Victoria Falls

Victoria Falls

My hostel here in Livingstone is a hard place to describe. I chose it from the Lonely Planet description of being a little quieter but close to amenities and with nice facilities. That's mostly true, the bar area and the outdoor pool are stunning, an unexpected luxury from a fairly mundanely fronted building on the main road through town. On the flip side the rooms are stupidly hot and the wall fan merely stirs up the warm humid, even sleeping with no covers makes you sweat an stick to the mattress. But that's just Africa and I'm hardly complaining esp for $10 (about £7) per night.

For that £7 a night you also got a free van ride to the falls which is what I did on this Sunday, paying my $20 entrance fee and walking about to see the "falls that thunder". And well, they weren't exactly thundering. As you crossed knife edge bridge and walked to the edge of the canyon separating Zam from Zim you see a few narrow stream tumbling over the 100m basalt cliff with a misty haze of the main falls about 500m distant in Zimbabwe. Usually the whole 1.4km cliff face extending up to an past my position is a roaring tumble of 50million litres of water per second but unfortunately my visit is at the end of the dry season so the Zambia side of the falls are pretty dry. That said, what there is is simply spectacular both the water and the canyon scenery. I bumped into 2 Fin's and a German guy also staying at my hostel and we walked down to the bottom of the canyon together, past a hoard of baboons and found a great spot to relax almost below the 1904 Livingstone bridge linking the two nations.

I'm now sitting back at the hostel with a guy from Poland I think watching the Liverpool match on tv a the bar. Victoria Falls is one incredible place but somewhere I need to come back to during the wet season to see it in full force, quite when that will happen I'm really not sure.