotel, had dinner and went to bed early.
The next day we went white water rafting on the great Zambezi river. I had been looking for a chance for us to go white water rafting over the past couple of months and it had never worked out. I hadn’t been since our honeymoon in Costa Rica and Michael since a bachelor party in Denver. We were due. Plus how cool is it to go white water rafting on the river that feeds Victoria Falls!?!
The Zambezi River is Africa’s fourth longest river (2,693 kilometers) after the Nile, Congo and Niger. Here’s a video of a stretch we were rafting on:
https://www.thatsonourlist.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/img_7771.movJust kidding! That was right at the base of the falls and we did not raft on that. We rafted a few miles down the river once things had calmed down a bit.
The day started at 7am and involved a lot of work to get on the water. About an hour and a half of driving, an hour of waiting, and a 20 minute challenging hike down the gorge to get to the water. But then we were on the water and it was great! It wasn’t the best rapids – 2s and a few 3s (one of which they called a 5). But it was still great being out there. The river was beautiful and the water was a great temperature. No pics since we couldn’t bring ourselves to pay the 45 bucks for their photos.
We got back to the hotel early afternoon and were going to head out to see the falls, but we were so tired. We napped a few hours and then headed into town for a quick dinner. While in town we found the place where they do cage diving with Crocodiles. This is a thing apparently. It sounds stupid and dangerous to me. It sounded more stupid when we found out that it’s just some crocs that they keep in a tank. This tank was just the size of a small pool next to a bar. No thank you.
I’ll leave you with a quote from Frank Zappa that I liked a ton that was on the wall from the brewery we had dinner at:
“You can’t be a real country unless you have a beer and an airline. It helps if you have some kind of a football team, or some nuclear weapons, but at the very least you need a beer.”