Livingstone, Zambia & Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe

The last 3 days have been amazing! I have so many things to write about, I can’t even think of where to start.

In Livingstone, we stayed at Grubby’s Grotto which is basically an old mansion with a pool where people camp on the lawn. It was pretty cool, but the guy running the place was a bit crazy. The first major activity that I did was a flight in a microlight airplane. (A microlight basically looks like a go kart/shopping cart with a hanggliding wing attached to the top. It’s really a motorized hangglider. There are no sides and it is basically like having to plastic lawn chairs attached to the bottom of a hanggliding wing with a small motor on the back. The pilot controls it with a triangle shape piece of metal, just like they do on a real hangglider, so no stering wheel or stick controller thing.)

I was quite freaked out for the first 5 minutes of the flight, but it turned out to be very cool. The scariest part is that it is so easily pushed around by the wind, so everytime there was a gust it felt like we would be blown out of the sky. (I had a death grip on the handles near my seat and my arms ached for about a day afterwards.) I saw some animals (elephants, hippos, buffalo, and crocs) on the flight. Plus of course you circle around Vic Falls a few times. (Victoria Falls are one of the biggest waterfalls in the world. It is about 1500 meters wide and over 100 meters tall. It was dry season when we were there, but they were still amazing!)

Once we all finsihed our microlight flights, we headed for the falls. You really need to see them from air and land to full appreciate them. It was very cool. The rest of that day was sort of rainy and chilly, so I basically read a book and hibernated.

The next day, we packed up early and headed for the national park to do a game/rhino walk. Our guide was awesome! He knew so many little facts about all the animals, birds, plants, and trees to impress us all. We saw some elephants, giraffes, impalas, buffalo, waterbuck, baboons, and best of all…white rhinos. We were all to walk right up to them (only about 20 feet away). The guide said that there are only 15 rhinos left in Zambia, and we were able to see 2 of them. How cool! They are these huge prehistoric looking beasts.

After the walk, we had to move to our new campsite which was in Zimbabwe. Crossing the border was pretty easy, but things are a bit backwards here. It’s illegal to exchange Zim money with other currencies, but it’s all illegal to use US dollars to pay for things (figure that out). Luckily, Katherine straightened everything out for us. That evening we did our booze cruise down the Zambezi. It was quite fun, but it ended much earlier than we had expected. (It was supposed to be 4 hours but ended up only being 1 1/2!) Anyways, we all had a great semi-crazy night out.

That brings us to today, this morning I had to leave the campsite at 6:30am (after the booze cruise) to do a lion walk. The lion walk/encounter was incredible. (It was one of the best things I did in Africa!) They give you a little breifing, arm you with a twig (to fend out the lions if they try to bite or scratch you), and off you go walking with the lions. (All of the lions in the park are domesticated, but will be released into the wild when they are older.) We got to see 3 lions that were 20 months old (and almost as big as adults) and 2 5 month old cubs.

At first, I was a bit scaried to be hanging out with lions, but they were all sweethearts that just wanted to play around like a big cat. We walked with them, petted them, and sat with them. It was great! (I have a ton of awesome photos to show/email you all.)

In the afternoon, some of us decided to see the Zim side of Vic Falls. After along hot walk (I would say it’s at least 90+ degrees here) we got there. This side was even more impressive than the Zambian side. There was a lot more water falling on the Zim side, plus you were able to get really close to them and fell the spray from the falls. (Of course I have some more awesome photos to show.)

Tonight, we are going to a dinner/ African dance show. So that should be fun. Then tomorrow, we are leaving this incredibly fun, but touristy town and heading to Botswana.