Goodbye Botswana

We spent much more time in Botswana than planned because we were (unexpectedly) able to access Moremi and Savuti (Chobe) parks. We were sad to finally leave, but realized we were halfway through January and still had a lot of distance – and desert – to cover before reaching Cape Town.

Our first stop was Victoria Falls in Zambia. In hindsight, this would have been better/easier/cheaper had we signed on for an organized day tour from Kasane. The Zambia border entry was rainy, muddy, and chaotic. We got some “help” from a tout who turned out to be a sketchy moneychanger and possibly a fake insurance agent. We knew he was a tout, but figured the confusion of poorly signed bureaucracy was worth the few dollars we would have to pay him. We were also used to Botswana where nobody ever tried to cheat or hassle us, and when he first approached we thought he was just being nice to us. After an hour and half of me waiting with the truck and B wandering around from office to office, we got through the border. We paid visa fees, which we knew about, and also over a hundred dollars in other costs we didn’t know about, including liability insurance for the truck that was definitely overpriced and possibly fake. This all had to be done with Zambian kwacha, which had to be bought at a criminally high exchange rate from the tout/moneychanger/insurance agent because the bureau de change was conveniently closed. It was unclear to what extent the bureau, the police, and the insurance were all in cahoots with this guy, because the police told B to go with him for insurance.

Anyway, we got through and spend too much money on a mediocre room. We’ve had some trouble with camping on our roof because of frequent torrential downpours and electrical storms. The Falls – though maybe not worth all our hassle and expense – were amazing. There is a wall of water that plunges down into a narrow canyon perpendicular to the river flow, so the water sprays straight back up. Walking near the edge was like being in a heavy rainstorm, and there was so much spray we couldn’t see the entire falls at once. Apparently the locals, were too afraid to go anywhere near the “place of smoke,” which they considered sacred. David Livingstone (the first European to see the falls back in the mid 1800s) first approached them by canoe and stopped on a rock island just before the lip of the falls. No doubt an impressive, though risky, view.