Day 19 – Victoria Falls: Where the Lines Meet

Livingstone got there first, and in bronze he is still watching. His statue stands on the Zambian side, looking out over the water he reached in 1855 and named for a queen who never saw it, and we came up to the falls just below him with two rainbows standing in the spray and the sky clear behind them. I had crossed a good part of a continent by land to arrive where he had arrived by land, and for a moment, under his gaze, that felt like the whole point of the trip standing in front of me.

Then the noise takes over. You do not so much see Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders, as get taken into it: the roar, the ground trembling under you, the spray coming up out of the gorge and falling back as rain. Most people were renting or buying plastic ponchos. We had waterproofs in the bags and chose not to bother with either, and got soaked, which was the idea. Everyone in a poncho got soaked anyway. That is the thing no one tells you: the cold water finds a way in under your collar regardless, your shoes are full in three seconds, and within a minute the whole business of staying dry is a lost and slightly ridiculous cause.

At the Knife-Edge Bridge, which juts out with the falls on three sides, I watched a man nearly lose his iPhone over the rail filming himself, leaning out for the shot he needed. The lens of my own camera fogged over completely in the spray, useless, and I gave up and used the phone. And somewhere on that bridge I stopped trying to photograph any of it, because the experience is not seeing the waterfall. It is becoming part of the rain that falls upward out of the gorge.

This is the dry season, so the Zambian side runs low; in places the rock face shows through. It is the season when they run the Devil’s Pool, the natural pool right on the lip of the falls. We did not do it. With the water this low, all I could see was a queue for a photograph: someone held by the ankles while they hung over the edge for the shot, and it just did not appeal to me. So we passed, and walked down to the Boiling Pot instead.

The Boiling Pot is the steep path that drops into the gorge to the Zambezi right below the bridge. Up above, the viewpoints had been full of people. Down here there was no one but Lorena, me and the baboons, the whole hard descent to ourselves. Everyone knows the baboons will take anything not hidden, so I kept everything zipped away. Coming back up, we met an African family making their way down with great difficulty in flip-flops, which put our own careful boots in perspective. At the bottom, the river comes out of the falls and turns on itself, green and violent, and you stand alone with it, and after the crowds on the rail above, that solitude was the better half of the day.

Then we crossed into Zimbabwe on foot. It is around four kilometres between the two border posts, over the Victoria Falls Bridge, and the walk is its own small lesson. Alongside the tourists with their day packs, local traders crossed on foot with heavy loads, at an entirely different pace and with a different purpose on the same road, and a line of lorries stretched back, waiting to be let over in alternating directions. The bridge itself is only a couple of hundred metres long, and it was never really built for any of them: it opened in 1905 as a railway bridge, part of Cecil Rhodes’s dream of a line running the length of the continent from the Cape to Cairo, a dream never finished. Rhodes is said to have wanted it built where the spray from the falls would carry onto the passing trains. Standing on it, one of the three threads I had come all this way to follow, the great unfinished lines drawn across Africa, was right under my feet, carrying lorries and traders and us, if not the through-train he imagined.

We had lunch on the Zimbabwean side at the Lookout Café, out over the Batoka gorge, and then walked the rainforest on that side, the permanently mist-fed forest and the wide frontal view of the whole curtain of water. A vast school group of South African students was working the viewpoints in the opposite direction to us, which by good luck kept us mostly out of each other’s way. The Zimbabwean side gives you the scale, the full face of it. And yet what stayed with us was the Zambian side. You see less of it, but you are closer, wetter, more inside the thing. Scale is impressive. Being soaked to the skin a few metres from the edge is something else.

Our taxi came back for us at five and took us home to Livingstone. In the evening we ate at Olga’s, a pizzeria that is also a community project, named for an Italian aid worker and run with the NGO Celim to fund local education and training. Two pineapple pizzas, very good. My hands were still cold from the day’s water as they closed around a bottle of Mosi, and that is how I remember the falls.

Practical Notes

Where I stayed

Second night at Jollyboys Backpackers, Livingstone (details in Day 18).

Where I ate

The Lookout Café (Wild Horizons), Zimbabwean side, above the Batoka Gorge. Lunch stop with gorge views, on the activity side (zipline, gorge swing, bungee all run from around here).
Olga’s Italian Corner, Livingstone. Wood-fired pizzeria and social project, named for an Italian aid worker, run with the NGO Celim to fund local education and training.
What I ate: two pineapple pizzas, very good, and a cold Mosi.

What I visited

Both sides of Victoria Falls in one day.
Zambia (Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park): closer and more immersive, lower water in the dry season (August), with the Knife-Edge Bridge and the steep walk down to the Boiling Pot. Park entry around $20.
Zimbabwe (Victoria Falls National Park): the wide frontal view, a rainforest walk with numerous viewpoints, Danger Point. Park entry around $50.
Border crossing: on foot between the two border posts, roughly 4 km all in, about 30–45 minutes each way. The Victoria Falls Bridge itself is only about 200 metres long. Zimbabwe single-entry visa $30 (done online in advance). Expect a queue of waiting lorries and local traders crossing on foot.
My take: the two sides genuinely differ, Zambia for proximity and immersion, Zimbabwe for scale and the full view. We were glad to do both, and preferred the Zambian side.
Devil’s Pool: runs in the dry season; in low water it did not appeal to us, and we skipped it. Baboons in the parks will take anything unzipped.
Waterproofs: you will get soaked whatever you wear. Protect your camera and phone; carry a dry change.