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Passing on Victoria Water Falls, Shooting the Zambezi, Escape into Africa July 10, 2008

Posted by dodo in : Botswana, Hotels, Lodges, Passport, South Africa, Tour, USA, United Kingdom, Victoria Falls, Zambia , trackback

A white line still bisected the bridge, but its meaning had gone and the menace with it. Now the only sentry was a baboon sitting on a fence barking at a warthog on the other side of the road.

Early morning, sun up but cool, just two of us on the bridge at Victoria Falls, between Zimbabwe and Zambia. We looked down at the pale green Zambesi 300 feet below. Cecil Rhodes had wanted the bridge built close enough to the Falls to catch the spray. Usually it does. However, this was September and the “Falls” in front of us were just a curtain of rock. The rains had been good; not good enough, though, to make up for years of drought.

Only on the Zimbabwean side did the river reach over and plunge in. Its noise was like distant motorway traffic.

We were about to go down the river on a rubber raft. We were to start at the bottom of the Falls and travel six miles down the Zambesi through zigzagging gorges . . . and over nine rapids. Why on earth had we agreed to it? Sarah didn’t even like putting her head under water in the bath. As for me, the wake of a passing launch under a scull on the Thames was the nearest I’d ever got to white water.

“Triple A,” the caricature Californian told our subdued party of eighteen outside the Zambian hotel. “A for scenery, A for excitement, and A for ease of access.” Better than Omo. It took a little time before I realised he was talking about a river in Ethiopia. Through his organisation, Sobek, he seemed to have shot most of the world’s rapids. “I’m Jib.” His chin did indeed have a confident look about it. “Now let me tell you.” The ‘you’ appeared to be a tiny seventy-year-old American woman. “The real danger is getting down on in there. That’s where the legs get broken. The rapids is easy. And then there’s the climb right on out at the other end. Five hundred feet straight right on up to the top.” The lady was unimpressed by the string of prepositions.

Travel Guidebook“Ah did the Choler-ado end Ahm dooin this one.”

So we clambered down to the whirlpool — the Boiling Pot — past the grinning curio sellers. “Hey! Buy now, madamsir. You are being too, too tired after Sobek, isn’t it?”

A steep path through spray forest and then we were on to mossy boulders. Only one of us slipped. Me, twice. Collapse of the agile mountain man pose.

Our three rafts dangled over the water, small against the black cliffs. The river, a mile wide up there, squeezed into 150 yards down here. It objected to the constraint. We were all trying not to look at the first rapid, delicately yet furiously turning in on itself. I tightened my lifejacket for the fifth time.

“Okay!” Jib bellowed at us a couple of feet away. “No-one has to flip if they just remember a few basic rules.” A twist of his flat hand showed what flipping meant. “All you gotta do is hold on hard to the rope around the side. And go where the wave is. If there’s a wave hanging over you on the right side, then you throw yourself on that side. That’s the high side. You gotta go for the high side! Okay?”

The high side. He’d shouted it as if it held the key to the meaning of life. I glanced at the rapid. Maybe it did.

In our raft were a middle-aged dentist from a Namibian diamond mine, his silent, teeth-baring wife, a thin and earnest German (”What is bail please?”), two perfectly mannered teenage sons of a senior

Zambian official whose mountainous wife we had left behind at the hotel (”I’d sink it”), us and Jib.

We were last to cast away, but first through the rapid. Whatever happened to queuing? Why us? . . . Dentist and I threw ourselves half out of the bows to become a bouncing, double-headed figurehead. The waves swept over us; we came up, twisted, went under again, rammed the gorge side and finally got flicked out into the calm. “Bail!”

The German was picking up English fast.

The water, very cold, sent up streams of bubbles. We shivered in the gorge’s shadow. Above us was the bridge. Little figures lined the railings. As we waited for the others to come through, I thought of the first time I had crossed here, nineteen years before. Two armed soldiers had stood either side of that white line, three feet apart, both black, silent and avoiding each other’s eyes. The next time, the soldiers had moved back out of sight. The young white Rhodesian I’d passed on the bridge had told me not to bother trying to get into Zambia. “Bleddy munts, man . . . told me I was illegal!”

I was luckier. An immigration officer in Botswana had given me a full-page visa with “VSO” stamped all the way across it. It didn’t mean anything but it opened every border. I had made sure, too, that no Rhodesian stamp sullied my passport; instead I got one on the back of a piece of cornflakes packet. Now there was still tedious form- filling. But the hostile line had moved on, “down south”, to the Limpopo. The mighty Zambesi had become a tourist’s plaything.

The next two rapids were similar to the first. We were all joining in the atavistic yell: “Hit the high side!”

Jib soon cut us dowii.

“Okay, guys. Now, the Real Thing. Yoohaa … Number Four!” We could hear it. It was round the bend. Dentist’s wife’s rictus smile showed that we all were.

“Second Gorge,” Dentist said. “That’s where that Canadian girl got shot • •. by the Terrs.” He glanced nervously at the half-caste Zambians. But they were staring hard at Number Four.

Sucked in and spat out, I still don’t know how we avoided being liquidised. But the terror wasn’t enough for Dentist. He had to tell his tale of murder. I nodded. Why bring up yesterday’s war? Wasn’t this exciting enough for him?

Number Five had us falling into a very deep hole, riding vertically along a wave called the Rooster Tail and bending so far that bow almost touched stern. At least, that’s what Jib told us we had done. Dentist decided to look around for rare falcons instead of guerrilla ghosts. Sarah began to feel that the bath-dipping had not really been adequate preparation. The German appeared to have been reduced to a fearful mute. Dentist wife kept on grinning. The half-castes sat on the raft side as if waiting for cucumber sandwiches to be served. And Jib rolled his words around the gorge and gave us a geology lesson.

A klipspringer buck leapt up an invisible path on the cliff face. Most of the others weren’t interested: they wanted their lunch. I remembered the comments book in the self-catering lodge where we had stayed the previous two nights in Zimbabwe. A narrow strip of chopped grass and scrub leading down to the Zambesi had been the subject of a long-running dispute. Forget the bushbuck, baboons, vervet monkeys and warthogs that could be seen there. Instead: “Why no lawn?” (a Brit.)

“Go back to the UK for your bloody lawns.” (an Aussie)

“A lawn equals civilisation.” (another Brit.)

Lunch came out of sealed containers together with the cameras. Some were eager to cut carrots and avocados. Others stared at the next

Rapid. The American lady sat down very gingerly on her patch of rock ledge and said little. A group of English students — “Coal not Dole” on their T-shirts — talked politics. “British politics are a sham by comparison with South Africa. They mean something down there.”

Dentist looked disapproving.

Nobody flipped. We were all disappointed (provided it had been somebody else’s raft, of course). The end was the slow toil up Jib’s 500 feet — “straight up”. Local carriers climbed steadily past us with oars, rafts and boxes. No hesitation, no pauses for breath, sweat runnelling down their backs. From the top we watched the progress of aged America. An hour to push and pull her up like some truculent donkey. But at the end: “Ah tol’ you’all Ah cud do it. Just gimme time. Okay. . . why don’ we’all do that agin?”

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Passing on Victoria Water Falls, Shooting the Zambezi, Escape into Africa

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