Livingstone, Zambia (By Mel)

Hello from Livingstone, the town of one of the seven natural wonders of the world.
For our last blog we were in Lusaka, where we took a bus to get to Livingstone in the south of Zambia. The bus trip wasn’t bad until it was! The bus broke down around halfway through the 7 hours trip. They could not fix it. The trip, which was supposed to last 6 to 7 hours, ended up lasting around 15 hours! We had to wait on the side of the road, for the next bus coming this way to pill up with the people already in the bus. We arrived after midnight to Livingstone. We were lucky that the owner of the place we booked was nice enough to wait for us and come and drive us to the place. We got straight to bed as we were exhausted!
Livingstone is a small town in the south of Zambia, on the Zambezi River. It is name after the Scottish Christian missionary, David Livingstone, who travelled through Africa to spread the word of God, and is known as the first white person who saw the Mosi-oa-Tunya ("the smoke that thunders") waterfall in 1855, despite the fact that there was Portuguese traders in Africa for a few centuries before that, but none officially saw it. He named the waterfalls Victoria falls in honour of the Queen Victoria. But the real name for me, is the name that the people from the region call it, Mosi-oa-Tunya, the smoke that thunders: this name represent the falls perfectly.
This is obviously, the place we went to visit first. It is one of the seven natural wonders of the world, and it is magnificent. I knew that we would get wet, but I didn’t know how much!!! I was thinking, it is just water, we don’t need raincoat! Yeah right!!! We got soaked!!!! But that is ok as there is an old story from the tribe of this area saying that when you go to the Mosi-oa-Tunya, the water will wash all your troubles away; so we have no more troubles now!
Lets start back to the entrance: there is a statue of David Livingstone of course. That rubbed me wrong for some reason. Why make such a big deal about a white guy, when this is not his country nor his continent and he wanted to travel in Africa to make African people change their religion. Anyway, not my business, but I did not care about the statue!
We got our first view of the fall and it is breathtaking. The rainy season just finished, which means, the fall is in full strength. We learnt later that around 5 000 m3/sec of water fall down at that time of the year. It is deafening! That is why it is called the smoke that thunder! Because it sounds like it! The water falls down with so much strength that mist get pushed up so high and then fall back down feeling like rainstorm. Some place, it feels like mist, but some place it feels like a cold very strong storm! As I said before, we got drenched in seconds! We were really surprised by the sheer amount of water. Kev walked, very chivalrously, back to get us all raincoats (they rent some at the entrance of the fall) as the kids were shivering within minutes (Andrew had blue lips). We were still wet, but we didn’t get more wet and I could protect my camera! If you go to the fall, do not snob the raincoats, they are very much needed!
Mosi-oa-Tunya is between Zambia and Zimbabwe. On the Zambia side, which is where we were, you can see around 25% of the fall. You can see less, but the part you can see is amazing: watching the water falling from 107 meters (at the highest point) and boiling at the bottom, projecting water up to hundreds of meters high, visible several kilometres from the fall, is a tremendous experience that we won’t forget.
We followed the different trails that take you to different point of views of the fall: some with a great view, some all you can see is white cold mist and sometimes, when the wind clear a bit of the mist, a tiny piece of the fall appears, and it is magical. There are also a lot of rainbows: as there is a lot of water and sun, rainbows appear everywhere regularly, which add to the magic of the place.
We got down at the boiling pot: this is an area at the bottom of the fall where you can see the water coming from the fall, rushing against the rock and splashing back, creating whirlpool and ‘boiling’. The path to get down was slippery and hard but going up was even harder and I am still very not fit! I struggled a fair bit on the way up. We also crossed path with a big group of baboons, which we still don’t like. We had no food though, so they were not interested in us.
Going to Mosi-oa-Tunya was a big expectation for me and it did not disappoint. I’m so very glad we saw it for the first time as a family and it will stay one of the highlights of our trip. Luckily we are going on the Zimbabwe side in a few days!
As it was school picture day at Andrew and Emma’s school in Australia, we took the opportunity to do our world school picture with Mosi-oa-Tunya in the background.
After that we went back to our rental and enjoy a lovely evening watching movies with the kids.
