S/V Tavarua

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.

We spent Valentine’s Day on an all-day raft trip down the Zambezi river. There were two rafts from Zambia and one from Zimbabwe on the trip. We chose to be in the ‘Active’ raft. This consisted of our guide, Boid, flipping our raft through three of the rapids and having us hang on the outside of the raft and float through another set of class 4 rapids outside of the boat. If that wasn’t active enough, he pushed us over a few times just to make sure we were completely exhausted. Ah, that boundless energy from doing this as a living and kayaking the other four days of the week for fun. Boid shook his head at us as we beached ourselves back up over the sides of the raft while he catapulted from the water with a maniacal gleam to his eye.

The width of the gorge was not as wide as I would have imagined, but they said at some sections the depth was 96 meters. Now that is a deep whirlpool. The Zambezi is considered one of the safest rafting rivers in the world due to the depth. So, you can get good Class 4 and 5 rapids without worry of landing or even seeing a rock… which allows you to be out of the raft and freeride through the rapids. The floating and swirling, and of course, the coughing and getting water up your nose, throughout the rapids is great fun. We ran rapids 11 through 23. The top rapids are only open in the fall when the water is low, and low-water is supposed to make the high-water Class 5 rapids look tame. Guess they need a 5+, 5++, 5+++ grading system?

The gorge was stunning. The black basalt blocks were mind boggling. The blue sky up above the jungle vegetation was amazing.

The only downside of the entire day is the hellacious climb/scramble back up out of the canyon at the end of the day. This ends up being a 40 minute climb on wooden pegged latters that gets your heart racing to maximum stairmaster levels. If you stop to catch your breath, a set of hornets start biting you and huge man-eating flies start to hone in on you. We thought we might die before we reached the top. It took us three days for our legs to stop wobbling when we went up or down stairs after that climb. Ouch. Some of the guys/kids hauling the raft equipment back up the hill were in perfect shape. They would make a number of body builders swoon with jealousy. The upside of that job is that you become a physical chick magnet if you stick with the career, the downside is that it only pays $10 USD/month.

Our truck heading us back to the rafting headquarters headed through some villages. We were back to mud huts, but most were square, not round. Even in basic housing like this you see the special touches from folks with a penchant for flower gardens and art. One of the small mud buildings was turned into a beauty parlor and braiding was underway. At one point we stopped to wait for one of the porters. The young kids from the area started to surround the truck and call for ‘Icees’ which caused a few of the guides to start tossing handfuls of the block ice from the cooler over to them. This became ‘toy extradonaire’. It could be melted on you, in your mouth, on a tree, on your brother or sister, and rolled in the dirt. The little kids seemed quite pleased that things were running a bit slow today.

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.

Our flight from Nairobi to Lusaka was mostly empty except for the twenty or so families returning from the Haj. These folks were in the full spectrum of traditional Islamic wear at the Nairobi airport, complete with a ceremonial gleaming brass water canister around their necks. (I’ve made a note to myself to look up exactly what those canisters were, they were certainly bright against some of the black robes.) On the plane, the spectrum dwindled to a subset of Islamic families that lived in Southern Africa, so the austere black garb disappeared leaving more colorful robes with wild children underfoot.

Our plane was continuing on to Harare, Zimbabwe, but only two older nuns and two businessmen were left on the flight. One wonders how British Airways was making any money on that leg of the journey.

The Lusaka airport is small and tidy. We had a lift from the airport to Cha Cha Cha Backpacker’s by Victor and his friend. This consisted of Derrell getting the back of a flatbed pickup with the friend and luggage, while I, enjoying being the token female of the moment, got the front seat. Derrell got to meet the friend in back who, surprise surprise, turned out to be a “guide”. How helpful.

Our immediate impression of Lusaka was positive. The weather was balmy, palm trees were scattered about. The guys shuttling us were friendly, relaxed and chatty. The town had cement buildings (no huts in sight) and the tall grasses were trimmed back from the roadways. For one million people, this place was looking really good after Nairobi.

