Photo Journal: Soaring above Victoria Falls

I’ve got big plans to take D to see the great wildebeest migration. Yes, the very same for which this blog is named! But we decided to put that trip off until a little later so we could trip-bomb one of my very best friends and her hubby in Victoria Falls. We figure our friends and family will so rarely make it to this continent; we have to find ways to see the ones who do. Besides, I had wanted to see Victoria Falls for a very long time, and this was such a great reason to go!

The cities of Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe and Livingstone, Zambia flank either side of the falls and each side offers amazing (though both soggy) vantage points of the falls. So before planning anything else, we had a big decision to make—Do we stay on the Zambia or Zimbabwe?

Our friends were staying on the Zambian side, but the Zimbabwe side was much cheaper and cuter. Because we are completely incapable of compromising, we made the obvious choice to stay one night in each and completely jam-pack our 3-day trip with lots of fun activities and time with friends. Within minutes of landing, we had made it across the Victoria Falls Bridge and into the Zambia.

There is so little info about the bridge border crossing online, so I thought I would go into a little detail here. We did the UniVisa for multiple entries in both Zambia and Zimbabwe, which made going back and forth between the two countries pretty simple. From either side you can easily find taxis to take you through the first border post (they’ll even run your passport in to get an exit stamp while you wait in the car) and drive you across the bridge, and there are plenty of taxis waiting to pick you up after you clear customs on the other side. To get an entry stamp will take anywhere from 2 to 30 minutes. The line is more like a jumble. But that’s nothing new to anyone who’s spent much time in this part of the world. Expect to be cut by tour operators and locals who “just needed a quick stamp.” My tolerance for that kind of chaos took a dive our second time through, but luckily D reminded me that we were on vacation (woohoo!!) and it didn’t matter at all. Of course, he was totally right. Both border posts close at 10 pm, so if we needed to return to Zimbabwe as long as we got to the bridge by 9:30, we would be sure to cross.

While you can take a taxi all the way across, we opted to go ankle-express for our very first crossing so we could get a really good look at the falls from the bridge. Dr. David Livingstone renamed the falls after Queen Victoria, but it was first known as Mosi-oa-tunya or Smoke That Thunders. I think it’s pretty interesting that the original identity of the falls was more connected to the spray produced by the falls than the waterfall itself. If/when you go, you’ll see why! It’s pretty impossible to get a good view of the falls without getting thoroughly moistened. The view of the falls from the bridge is really limited, only a fraction of the total width of the falls, but it was a great teaser.

From the other side of the bridge you can see into the Kariba Gorge. From this side tour operators will push you off a bridge….in the form of bungee jumping (not my thing). You can raft and zipline on this side too, and they’re working on setting up an abseil! Local lore is that the Zambezi river god, a snake-like deity named Nyami Nyami, lives in the gorge and controls life and death on the Zambezi. In the 1950s construction on the dam began just upstream of the Kariba Lake, trapping Nyami Nyami in the gorge and separating him from his wife on the other side. Local people believe that Nyami Nyami’s wrath caused the dam project to flood midway, killing many workers and pausing the project. Work on the dam was resumed and the project was completed, but Nyami Nyami’s anger is only building, and he will one day succeed in destroying the dam, reuniting him with his wife and restoring the natural flow of the river. Yikes!

Victoria Falls is unlike any other waterfall that I’ve ever seen. Yes, it’s big. The biggest! But what I think is so cool about these falls is how they were formed. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, lava erupted and flowed over the area creating a large plateaued landscape of basalt rock. When it cooled, the rock contracted and cracked the surface into deep fissures. Over time, those fissures filled in with sandstone. Eventually, the Zambezi River began to flow over the plateau eroding the softer sandstone and leaving behind the basalt rock. For the last 100,000 years, the falls have been slowly retreating against the rush of the river as the sandstone gets washed out bit by bit. Today, the river flows over a fissure that’s perpendicular to the river resulting in a spectacular knife’s edge panorama!

So cool, right?!

From the Zambia side we met our friends for an incredible Zambezi River cruise complete with some boozing and a half dozen obligatory jokes about going over the edge of the falls.

The river here is surrounded on both sides by national parks, which made for some amazing riverside wildlife encounters, like this adorable elephant family stopping for a drink and these gorgeous bee-eaters which make their nests in the muddy Zambezi banks.

The sun was just starting to set as we approached the spill-over point of the river. From this vantage point it was so cool to see the spray erupting out of the gorge after the river’s violent 1000 ft drop below.

We enjoyed an amazing sunset view of the falls while dining and cheersing with our friends at the Royal David Livingstone Hotel. The hotel was a bit uncomfortably colonial for my personal taste but offered an unrivaled, theater-style upstream view of falls.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on how you look at it), there’s no single good way to take in the awesomeness of the falls. To get a sense of their enormity and power, you really need to see it from all angles—near, far, upstream, and down…maybe from the air? Luckily there’s a ridiculously fun way to do that!

Have you ever heard of a microlight? I had only known about these aircraft from stories about teaching birds how to migrate. I never thought I might actually fly in one one day! We got up early the next morning and strapped ourselves in for an amazing ride and an even more amazing view of the falls!

Thumbs up is the universal sign for “This is gonna be GOOOOOOD!” The view from the microlight is so cool because you can get a sense of the how many basalt fissures were once filled with sandstone but have now been eroded out by the river. D’s airplane arms are so cute! Haha!

My pilot and I pulled some serious Gs up there! So fun! The microlight flight was amazing and so so worth it.

Of course, we had to see the falls on foot too! So we made our way to the many viewing points on the Zimbabwe side.

So incredible!

On the Zambia side, I would recommend hitting the museum in Livingstone. They have a whole wing dedicated to David Livingstone, the first westerner to see the falls. There we got to read some of his original handwritten letters! Did you know that Livingstone very actively fought against the Arab Slave Trade? Eventually his many writings led to Parliament outlawing the trade of slaves along African’s east coast. Super interesting guy!

On the Zimbabwe side, we loved our bike tour (although the bikes were in rough shape) through the Mosi-oa-tunya National Park and the touristy and not-so-touristy parts of town, too.

For food and bev, absolutely worth checking out are the Wild Horizons Lookout Cafe where you get to sip coffee perched on the edge of the Kariba gorge and The River Brewery which offers flights of craft beer and delicious food. Cheers!