Kim, one of the owners of JollyBoy’s Backpackers was fantastically helpful. She seemed to know everything about the area, know everyone in town and be genuinely into chatting about it all with anyone who asked. We got our route to the airport straightened out easily.
We didn’t think there would be anything of note on this day, but surprisingly there was. We flagged a taxi to take us to the Zambia border, got our exit stamp, got back in the taxi which took us to the Zimbabwe border, paid for our visa stamp.. and then…
We got a new taxi to take us to the airport. At that point, our young driver asked us if we were in a rush or not, is it okay to get petrol first? Of course, answering ‘yes’ to getting petrol is always the right answer. So off we go… into the Victoria Falls township. This is actually a tidy township and the people look like your standard middle class crowd with slightly more worn clothes and homes that are pulled together from cheap materials. There are gardens, flowerbeds, and swept dirt yards. People are casually wander the streets in their Sunday clothes (since this is Sunday morning). We stop in front of one fenced in house, our driver gets out and bangs on the fence. A few words and a shake of the head. Off to the next house, someone comes out and says no again. Finally, over to a third house. Derrell and I are having a bit of a hard time deciding just how worried we should be at this point. Our driver’s body language is relaxed, but this is just a bit weird. Finally, we get a positive response from this house. Out comes a plastic jug of petrol and a peice of garden hose. We hand over our fare to our driver $20 USD and he hands over a $5 USD to the jug guy. We get an explanation as he climbs back in. About 2-3 months ago, the petrol stations had run dry (or went exhorbitant on pricing) so you can only obtain petrol from the black market. With that accomplished we headed out for the 15 kilometer drive to the airport. Along the way out of the township, we noticed a number of anti-president painted signs (”Mugabe must go”) surreptitiously showing themselves here and there.
Good old President Robert Mugabe isn’t doing such a good job. He went for land reform and took back the farms from the white farmers starting in 2000. This ended up placing the farms into his cronie’s hands, who unfortunately, didn’t have enough background in farming. The old farm hands were either considered evil for working for the whites and let go, or their wages were slashed and they started to leave. The current state of affairs is that 2/3rds of Zimbabwe is in need of food aid. It is a complete mess and getting worse. The only independent newspaper has stopped publishing, since it is a crime to publish without a government license. And the government police are harshly stopping opposition parties. Thus, seeing anti-president signs seems like a risk to your life, but then again, the president is proving to be a risk to your life as it stands without the signs.
It is tough to see the common people with a genuinely friendly culture are stuck in the middle of these corrupted politics. Needless to say, we were a bit shaken by our own gut wrenching, what has gone wrong with this world pondering.
Once we arrived at the ‘once-great-and-busy’ tiny airport, we found a number of tourists that were part of ensconced tours that kept you away from taxi drives through townships. These guys were swept off to the posh Victoria Falls hotels, let out to wander the main tourist street of the town (which looked very 1980’s modern, complete with t-shirt shops), and herded onto the Zambezi river sunset cruises. They looked really cheerful, while we were sitting there staring at the very, very closed Money Exchange booth. Guess Zimbabwe currency isn’t something you want these days.