The next day, we had booked a game drive in the hope of seeing rhinoceros. Around 7.20am, our guide picked us up, and we went to the Mosi-oa-Tunya national park, which is one of the smallest one in Zambia. We got very lucky as in the first 30 minutes, we came across 5 white rhino, including a young one. We had to wait to find a ranger, to be able to walk near them ( you are not allowed to leave the tour vehicle without them, for our safety and the safety of the animals). We walked to about 15 meters from the rhinoceros. They are incredible animals: big, beautiful and impressive. The guide took a couple of pictures of us in front of the rhino, which mean we had to turn our back to trhem, which I was not super comfortable with! They run up to 40Klm/Hr, and I don’t run that fast! But all was good, we took some pictures, I could have stay there for hours just watching them, but we couldn’t stay too long to not annoy the rhino and get them stressed. Fair enough!
We saw more giraffes, zebras, impalas, monkeys and a whole colony of ants on the move (that was cool!). We didn’t see as much as we hoped, but the rhinoceros part was amazing. Our guide was also full of knowledge of the animals: we learnt a fair bit. For example, females zebras have larger stripe on their bottoms and that is how you can make the difference between male and females, giraffe make sounds but not on a frequence we can hear, a bunch of standing giraffes is called a tower of giraffe, but a group of running giraffes is a journey, a group of zebra is called a dazzle because when they are threaten, they get together and they dazzle your eyes so you can’t isolate one target. We learnt more but not everything stayed in my memories unfortunately!
When the game drive was over, we asked our guide to drop us in the centre of the town and it was a good idea to do that, as we saw groups of traditional musicians and dancers advertising a festival for the next day. We stayed there to watch them. Then we had to do some shopping as Emma was in desperate need for a jumper (she has been using mine). We found one she loved in a second-hand shop for 60 kwachas (AUD$3.50); great!
We visited the local museum. There was an exhibition about human evolution, there was a room about David Livingstone obviously, as well as information about colonisation and what happen since the independence. It was interesting, similar to the museum in Lusaka, but as this history is very new to us, it is good to reread some of the information to understand them better.
Then we found a pub with live music in the evening. It was still only afternoon but we had nowhere to be, so we went there, had a coffee and chat for a while. We got told that the music will start around 7pm. We moved into the area where the music was supposed to be around that time, but they seemed to be having a big team meeting and no music was being played. They only started playing after 8pm. We listen to the music for a bit (3 guitars, one keyboard and one drumkit), it wasn’t bad but not the best either. Around 9pm we got a taxi and went back to our apartment and bed time!
Saturday the 17th of May was our last day in Zambia. As we saw the day before, there was the Livingstone International Cultural Arts Festival (LICAF) happening that day. It was supposed to start at 8am. We got there a bit after 9am but not much was happening yet. The floats of the carnival were still in town and only arrived at the main place of the festival around 11am I think. There was some music to entertain us but the festival properly started only then. I am so glad we got to see this. We have been looking for cultural dances and music in Zambia but haven’t seen any until then. This festival was all about promoting the arts to Zambian and tourists alike. We saw representation of all the region of Zambia; dancers and musicians in traditional clothes, singing and dancing traditional dances. It was a great last day in Zambia.
Each region had different costumes, some more crazy than other, some had lots of colours, some all in white, some had animal masks on. We listen to a concert band doing the national anthem, then each group had instruments, singers and dancers: we saw different type of drums, singers, one group had a type of xylophone, and I am sure I forgot some! The diversity and creativity were truly amazing.
I had a lovely moment with one boy, around Andrew’s age. He was standing next to me when I was taking pictures and we said hello to each other. He asked where I was from as usual, so I told him, asked him if he knew where Australia was. Then asked if he was from Livingstone, which he was. I then asked him if he like dancing and his answer was amazing. He said: “Yes, dancing is the best part of us.” I loved that answer. Then he asked: “Can I capture some?” It took me a second to understand that he wanted to take some pictures. I gave him my camera and show him how to use it and he took a few pictures. I think he was happy about it. I asked him if I could take a picture of him, which he agreed. I loved his pose. His name was Elijo (not sure how to spell it) I’ll remember him for a long time.
Emma also had a great moment. She got picked by a scary looking warrior/dancer to go where he was dancing and he danced in front of her for a tiny bit. It was impressive to watch and Emma was very brave to go and also very lucky to be picked. I’m sure she’ll talk about it in her blog!
Then we had to go as we had someone waiting for us to pick us up on the other side of the border in Zimbabwe.
We got a taxi to the border, got our passport stamped by the Zambian stamps, walked on the bridge going above the Zambezi River, stamped our passport again this time with Zimbabwe stamps, meet with Sissy, the owner of our next stay. We wanted to book some activities for the adrenaline junkie of the family (Andrew), so she took us there (we spent a fortune), then to our little house we are going to stay for the next 4 days.
That’s it for the moment,
See you soon.
MelLæs mere