At the Backpacker’s place, we met a guy from Belgium that drove the eight month overland truck trips from Cairo to Cape Town. He had been doing the tours for ten years. On this particular trip, his group had started with 17 people and was already down to 14. He figured most of them would probably last the rest of the trip. He was the sole driver and tour representative, everyone else was a tourist that helped cook and pitch tents. He was headed down to Victoria Falls to pick up a truck in storage, get the cobwebs off of it and get it running again. His tour could not cross into The Sudan due to recent rebel shelling, so the company flew the tour over the conflict region where it then had the group hang out for a few days while he scuttled the truck back up north to get them. (This was with a shake to his head about his tour company making him go to the border just to make sure the news about the bombings was correct.) We had seen a few of the overland truck tours and they looked a bit miserable, although the hardy souls who were on them seemed cheerful enough. Heaven knows why. We asked whether he had to cook or not. The answer was that everyone cooked.. and they always become lazy after the first or second week. Every dinner eventually ended up being pasta or rice with tomato and onion sauce over it. He emphasized the ‘lazy and tomato sauce’ aspect. Derrell shuddered. So to cheer Derrell up, he offered that it was a special day when someone decided to cook pancakes and it usually took an extra hour or two of clean-up time, since the everyone seemed to have found their long lost appetites on those days. Derrell wasn’t convinced that would make the trip any better.

The following day in Lusaka we didn’t get a good reading of the distance legend on our map. This caused us about an eight kilometer meander that we weren’t quite expecting to be so long. I suppose it’s some measure of travel fitness that you don’t think twice about walking this sort of distance when it happens.

Our first stop was the Zambia National Museum. This was a peculiar place with placards written about witchcraft, politics and a few household items. A few were along the lines of… “Item: Stool Use: To Sit Upon Material: Wood”. We rather thought that was getting to the point. The political section was a scathing but warranted overview of items collected from the British colonial oppressive period up through Zambia’s independence in the 1960’s with a few political photographs without captions post that timeframe. If you didn’t know Zambian political history, you sure were not going to learn it from this museum. The political section had a few witchcraft items that were used to gain independence, including the tip of some guys finger complete with fingernail sitting in an old-fashioned case. What a strange place. The banner downstairs was declaring the museum wanted to be ‘internationally known as one of the great museums of the world’. We considered that it may have a few million miles to go to reach its target.

From there we wandered down to the main street of Lusaka and over to the C R Bus station to buy tickets for tomorrow. While we were staring at a map trying to find our way, we got a couple offers of help by passerbys. No sales, no gimmicks, no con-artists. Aaaah. Our bliss was only slightly dented after I was overcharged by double for a small pad of paper that I bought later. It ended up being fourteen cents instead of seven, but hey, I can handle that.

We ran the full gamut of Lusaka’s main street. Derrell stopped by the ATM and soon discovered Zambian bills (Kwacha’s) are small denominations and that getting out the equivalent of $100 US will overflow your wallet to the point you need to start tucking bills in other pockets.

We decided against fast food and opted to head over to an Indian restaurant for lunch. This sounded reasonable when we made the decision at noon, but as we soon discovered an hour later. The sun gets a bit hot, the blocks are way longer than they looked, and the damn restaurant must have been in hiding when we finally reached the shopping center/gas station/market stalls area. Hot, slightly sooty and gritty from traffic and the wind, we hung our heads in shame and ended up at Nando’s again… but we reveled in the air-conditioning.

Our ‘morning’ jaunt took up the full day, so our evening was spent watching Rocky the yellow labrador swim after geckos in the swimming pool. Needless to say, humans weren’t going to be using the pool anytime soon, eh?

My departure day at the backpacker’s place started most unforunately with a weird dream about a metal machine about to roll over my head. What I woke up to was one of the grounds keepers clipping a hedge on the other side of the thin cabin walls about six inches away from my head. Clip, clip… pause, clip-clip, clip… pause, clip. Ugh! At least keep a good rythm if you are going to wake up the entire place. Well, that got me out of my sleep sack, out from under my mosquito netting (which finally seemed to work… no bites for once), and stumbling over to shower with everyone that had a tent set up near the mad clippers vicinity, and, of course, finally over for some proper morning tea. This place has world coffee plantations, but not coffee drinkers. It’s tea or bust, baby. Derrell keeps muttering, “God damn Nescafe again…”. I think Africa’s starting to get to him.