Victoria Falls - 2008

October 31 - November 3, we went to Victoria Falls. This was Thom's second trip to the Falls and Debra's first trip. We were traveling with friends from the Washington, DC area: Mandy, Joanne, Sue, and Ruth.

As we may have mentioned before, traveling outside of Botswana is never simple. Victoria Falls is on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe so to see the Falls, you have to go to either Zambia or Zimbabwe. State Department still has a warning to avoid travel to Zimbabwe so we went to Zambia and followed the same route that Thom took in January 2007.

We flew to Kasane (2 hours from Gaborone). We were met by a tour company called Wild Horizons that took us by van to the border (about a 20 minute drive). We filled out our paperwork and cleared immigration at the Botswana border and then drove just a little further to the river -- The Great Zambezi River. At the river we were met by a small speedy boat that took us across the river in about 5 minutes. Then we had to deal with locals trying to sell over- priced trinkets (including a Zimbabwean Billion Dollar Bill) to stupid Americans. After that we had to clear immigration on the Zambia border. And another van took us the rest of the way to our hotel -- about an hour drive.

We stayed in Livingstone, Zambia at the Zambezi Sun. It was a nice hotel but it had too many monkeys. Seriously, we watched one monkey eat all the french fries right off the plate of a guy sitting at a table next to us. And breakfast was quite the show with the waiters also running off the monkeys that were trying to steal everyone's food.

The water level at Victoria Falls is at it's lowest right now. The rainy season stopped around April and we've only had a few showers since the beginning of October. So the water was very low at the Falls.

OK...it wasn't quite that low. We saw a lot more canyon than what you see most of the year, but there was still a lot of water a little further down closer to Zimbabwe than where we were.

For a comparison of the Falls at high water level, refer to Thom's blog entry from 2007: http://hotswana.blogspot.com/2007/04/victoria-falls-part2-wow.html

More photos of our adventures at Vic Falls can be viewed at shutterfly: http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8AbtWzhs0bt3tw

And now our ending sunset photo, sunset on the Zambezi River: