Victoria Falls

Victoria Falls

 

If there is a town that Disney built, it’s the village of Victoria Falls.  Its sole purpose is to provide an extraordinarily high level of service to the tourist who’s will to spend spend inflated prices to hang around.  Best rule: pull in, see the falls, then leave.  There are as many ways to spend a dollar as there are bees in a hive.  Bungee jumping, Canopy tours, a Hemingway High Tea ($180.00), and a full day Teddy Roosevelt Experience ($350.00).

 

My experience at Victoria Falls was a bit like a visit to the coast of Maine on a glorious summer’s day, except off-coast fog occludes vistas of the sea.  You know it’s there because you can hear the gulls, the fog horn, but weather just gets in the way.  It was like that at the Falls.  Numbers are astounding.  Five million liters of water spill over the falls each minute and that water tumbles into a narrow gorge.  Only from the air does one get a really good view.  Of the 16 view-points on the 1.7 km ridge, only five provide clear vistas.  The other 11 vista points are so close to the falls that a heavy mist, at times so thick that being within it was like being under a strong shower, soaks the visitor. There was no point trying to stay dry.

 

Victoria Falls is the highest, widest sheet of falling water in the entire world, and in May the water falls at full force. Clouds of spray, thick with water, form as the Zambezi rages over the falls. It deserves some credit for traveling 2,700 km from its source in Zambia, near the border of the Congo where it travels through parts of Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.  It’s unfair to compare it other marvels of its kind, but at least Niagara Falls is visible, as is Iguazu in Argentina.

 

To say that I was disappointed with Victoria Falls—the mightiest waterfalls in the world—is tourism sacrilege.  I’d traveled a very long way to come here and to be disappointed was a let-down in itself.

 

Unlike Iguazu, where I spent two full days, Victoria Falls got five very wet hours.  When I exited the park, I parked myself in a café, in the sun, and ordered a really good piece of carrot cake and a Diet Coke.

 

When I finally got back to the Lodge, I had dinner with Tanya who was horrified that I was disappointed with the Falls.  “I cried,” she told me.  “It was a lifelong dream that was fulfilled.”  I felt badly.  The unapologetic country bagger is no jaded traveler, but Victoria Falls just didn’t cut it.  I don’t like to compare places in the world.  Every place is wonderful is in its own way, but I’d seen Iguazu and that had been the bees knees, the cat’s meow.

 

A week later, we met in Cape Town for dinner.  She’d flown back to the city several hours after I had.  Her seat mate vindicated me.  He’d been to Iguazu, too, and confirmed my bias.  

 

Some things just are better than others.

 

I suppose I could revisit. I hear there’s barely a trickle by end of the dry season—October into November.  But it’s no easy task getting to this part of Africa, and once will have to suffice.

 

The carrot cake gets high marks, though.  

 

I might return for that.