Month: November 2012

Day 291, Sunday 21 October 2012 – Livingstone, Zambia

Not a bad sleep at all last night, I woke a couple of times but was reasonably refreshed when I was woken at 5:30 by the sounds of other overlanders packing up for an early departure. The camp here is very crowded, at least six trucks around us and there is always one group leaving early in the morning and packing up a site is never a quiet process. Swings and roundabouts of course, we do exactly the same to everyone else.

Official breakfast time was 8:00 but we are all so used to getting up early that most of us were up with the coffee on well before then, for half the people it is their final meal with Africa in Focus and for some of those it is their last on African soil, for this time anyway.

The first tour – “desert and water wanderer”, has been fantastic, I cannot believe twenty one days have passed so quickly, I guess I was lucky in that I was with a pretty good bunch of people and personality conflicts were minor and had no impact on the trip itself. I have been really surprised at how much I enjoyed the trip, but not surprised that I have loved what I have seen of Africa so far. Roll on leg two – Livingstone – Nairobi.

At 10:00 we farewelled five of the group when they took a taxi to the airport, those of us that stayed behind went our separate ways, I did another load of laundry and then made use of the empty truck, plugged my laptop into the power, cranked some tunes and edited photos for a while.

After lunch Leonie and I moved into a twin room for a couple of nights away from the tent. Leonie spent the afternoon at the hotel next door and I did more photo editing, blog writing and music listening in the room in the relative cool. It was great to have a decent shower and then get out and not get covered in dust walking back to the tent, sometimes it is the small things that make a difference.

At the camp site in Chobe we ordered custom souvenir t-shirts , mine was slightly different to the others as I have Uganda and Rwanda added to mine. It was suppose to have the flags of the ten nations I am visiting on the trip and say Cape town to Kigali, but it only had the standard seven flags and said it Cape Town to Nairobi, it went back again and came back with two more flags and nothing else. I took it anyway. It is the first souvenir t-shirt I have bought on any of my travels. Most overlanders seem to have them on Livingstone.

Brett, our tour guide had told of us a gate that leads from our camp ground into the five star David Livingstone Hotel next door and the code for their free wifi, which is one hundred times better than the costly wifi in the campground. I popped over in the afternoon to upload a blog post and grab some emails down to my phone for reading and replying to offline. Some of the others were lounging round the pool and using the free towels, love it.

At 5:00 we went down to the campground bar to sit in on the pre-trip meeting for the next three weeks tour and meet the new crew mates. There is a vast age range on the next trip with some under thirties and an over eighty. For a change I will be in the much younger group. I hope I have a beer buddy like Stuart from the last leg, also that as I am fit and able I wont have to do more work than everyone else – putting up tents can be a drag!

After the meeting the last of us from the first leg went into Livingstone for a curry and a couple of beers to say farewell to Stuart and Jackie who are the last to leave. It was a good night, the food was great, hardly cheap but worth it.

Stu and I

We topped it off with a brandy and coffee and then it was time to sleep in a real bed.

Day 290, Saturday 20 October 2012 – Livingstone, Zambia

I immediately fell asleep when I got to bed and sadly discovered when I woke at 4:00 that it was actually only midnight, again. i didn’t sleep much after that either. But being awake meant I did get to drink a couple of bottles of water and flush out the dirt cheap vodka I was drinking on the booze cruise last night. I felt fine and dandy when I did get up at 7:30.

Like a lot of the camps this one is surrounded by a double fence, outside is electric and inside has barbed wire on the top. There are a lot of elephants in the area and they will come through campsites if the sites are not protected. It has been suggested that we do not go outside the camp and walk into town due to the elephant risk. Later in the trip the fences and gates are more designed to keep the locals out, which is a bit of a shame really.

Eight of us have decided to take a day trip into Zimbabwe, I am partly doing it so I can get another stamp in my passport. However, the main objective is to see Victoria Falls from the Zim side as it actually has water over in it, at this time of year, in the peak of the dry season the Zambian side is almost bone dry.

The truck took us to the border and we walked across, the Zambian side was fairly straight forward but the train had just arrived before us and it took almost an hour to get through into Zimbabwe, we were very pleased there was air conditioning in the office, it would have been awful otherwise as it is very hot.

