Ted's Tours: Living(stone) it up!

Friday was the day that I was looking forward to the most. Leaving Hwange, we joined a road north heading for Victoria Falls. According to its own exhibit, Victoria Falls is the greatest waterfall in the world if you take into account height, length and volume of water. And let me tell you – it was incredible.

The Victoria Falls park starts off with a little information on Livingstone who travelled up through Africa and his account of his travels greatly aided the abolition movement in Britain.

Nothing quite like having a giant statue of a white guy at the entrance to (one of) Zimbabwe's most beatuiful landmarks. (snarksnarksnark...)

The Falls themselves are kilometres across and there are about 16 different view points to which one can walk. So (as per some people’s request*), this blog post is going to be a lot of pictures.

The falls look very different at different times of the year (surprisingly). We were there when the water is relatively low, so we didn’t get rained on too much (by the spray).

There is this amazing rainforest around the falls because the spray from the waterfall waters this area every day.

If you come in the wet season, you get absolutely drenched. There are also months of the year where you can hardly see the falls because of the spray. We had a beautiful view of half of the falls.

And then got a bit of a shock on the second half of our walk:

Because we rocked up to Vic Falls during the dry season, the falls have less water. Ted was very proud of his wordplay – he named this half the “Victoria wall(s)”. The bad puns clearly run in the family.

Fun Facts (there are two today! Isn’t that exciting?!): Victoria falls is on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe so you look across at Zambia when viewing the water. FUN FACT NUMBER TWO: This is the eighth iteration of Victoria Falls. The rocks erodes slowly over time and the river keeps moving along its course so the original falls were much higher up on the river's path.

After this adventure, we went and had high tea in the Victoria falls hotel.

James and I tried and failed at looking swanky. We had been in the bush for five days, okay? Moreover, for this whole trip I wore Dartmouth t-shirts and running shorts. So we rocked up to this fancy establishment appropriately dressed. I know, I know - we are beautiful human beings.

Now I get to what I had been most excited about: HIGH TEA.

If you haven’t been to the UK and had high tea – I highly recommend you do so, immediately. High tea is the best. It’s lots of tea (so that alone is worth it). Go have high tea now. Do it. I would have high tea for all meals if I could.

The food for high tea is as follows. It is served on a three tiered cake platter. The top is always little sandwiches (cucumber always, but we also had salmon, chicken, and bacon), followed by delicious and yummy cakes (chocolate mousse cakes, meringues etc.), then the last layer is scones – with clotted cream and jam, of course. As I said, pretty incredible. I also took a trip to the bathroom which was a near religious experience – I’ve never been in such a fancy bathroom before. The contrast with my previous bathroom experience was also pretty extreme (= a lovely shady spot behind a large tree).

I won’t lie to you, I may have stolen some hand lotion.

While we were there, there was a huge Zanu PF convention, Zimbabwe’s ruling party. It was quite an experience. Every member had a Zanu PF tshirt and the more important officials walking through the hotel had Mugabe’s face as part of the print on their dress/shirts/pants. You clearly are not a truly beloved dictator until some woman is walking through a ritzy hotel with a print picture of your face on her butt. It was surreal walking round and having Mugabe stare at you from all corners of the room. We also have a sneaking suspicion he might have been there because we were asked not to take pictures of the front of the hotel (oops) because of some of the official vehicles parked there and they didn't want any photos of the license plates. At a later stage we were also shooed off one road because someone super uber important (they wouldn’t say who) was headed in our direction.

After this very exciting day, we headed to our next camp on the shores of the upper Zambezi river. What a change. This campsite had no bathroom or shower facilities and we collected water from the crocodile infested river - a stark change to the place where we had just had tea. But it was beautiful (as per usual). Around the fire that night, we had a very engaging conversation about privilege, sexism, and the role of feminism. As Ted says – where better to solve the problems of the world than round the Botswana TV**?

The next part of the story will be coming soon (it was a long trip, bear with me guys) xx

LINKS to previous safari stories: Part one

Part two

Part three

*Apparently these safari posts need to include less Steph-prattle and more pretty pictures - I get such loving and supportive comments from my family members.

**Botswana TV = watching the fire. This is what they used to call it when Ted would come with my cousins when they were small.

#TedsTours #Safari #Zimbabwe #VictoriaFalls #Tea