Our bus ride down to Livingstone looked pleasant from the outside and was pleasant all the way up to the point of sitting down on the bus. Those seats were narrow! Somehow they had managed to fit a luxury bus with five seats across… three on one side and two on the other. Derrell and I both had to sit sideways to fit, our shoulder spans were too damn wide. We adjusted the best we could to constantly squirming and annoying each other for the next six hours. The Sony noise-cancelling headphones with the iPod were worth tenfold their weight in gold. The bus driver had gospel music up so loud our ears were ringing after the first hour of the ride. We noticed a few passengers running up to turn the music down whenever we stopped for a break. One of the breaks being a complete exodus of all males from the bus to inspect, help, offer advice and generally grin over changing the inner back tire that blew out enroute. And honestly, if you live near a city in Africa and are male, it is likely that you have earned your master mechanic badge well before the age of twelve. We finally arrived in Livingstone a bit more deaf but well-fed on some darn good fried chicken that Derrell picked up at one of the stops along the way. We have also determined that french fries are much harder to cook that the fast food chains would have you believe. You tend to get really limp and soggy fries in Africa.
JollyBoy’s Backpackers was a great place. We spent a day getting laundry done, chilling in hammocks near a pool, and wandering the street in search of pizza. The pizza we found. It was a colorful place in Carribean colors (or are Carribean colors actually African?), and the pizza was good. The pizza titles threw us a bit, though. The place was called ‘Funky Munky’. Okay, fine. The specialty pizzas were titled such things as ‘Orangatang Pizza’, ‘Vervet Monkey Pizza’, ‘Gorrilla Pizza’, and so with Uganda just up north and blurbs about ebola circulating in the newspapers, we were slightly dismayed about the marketing angle at first. We got over it when a pizza arrived at another table and looked like you would expect (well, in Africa that is), apparently bush meat free.
Our next day, we headed over to Victoria Falls. The falls are amazing and wet. They have the requisite term, Zambian Shower, for just how wet you get on the Zambian side. It also is a place that you can get up close and personal with the falls. If you are so inclinced, you can walk up to the unfenced edge of the river or cliff. And if you are possibly uncoordinated, you could land you a good thousand feet down at the bottom of the falls without seeing a warning sign. It is nice being out of the United States at times. It lets you remember that you really are responsible for your own altitude. While we were wandering the path, we crossed a group of local college students. This resulted in us being placed in their group photograph. That seemed slightly odd at the time, but about an hour later, we crossed two guys in the midst of the falls misting downpour (think gardenhose being poured down on you) and they got us into one of their pictures, as well. Well, we’ll be some drenched white folks in someones trip album somewhere in the area. The falls were amazing and the river is on high-flow season so it was a torential mass of water as far as you could see. The overused phrase you see everywhere in town is quoted from Livingstone ‘the smoke that thunders’. We were thinking maybe the smoke that thunders and drenches you might be a better phrase… it took us over an hour to wring out our clothes and sit in the sun in order to stand up without dripping. Ponchos are for wimps.
