6/9/98: A very full day that included a crocodile ranch, a troop of baboons, several grazing elephants and a walk along the upper Zambezi River that ended with a spectacular view of Mosi-oa-Tunya, “The Smoke That Thunders.”
NOTE: The photo above is a pre-smartphone selfie that I took of Ruth and I upon our first view of Mosi-oa-Tunya, or “Victoria Falls,” as you may have heard of it.
6/9/23: We started the day with a tour of Spencer’s Crocodile Ranch (since renamed Victoria Falls Crocodile Farm). I managed to keep all of my digits while Ruth snapped a picture of me holding a baby croc. The ranch was also an orphanage for three lion cubs, all kinds of birds, and a bunch of monitor lizards.
We started to walk the 5 km back to town on a path that wound back toward town along the Zambezi River. Ruth was terrified that we might encounter lions or leopards, though the folks at the ranch indicated that it was highly unlikely. I tried to reassure her that if we did come across any animals, they would leave us alone as long as we left them alone. At least that’s what my mom always told me about bumble bees and wasps! Shortly after entering the jungle on the path, we found ourselves completely surrounded by a troop of baboons. I don’t mean that they converged on us like an attacking army, only that they were everywhere around us, including above us in the trees. We paused for a long while, standing still and discussing if we should turn back or proceed. The baboons did not try to approach us and seemed to pay us little mind, so we decided to slowly move forward past them. We breathed a big sigh of relief once we were past them and they continued to forage or do whatever they were doing.
We continued to keep our eyes and ears wide open for danger, and saw no other animals along the path, until we were about 200 yards from the end of the path at the Victoria Falls. There we encountered several elephants eating and drinking. Because we didn’t want to startle them, or get between them and their exit route, we decided to retrace our steps back the path. About half the distance back to where we started, there was a hotel not too far from the path. We stopped there, picked up a taxi and headed back to Livingstone and approached the Falls from that side.
Well, Victoria Falls are everything they say they are. HUGE! Beautiful. Sort of dumbfounding. It stretches about 1.25 miles across and 355 feet high. I had seen Niagara Falls before, but they are only about 3600 feet across, or 6/10s of a mile if you count both Horseshoe Falls on the Canadian side and American Falls on the US side together. Victoria Falls was more than twice as wide and was a single cataract! It was high season and at the very point that the water spills over the edge, the depth was estimated to be over six feet deep. Our travel guide book says that’s 5 million cubic meters of water pouring down the cataract per minute! So much water spills over that the noise is deafening, and the misty spray that results rises so high in the sky that it can be seen up to 20 miles away. That is why the Ndebele and Shona people call it Mosi-oa-Tunya, the Smoke that Thunders! It was named “Victoria Falls” in 1855 by David Livingstone, the Scottish missionary and explorer who was one of the first Europeans to see this natural marvel.
