Last Day in Vic Falls

Lesson of the day from Victoria falls: if someone offers you a poncho before you enter the falls, take it. So as you can imagine, we were not so wise as this. We walked down to the falls first thing this morning, and said "No thanks" to the vendors selling ponchos near the gate. The Falls are spectacular, or at least what one can see of them. It's high water season which means the volume of water going over the falls is near its highest point of the year. The gorge is breathtaking when you look down into it... a long ways down! However, you can't see the bottom because of the huge amount of mist coming up from the falls in some places. That mist caused us to look like we had just jumped in the Zambezi River. It's truly amazing that the force of the water can drive so much mist so high up into the air. After getting some great views of the falls, some great pictures, and completely saturated with water, we decided to make the walk to the Vic Falls bridge on the Zimbabwe/Zambia border. It's one of the iconic symbols of Vic Falls and also the place where idiotic people go bunjee jumping. Even on the walk, which is a fair ways from the falls, we were still getting pelted wig water in places. We watched people bungee jump, got some more great pictures, and bought some 100 trillion dollar bills from a guy for $3. We can also now say we've been to Zambia!

We braved our way through the many street vendors harassing us relentlessly to by everything from necklaces to "crazy bills" (everyone wanted to trade for my hat or shoes) back to our campsite. After changing our clothes, we went for lunch at "Chicken Inn" (we had supper at "Pizza Inn" last night and dessert at "Creamy Inn").

After lunch, we went to the local craft market to get some souvenirs. We had to barter quote hard to get what we wanted at a reasonable price. The street seller people are ridiculously persistent. They'll follow you down the street for a 20 minutes telling you every story they can think of to get you to buy from them. Most of it was stuff we didn't want, but we found it much more intense even than Mexico in terms of their persistence.

We had a meeting with our new tour crew tonight and we leave for Hwange National Park tomorrow morning at 8. We've heard great things about the next part of our tour from people who just did that route, so we'excited about what awaits us. The only thing we disliked about Vic Falls is how light in the wallet it left us! Fortunately, bottled water has been our only other real expense, so hopefully that continues. We'll miss the luxuries of wireless internet, but we're told the showers are hot for the whole trip back to Pretoria!

D&K