Holiday

It’s all about the journey.

For the last weekend in September, 4 other volunteers and myself ventured out of the country for a mini trip to Zambia. It was a long weekend in Bots for Independence Day so we all took an extra day or two off of work and started packing. The plan: Victoria Falls (Zambia), Chobe National Park for a safari (northern Botswana) and home again.

First things first, choose route and mode of travel (not as easy as it sounds). We chose the night bus, straight through to Zambia. Funny enough, Bots doesn’t really have a bus schedule or bus station, for that matter. We had to sort out where it was leaving from and when it was leaving through word-of-mouth and that’s what we based all our other plans on. We had to ask about 6 different people before we got a phone number to find out the actual times from someone else. Once it was all sorted, we made sure we were there 2 hours early to ensure a seat and a spot for our luggage then we were off. Trying to sleep on a bus like this was just short impossible (for me anyway). Picture a greyhound but the seats are closer together with less room on every side, a temperature of roughly 30 degrees, and the smell of everyone sweating. Oh yeah, good times. And we were on this bus from 8:30pm to 9am the next morning.

The traveling portion of the trip didn’t end there. We arrive at the border of Zambia, well, the border is pretty much the Zambezi River and just before that, we went through immigration. At this point we are all a bit groggy, we get into the line and notice the bus suddenly drives away. No one else seems shocked by this observation so we act like we know what’s going on. Our passports are stamped, we head outside and watch as every other passenger begins walking down the road. And we follow suit. Along our walk we find out from some friendly strangers that the bus has gone to the edge of the river to wait for the ferry and we are to cross separately and return to the bus on the other side. The riverbank was a gong show. There were trucks and buses backed up for at least 2km and a sea of people, waiting to get onto the next ferry (barge). It took us about an hour of waiting around before we got onto a barge but finally we made it across and once our visas were purchased on the other side, we headed to our hostel.

The best hostel ever! It is called Jolly Boys and I wish we could have spent more time there. It had a warm but eccentric decor to it, swimming pool, bar, restaurant, lounge area with huge pillows to veg on, gift shop (of course), pool table, and options of dorm rooms, chalets or tenting sites. They also book everything for you, tours of any kind, special dinners, you name it. Needless to say, I highly recommend it to those of you planning to travel to Africa.

Vic Falls is one of the 7 wonders of the world, so it goes without saying that it be spectacular. It wasn’t in full bloom due to the time of year (lower water levels) but it was still quite impressive. We spent 2 days exploring the falls and river by foot, boat and raft.

A few interesting encounters...

While walking through the trails around the falls, 3 Zimbabweans tried to convince us to go bungee jumping before telling us they would be our tour guides across the bridge to the Zimbabwe side of the falls. It was a short cut and they assured us they would (with a small fee) get us across the border without passports. After the attempts had failed, they tried selling us jewellery and Zimb dollars. We were, of course, not interested and wanted to be on our way so we backed out as politely as possible.

We decided to explore the top of the falls and met a local tour guide willing to lead us along the edge to get a different perspective. After some rock hopping across the drying river, we were able to look down into the gorge from the top of the falls. Incredible!

The latter half of that day we went rafting on the lower section of the river, probably the highlight of the weekend for me. It’s known as the best white water rafting in the world! I’ll save the rafting stories for another time otherwise this will get a bit lengthy. I have many pictures to go along with it as well.

Now this was only half our trip, after the falls we were off on safari. An overnight safari! So we made our way across the border, back into Bots and began the tour with a guided boat cruise on the Chobe River. After 2 hours of seeing hippos, crocs, buffalo, elephants, waterbuck, and giant lizards, we were taken to our campsite where lunch was served followed by a siesta. Later in the afternoon was the game drive which took us on a tour of giraffes, more and more elephants, lions, zebras, baboons and hyenas. I’ll save the rest of the details for the pictures to explain, they will do a better job. But I will say this, camping in the middle of all that was a little more unnerving than expected. We fell asleep listening the elephants trumpeting close by and hyenas walking through our campsite, quite the experience.

Alright, I will leave it there. If you have made it this far, thanks for reading. There’s so much more I could add but we will save that for a later date.


Ciao