Huge surprises
Trip Start
Nov 15, 2006
1
57
60
Trip End
Aug 04, 2007
Harare,
Zimbabwe
Friday, June 22, 2007
We spent the night camping in the middle of the bush, building the usual fire to cook on, not straying too far from the camp for fear of peeing on a landmine and sitting around playing 'Mafia' - a highly argumentative game; good for those prone to telling untruths (such as my husband); which is like a more complicated version of 'Murder in the Dark'. It became the theme of the trip - turning many a dull 10 hour drive into full scale inter-truck warfare.
The next morning we crossed apprehensively and expectantly into Zimbabwe where we would spend the next two weeks. I had so many preconceptions about what Zimbabwe would be like, from seeing so many news reports about the murder of white farmers and the hideousness of Mugabe, that I was truly astounded by the country. Whilst I seem to say this about everywhere we visit, Zimbabwe is a stunningly beautiful country. Everywhere you go there are strange rock formations that made a huge impact on the landscape and really make it visually different from the countries around it and there are so many things for a visitor to do, but sadly there are practically no tourists anymore.
Our first stop was the capital Harare. When we arrived we went straight to a nearby orphanage where we dropped off loads of blankets, food, footballs, books that we'd bought to donate to the kids there. It seemed really well run and the kids happy and healthy. And then in contrast to the sadness and poverty we'd seen all day we went and did what western people do best and got drunk and danced on a bar - seems really wrong considering the total lack of money that people around us have.
We spent the following day wandering around Harare, walking past Mugabe's presidential residence whilst soldiers made another man walking past stand in a ditch with his hands on his head for no apparent reason; visiting the lovely central gardens and the cricket ground (where the matches that were boycotted by the Ozzies would have taken place); stopped to watch some Pentecostal Church (they're the real nutters) concert where the 200+ audience suddenly got up from their seats and started legging it around the grounds in time with the music. When we asked why this was happening we were informed that the congregation were physically "looking for Jesus". Explains why they kept looking under chairs. Ben and I then walked around the main shopping area - which totally surprised us by how attractive, spacious, clean and cosmopolitain it seemed in comparison to other African cities / capitals - we stopped to watch some guys dancing and inadvertently became the butt of their jokes to the rest of the watching crowd - which had everyone pointing at us and laughing. We slunk away feeling mightily miffed but too English to do anything about it.
We left Harare headed for Gweru further south where we would be staying outside the town in a place called Antelope Park. This is a private game reserve where the owners have created the first lion rehabilitation programme in Africa - as believe it or not lions are on the 'vulnerable' list (i.e. not endangered but heading that way if the silly (mostly American and Spanish) idiots who need to go and shoot a lion to prove their masculinity carry on the way they are going). They have inherited several lions from zoos around Africa/the world and give the lions more freedom than they would have previously had, they then use these lions to breed from and reintroduce the cubs to the wild when they are old enough and deemed capable of hunting and defending themselves in the big wide world. The project has been running for 7 years and they are releasing their first lot of 2 year old lions this August, so hopefully they'll be able to cut it.
So the main reason for going here is essentially to give our tourist money to a project which has no governmental funding and also to get our kicks by seeing the King of Beasts up close and personal. This was done by going for a walk with year old cubs - cubs they may be but they're still a lot bigger than you're average rottweiler and seven hundred times more deadly (oh, and far better looking); playing with the real babies; and for me going on a "Lion Stalk". They really are the most incredible creatures; the power, the speed, the disdainful way the look at you.
Anyway getting back to the Lion Stalk, this involved going out in the dark to follow two of the older cubs (2 and half years old so pretty much fully grown) to see if they could successfully hunt and eat anything moving. This is part of the rehabilitation process and is no doubt a good idea, but you do wonder if there will be big trucks searching with spotlights to point out the nearest zebra for the lion to attack when they're released back into the wild .... That said, it was incredible. The lions are released from their enclosure, spend half an hour roaring - a noise that reverberates so loudly it is totally indescribable - at the big old fellas in the next door enclosure - you like their style; much younger and allowed out to prowl around and so having a go at their superiors from the other side of the fence. Tough guys. Then after much banging of dustbin lids from the keepers our two lions got bored and trotted off to go find themselves some supper.
