Zambia

The southern portion of our Africa trip began with Zambia.  The first activity was a 3 day canoe safari down the Zambezi River.  Claire and I thought that between the two of us we had enough canoe experience to navigate our own canoe, following our guide in the first canoe.  However, once the canoe got packed to the brim with gear, the current, wind, oh and navigating around the piles of hippos… it was a bit harder than we had anticipated.   TK (our guide) ends up a bit ahead and he’s pointing at the riverbank.  We go over to check it out and end up at a 45 degree angle ready to crash into the riverbank.  That’s when I see that the thing he’s pointing at is a 15ft long crocodile which was sunning itself on the riverbank.  The croc was terrified and lunged into the water ….

Apparently crocodiles don’t usually attack from the land.  He was just scared and luckily our canoe was angled in such a way that he could just dive right in next to us without banging into the canoe or anything.  When I finally opened my eyes TK was standing up in his boat.  (We found out after the trip that he carries a gun.) 

So this was day one of the trip, thing were looking kind of bleak.  That’s when TK called in some reinforcements.  The next morning Carlos, a “stagier” paddled down the river and joined us.  He hopped in the back of my canoe and announced that he would take care of all the paddling and I could join in whenever, I was like alright this is more like it.  He totally one upped me on the crocodile story as his best friend got eaten by a crocodile – snatched down into the water as a child while he was swimming next to Carlos in the Zambezi!  Apparently there’s something like 30,000 crocs in Zambia and they’re all just crawling around the Zambezi river. 

But it’s not just the crocodiles that are a problem, there’s  hippos too.  Usually hippos behave like the Garoua ones in Cameroon, just lolling out in a big old heap during the day.  But when we came through the Zambezi all the male hippos were riled up over some sort of territorial issues.  They were up to halfway out of the water smashing into each other and making the scariest grunting noises.  We passed all this the first day and like that big croc, I just don’t even have any pictures because I felt as if I was paddling for my life. 

After the trip was over, Carlos and TK were genuinely happy that we had made it through without “incident”  …. This was surprising to us as we thought that would be the normal trip, not the exception… (I also would have counted the crocodile encounter as an “incident”).   Turns out a year ago, Carlos literally had to jump in the water and save some English woman when a hippo started attacking her boat.  She was so grateful to be still alive that she told Carlos she’d pay for him to continue his studies in whatever he wanted to do.  Despite being in his fourth year of riverguide training, Carlos is now going to start mechanic school.  He was like, I can’t get out of this riverguiding job soon enough, it is dangerous! 

Aside from the Croc encounter the trip was really delightful.  The Zambezi is the fourth longest river in Africa; we passed through some sections that were narrow and full of wildlife and others where the river seemed reallllly wide and the current/wind really picked up.  It’s really clean and you can actually just drink the river water.   I thought the coolest site was watching a whole herd of elephants troop across the river. 

We camped out both nights on sandy beaches where supposedly the hippos wouldn’t be interested in landing since there wasn’t much grazing.  But these were not camp sites like the Tanzania safari with loads of people and showers etc. …. This was like ok pitch your tent on the beach.  Have to go to the bathroom?  Fine, just don’t wander too far away cause you don’t really know what’s out there….  TK and Carlos cooked up some good food over the fire and we generally didn’t have any problem falling asleep to the scary animal noises since we were so exhausted from the paddling/sun slash they fed us a lot of wine.  It was fun. 

After the canoe trip we travelled to Livingstone to visit Victoria Falls!  We visited in September during dry season so apparently the volume of water passing over the falls was much less than in the wet/rainy season. 

But because it was the dry season we were able to visit “Livingstone Island.”  This is really just the stretch at the precipice of the falls.  During rainy season it’s all river and this “Island” is the visible stretch of land.  During the dry season the water is only about 1-3 feet high and you can approach the top of the falls by hopping rock to rock and wading through streams in linked hand chains.   When you finally get to the brink of the falls there is a deep pool called the Devil’s Pool where you can actually jump into and then lean on the large rock literally at the precipice.  It was pretty terrifying.  I wasn’t going to do it but I ended up getting shamed into it after this 70 something Italian woman took off her glasses and cannon balled into the water.  It was cool, we took a picture but I didn’t stick around. 

This video is our guide jumping into the "Devil's Pool" at the precipice of Vic Falls

The bus from Livingstone to Windhoek, Namibia only leaves twice a week so we ended up with some time to kill.  We did some last minute Peace Corpsy things like washing our clothes in a bucket, cutting each others’ hair and showing up at a bar with our own bottle of wine.  We went to a cool Zambian restaurant that served crunchy caterpillars as an appetizer with some other traveling former Peace Corps volunteers, it was fun.