To cross between the two countries we had to walk a few hundred metres, there was a great bridge crossing – though not a lot of water flowing at the moment. The walk from the border to the park entrance was quite long through a long section of dusty and dry road works.

A statue of Livingstone

We spent about two hours wandering the path along the side of the falls, they are spectacular even in the dry season and definitely deserve their place as one of the seven wonders of the world. I took a lot of photos, but I do suck at waterfalls for some reason, and definitely not through a lack of practise either. I am sure some of the others have some better photos than me. The falls are known as the “mist that thunders” and from a distance you can really understand why. In some places the mist fell like rain on our heads and I am glad I took plastic bags for my camera.

On the way back to the park exit we did spot some of the local wildlife.

We were going to walk into the local village for lunch and curio shopping. However, it was quite hot and we had been out longer than anticipated so decided to lunch at the cafe in the park. Not a decision I regret – the food was fabulous, but even better was the espresso thick shake! So nice I had two.

After lunch we walked back across the border and once back in Zambia took a taxi back to the camp site.

Leonie and I moved into our new digs, a fairly basic bungalow, at least I could have a hot shower and step out and not have instantly dirty feet, luxury!

There is a gate between the campsite and the five star David Livingstone Hotel next door. The gate is not locked and has been used as a rest area before. We spent a bit of time there over the next few days. The pool was great, the bar service friendly and prompt, the food wonderful and somehow we seemed to have the admin login to the fantastic wifi : The wifi in the campsite was not free and not very reliable so this was hugely popular with some of our group.

We had dinner at the truck, a couple of beers and another early night.

Day 289, Friday 19 October 2012 – Waterfall Camp, Livingstone, Zambia

It was not a big drive day today so we got to lie in though as usual we were all up early, breakfasted and hanging around waiting for the off.

It was a short drive to the border which is on the Zambesi River. We passed through the Botswana immigration post and were down by the river waiting for the ferry across the Zambesi. We had been advised earlier in the trip to not take photos at border crossings but were all a bit unsure on this one as we were not exactly passing secret military installations. I snapped a couple on the little camera.

The entry into Zambia was interesting, instead of filling in arrival forms, we all wrote our names and details on a piece of paper ! it was still a slow process, the border here was chaotic with a lot of trucks queued in each direction.

The drive from the border to the historic town of Livingstone was fairly short and we arrived in the early afternoon. The town is named after Dr. David Livingstone who was the first European to find Victoria Falls. Livingstone spent much of his life in the area and was one of the first to highlight in the west the awful practise of kidnapping local villagers to be sold into slavery.

Livingstone is the final destination of the first of the two tours I am doing and the start of the second, so the five of us doing both tours have five days in town. We are staying at the Waterfront Campsite on the edge of the Zambesi river. Leonie and I organised a room in the camp for two nights from tomorrow. A chance to get clean, wash some clothes and make use of some electricity.

Once we were settled in we were off on a sunset “booze cruise” on the river. Just before we left the heavens opened and a good tropical downpour passed through. I finally got to use my umbrella on the walk to the MV Makumbi, the boat that was to take us up river for the “sunset”. As the weather was bad I didn’t take my camera, and I didn’t miss anything either.

The boat ride comes with a meal and all the booze you can drink, we all made pretty good use of the bar, even those who don’t normally have a drink knocked off a tipple or two. I stuck to vodka and tonic, though the vodka was pretty rough. It was a good trip, we didn’t see much of a sunset due to the weather, but we did see a few hippo in the river which is always cool. It was a fun time with a load of laughs and fortunately it was all over by 7:00 pm or it would have gotten all very messy.

The boat docked right outside the camp ground bar and most of the group did not make it much past there, settling in for a couple of drinks. We were shown a game by Stu which was a real hoot and ended up with the couple behind us stomping off and telling us to “act our age”, that brought about huge bouts of laughter from all of us, and remains one of the funniest things on the trip – even three weeks later as I type this. I won’t reveal the game as it has a twist and I am going to use it one day!

It was not a very late night, but there were quite a few wobbles and staggers on the way back to the tents, and I wont reveal who ended up falling into a flower bed – but not one of the kiwis!