It took a while. To be honest, despite not having eaten for 5 days they didn't really seem that they could be bothered. They walked a long way ignoring a couple of zebra and a duiker and then lay down for a bit whilst the keepers waved a light at some ostrich about 200 metres away. And then it happened. The ostriches got up and started jogging in an ostrich fashion away and the next thing you know the lions have flashed across the gap in between them and the birds - faster than you would ever think possible - leapt through the air and brought down the female ostrich in a flurry of feathers, kicking legs, wildly stabbing beak (the ostrich not the lions) and vicious claws. What followed was pretty gruesome but strangely compelling as we watched the two lions eat the ostrich alive. They hadn't figured out how to kill it so whilst it was having it's stomach eaten and was looking at us saying "why are you just sitting there, why don't you help me?" it was also wildly kicking its legs looking like it might actually make a break. It evenutally died after 25 minutes, by which time we'd seen pretty much all our stomachs could take. I know it sounds incredibly gory to watch something like that, but if you think of it in terms of survival and seeing some of the most incredible animals on the planet in action, then it's pretty special.
The next day we all went horse riding to see game - apparently you can get much closer on a horse, because the animals smell the horse before you so aren't scared of you. They may not have been, but I was terrified. I don't know why I do it. I stopped riding when I was 12 because I was fed up with falling off horses, and every time I've done it since then I've just been plain scared. I spent the whole time causing the horse immense amounts of pain as I pulled tightly on the reigns and not letting it go above a fast walk. That, however, changed when we were told we had to get back quick smart to the stables unless we wanted to go the same way as the ostrich, as they were letting some of the lions out for one of the walks. The only thing that made it bearable was laughing at Ben's constant cries of pain as he tried to get to grips with a rising trot and failed; "I'm never ever doing this again" he repeated as a kind of mantra to get over what was happening to his bits and pieces.
We left Antelope the next day, really in awe of Simba and absolutely bloody freezing having woken up in our tents to frost on the ground every day. Next stop Bulawayo, via the Great Zimbabwe Ruins. The ruins are an old city strategically place on a hillside, after which former Rhodesia was renamed (it means something about a house, but I can't remember what). They are the oldest and most complete ruins in Africa - dating back to between 1100 and 1500 - about the same time as the Incas in South America with similar engineering systems - but not as advanced. As with everything we visited in Zimbabwe (apart from Vic Falls) we were the only visitors there, but it was great to see something that harks back to the pre-colonial era of Africa, as there is very little as most older things have been destroyed in the countless wars on the continent.
We arrived in Bulawayo late and stayed in a lovely campsite that actually had hot showers - soooooooo exciting.
We spent a day sampling the delights of Bulawayo and buying blankets to stave off the cold (don't be expecting no tan from me now, it's winter in Africa) and then the following day (29 June), we went to Matopo National Park, 50k's outside the city. Here we were going to go find us some rhinos to look at. Our guide was a gruff 50 something white Zimbabwean whose first words to us were "You can ask me any questions about anything you like, but no politics". Having said that, over the course of the day, whilst getting withing 5 metres of 7 year old wild rhinos (which was absolutely terrifying), we learnt that: Wally never carried a gun when out with the animals because "He'd spent 14 years seeing enough killing in the war"; that his co-guide was just getting back in the saddle after losing two of his clients to a charging elephant 6 months ago; and that despite his passion for the country and for his job, he was going to have to move to Australia because the state of Zimbabwe's economy was making it impossible for him to live there anymore.
Wally told us that inflation was currently at 4,000% (less than a week later it was at 8,000%); the government keep knocking zeros of the currency, so any savings/money he has are totally devalued. When we arrived we got 115,00 Zim dollars to the US dollar so 230,000 to the pound (changing 100USD involved receiving a stack of cash a foot high), however that was the black market rate, the official exchange rate is 250ZD to the US dollar, yet a loaf of bread costs around 100,000 when we were there, making it impossible for locals to even buy essentials - particularly when - as we witnessed, the price of goods literally doubles overnight. There are huge problems with electricity. Nowhere has a constant supply because it is routed from South Africa yet the Zim government doesn't pay the bills so South Africa limit the supply Zimbabwe can have. Listening to all this you soon realise that the grand appearance of the cities is a facade and that the country is on its knees. I have no idea how people survive - it seems the relatively well off Zimbabweans have it hard, so what about the millions who have nothing. And that is without the repression, intimidation and violence that we also heard about. You wonder for how much longer a country can keep going like that.
