We headed off through rural Zimbabwe and could see a few old colonial farm houses along the way and most were pretty run down. The farms were mostly unfenced and we saw goats, sheep, donkeys and horses in the fields. There were lots of small clusters of thatched rondavel houses surrounded by fences made of small branches to keep the animals in. Most did not have electricity or running water. There were no large trees anywhere and no fields of pastureland, just small scrubby trees.
We stopped at a place called Halfway Hotel where we could stretch our legs and have something to drink or use the toilets. A few people were collected from here and headed off on the dusty roads to their homes.The hotel had a lounge where the walls were covered in huge game animals' heads, a restaurant with no one in it and a bar. Surrounding the main building were small thatched chalets for guests. Out the front was a pump for fuel and nothing else.
Quite close to the falls we went through Hwange which was pretty polluted from the coal-fired power station there. There were also a few other factories and coal mines nearby and they were the only industries we saw on our trip.
Arrived at Victoria Falls at the Rainbow Hotel after dark and got besieged by taxi drivers wanting to drive us to our backpackers because it was a long way and there were a lot of wild animals on the road. We had met others who had been to the Falls and knew that none of that was true so headed off to look for somewhere to stay.
Found the Shoestrings Backpackers but it was fully booked as the tour trucks stay here and there were about 4 trucks in at that time. They rang around and found us somewhere to stay and sent us up the road to the Savanna lodge where we dropped our gear in our cell of a bedroom and returned to the Shoestrings for a meal.
A bonus was that our room had air-conditioning and we were able to sleep well. The lodges are nothing like backpackers as they too cater mainly for the safari tour trucks. It had no facilities where we could cook and a cup of tea cost $1US and usually you can help yourself to tea and coffee in a backpacker place. It did have a nice garden with grass so we didn't have to put up with dust all day and there were loungers around the very cold swimming pool where we could read and relax.
This lodge ran Zambezi rafting trips and we could watch the guides give the pre-raft instructions and watch the videos on the big screen when they all got back. The tee shirt printers would arrive with the tee shirts in the colours and designs that each person had chosen and collect his money. The company making the DVDs would have them all ready packaged for sale. The rafters would be adrenaline pumped after seeing the video of their 3 wipe-outs and were glad to have survived it and have a great tale to tell their friends and family. We spoke to some seedy people who rafted and were unwell after gulping too much of the Zambezi River water and were still shaken by the ordeal.
Although it is the dry season the Falls can still be heard thundering from the town. We were only able to find one spot where the sun on the water made rainbows and there was hardly any breeze so we were not drenched with spray. It was a nice place to watch the verwent monkeys and eat lunch. While we were looking towards the Zambian side, the tourists there were sitting above the falls looking at us looking at them.
We were also able to recognize the disguised cellphone towers on the other side as well.
A bridge crosses the river that marks the border between the two countries and we were able to get a stamped piece of paper that gave us permission to walk on the bridge to watch the bungy jumping, and bridge swinging that is in the middle of the bridge. There were also a couple of canoeists playing on the waves below the falls and along the side rivers. With a passport you could cross to the Zambian side and zipline back to Zimbabwe, but for some people the cost of the Zimbabwean visa made it an expensive activity if you didn't have a multiple entry visa already.
Compared with Bulawayo this is a full on tourist place. The touts are on every corner trying to sell wooden carved animals or wooden dishes and lucky charms called yum yums. They also want to sell full sets of the old Zimbabwean currency where the largest note is a 300 trillion dollar bill. If you don't want to pay for them they are happy to trade the notes for running shoes, shirts, shorts or hats.
In 2005, the government spent 3 months destroying markets and urban homes, and arresting street vendors and street children. These people were sent back to work in the rural areas under a programme called Murambatsvina translated as 'drive out the trash', but slowly the vendors are coming back to the streets.
As we couldn't cook at our lodge we ate at Shoestrings and met a Kiwi couple who live one street away from us in NZ and are close to our own ages. We were able to catch up on some of the local news before they joined a safari truck tour group for a few weeks. Angela was on dish washing duty on the first night and was not happy to be washing dishes in cold water and floundering in the dark with no lighting to put dishes away when she had no idea where they went. It will be interesting to hear how the trip to Nairobi went.
We found a taxi driver, called Dexter, to take us from the town to the 'hitching point' (a junction) so we could get a shared taxi to Kazungula and the Botswanean border. He couldn't take us all the way in his taxi as the route from the hitching point is run by a set group of taxi drivers. He introduced us to Index who already had one passenger in his car and we still needed to wait for one more before he could leave. Index told us that he works the route every 5 days waiting his turn with the other 5 cabs. He picked up school kids on his other days.
Eddie, the other passenger is a screen printer and takes the taxi to Botswana to get orders for his tee shirts that he sells to the safari tour groups in Kasane. He has to set up contacts with the tour guides to get access to the customers and then when he gets the orders he has to return to Zimbabwe and print them and then take them back across the border to his customers. He told us he married at 22 and had a 16 year old girl, a 14 year old boy and a 6 year old. His eldest daughter is at a boarding school in the Halfway hotel area and never comes home but he goes to see her when he can afford it.
After about 20 minutes we were joined by a rather large lady who squeezed in the back with John and I. She had a broken shaft for her Hyundai van and was heading to Botswana to get a second hand part or to make an order for a new one. We had read that Mugabe wanted his finance minister to put aside $200million US for the upcoming elections. When we asked them about the elections Eddie said the opposition party had a strategy in place this time and this would mean that Mugabe would not get in while the large lady was sick of the politics because people were trying to feed and look after their families so she didn't seem to care about it.
It is times like this that we are glad to be travelling independently and although it can be frustrating at times we can learn so much about the lives of ordinary people.
