Travel to Victoria Falls

I promised to fill readers in about how the trip to Vic Falls went.  I traveled with the Korean lecturer from AU.  We left at 3:30 AM, and caught a bus to Bulawayo that was supposed to leave at 4:00, but actually left at 4:40.  It was a large bus with seats like a school bus—no padding.  The cost was $15.  After any number of stops, we got to Bulawayo just after 3:00.  We caught a cab to another place where the bus to Vic Falls was supposed to depart, only to find out that we’d missed it by 10 minutes.  There were no other large buses that day, so our choice was to stay in Bulawayo and leave the next morning, thereby missing one of our two days in Vic Falls, or take a minibus.  (The minibus cost $25, whereas the bus we missed would’ve cost $10.)  We got on a minibus that was supposed to leave in a few minutes, and actually did leave in a little less than an hour.  It seated 24, but carried 28 of us.  It pulled a trailer full of stuff that we delivered to quite a few different places along the way.  We got to Vic Falls and took a cab to our backpackers’ lodging, arriving a few minutes after midnight.  The real trick of this 20 ½ hour sojourn was that we never had a rest stop along the way, and there weren’t even any stops with a good bush to pee behind.  I didn’t know I could wait that long!

 We had two delightful days of vacation.  The first day we went to Victoria Falls.  The day was quite overcast, so the photos are all in shades of gray.  It was quite impressive.  Around noon, the sun started to peek out from behind the clouds, so we walked the whole length of the park a second time.  Then we went to a local craft market, where I quickly became overwhelmed with the needs of the vendors.  They all are having a tough time, and although they tried to be polite, sales are extremely important to them for basic food needs.  I wound up buying more than I really wanted or could conveniently carry, just to spread a little money around.  We also went to a grocery store to get a few things, and were amazed at the greater variety of goods available there than in Mutare.

 The next day we connected with a day tour of Chobe.  There were four South Africans, two Brazilians currently living in Zambia, a Japanese man and a German man as well as us.  We went into Botswana, which conveniently has a free one-day entry (give them credit for encouraging tourism).  We spent ½ day in a covered tour boat and ½ day in a safari jeep that just held the 11 of us (including our guide).  The number of different animals we saw was amazing!  We were within 20-30 feet of most of them, and were able to sit for periods and watch their behavior.  It was a blast!

 Coming back into Zimbabwe fulfilled my need to be admitted with a tourist visa.  My temporary employment permit expired the 18^th.  The immigration officer who handled it threw a fit because I gave him a $20 bill with a small (maybe 1/8 “) tear in it.  I said I didn’t have another and held up the line over that for several minutes in hopes that he’d be reluctant to pick another fight over my work permit.  He commented on it, but didn’t object to giving me a 30-day tourist visa.  So now I have to go through some process again in a month, in hopes of being able to stay until the end of the semester.

 The trip back to Mutare was a little better than the outbound trip.  We’d paid for the backpackers’ lodging through Saturday night before we realized that we’d have to leave Saturday to get back Sunday.  That was a good thing, though, because we could leave our stuff there when we went to Chobe and, when we returned, take a shower and have a nap.  We caught a midnight bus to Bulawayo, arriving a few minutes after 6:00 AM.  We found a public restroom, got some food, and then caught a bus at 7:00 for Mutare.  This bus actually was a coach—quite rundown, but with padded seats, which made the trip back much more pleasant.  We arrived in Mutare around 4:30 PM.