From our amazing encounter with the rhinos and Wally, we went to look at some Bushman cave paintings dating back 10,000 years and then raced back to Bulawayo to catch the overnight train to Victoria Falls. This was fairly traumatic as one of the girls got mugged on the way to the station, we nearly missed the train, and had to climb over the tracks to get to the right platform, with me shouting at everyone to not step on the rails for fear of electrocution. It took somebody to point out that it was a diesel train and there was no live track before I shut up, slightly put out!
The train journey was like being on brownie camp we were all so excited, but our intentions to have a huge party went to the wall as we realised that whilst we lorded it in our sleeper compartments, the train was crammed with people using every available space to sit, stand and sleep and it really wasn't appropriate. We arrived in Victoria Falls about 9 the next morning having had the best night's sleep in ages; loving the old wooden panelled train and with me beside myself with excitement about seeing Victoria Falls which I've wanted to see since I was about 10.
So the next few days were spent seeing the Falls from every angle imaginable. We walked down to them on the Zim and Zam (Zambian) sides (as the falls and the Zambezi river mark the border between the two countries). I went in a little plane and bumped around above them, getting very excited by the millions of rainbows. We went on a river cruise on the upper Zambezi - supposedly to see all the wildlife, but really to drink as much as we could from the free bar in two hours and be so drunk we couldn't walk by 7pm. And then the next day, so hungover we couldn't see straight, we went white water rafting. We had decided in South America that we would save rafting for the Zambezi which is supposed to be the best in the world and is a series of Grade 5 rapids. As there had been so much rain, the river was a lot higher so the number of rapids you could do was less and there weren't as many Grade 5's. I was still really excited about it and was leaping around like a small child before we got in the boat and squealing ridiculously as we went through the first few rapids. Then we hit the biggies and of course we flipped over. I held on until the very last minute and so ended up underneath the raft. Every time I came up I hit one of the seats so couldn't get to any air. I thought I was going to die, managed to drag myself and somebody else out from under the boat, breathed in some air and promptly had a panic attack. Ben had a less traumatic experience, mainly because every time he fell in - which became numerous - he managed to cling onto somebody else and drag them with him. One time, whilst Ben clung onto the side of the boat, poor Mike - who was the person I'd already rescued from under the boat when we'd flipped - ended up bobbing off down the river ahead of us having to be rescued by a canoeist. All the while Ben's holding on tightly to the boat, the two other lads in the boat - Dave and Gary - were wetting themselves laughing and I was still trying to breathe normally. Hmmm not sure I'll be going rafting again.
We had four days in Victoria Falls to enable all the different 'activities' (boy do I hate that word) to be done. Our driver Stu hadn't been feeling too hot for a while and got substantially worse whilst we were there and was eventually - after days of hallucinating and the like - diagnosed with malaria, poor guy. As he is in Africa long term he can't take anti-malarials and it seems he contracted it when we were in Malawi. This meant all sorts of things for him and, for us, that we had to stay an extra day in Zimbabwe so another driver could get to us, as obviously Stu was in no condition to drive. He made a pretty speedy recovery over the next couple of weeks, but god was he ill. Lesson learnt - take those malaria drugs now everyone - despite what people say they do work.
So Zimbabwe is definitely worth visiting and my concerns about doing so helping to support Mugabe's regime were unfounded. Our tourist money does get to people who need it when we buy souvenirs and food and so on and people want outsiders to know that it's not the hideously unsafe country it is made out to be in the media. That said, we obviously saw mainly tourist spots and you absolutely cannot talk about Mugabe because you can get into serious trouble. One of our guides told us about how he had been beaten so severely for not wanting to vote for Mugabe in the so called 'free' elections that he spent 3 months in hospital.
Eventually on the 5th July we said goodbye to some of the guys, welcomed some new ones and with a new driver and a malaria delirious extra passenger we left Victoria Falls and crossed the nearby border into Botswana - possibly the dullest country in Africa.
