Story by Roeleen Cronje
This story took place some years ago but
it is still such a warm memory for us that we would like to immortalize it for
you (being the “friends of ours” mentioned below), in this gift.
As friends of ours had contacts
to book a houseboat on Kariba at a reasonable rate, we decided to take our
Christmas holiday break up in Zimbabwe.
We also decided that we would take the opportunity to visit Vic Falls
and do a spot of white water rafting as well.
We subsequently found out
that if you are planning a trip to Zim, the worst plan of action to take is to
ask advice from those who live or lived there.
The locals are singularly ignorant about the benefits of tourist
information and the general reaction seems to be amazement that anyone would
visit certain places, that these places actually existed or that someone would
need to know how to get there! Only
the main arterial roads to either Harare or Bulawayo are known, routes to any
other destination are a complete mystery to the inhabitants of Zim.
We duly booked the houseboat
at what we thought was a great rate, and as things worked out, we could not get
accommodation at Kariba straight off the houseboat, so our bright friends doing
the bookings, booked a cottage at Kariba with a gap of four days in
between. These four days they were
delighted to tell us would consist of making the trip with the 4 x 4 from
Kariba to Vic Falls and back, with a pleasant stay in the Vic Falls area whilst
we did our white water rafting stint.
This sounded extremely
Camel-adventurish and we relished the opportunity of casually informing all
those who might be vaguely interested of our holiday plans. Everyone was suitably impressed and we
embarked on our epic journey.
Our first disaster struck
when we arrived at Kariba to find that the houseboat we had booked was NOT! Due to a misunderstanding between the
houseboat owners and our friends who did the booking, the boat was not
available at all during this time. So
started a frantic hunt for alternative accommodation. One of the options we had was to buy shares
in the local hotel, that’s what their daily rate per person would be tantamount
to. We decided that this option would
only be used as a last resort, if you’ll excuse the pun. We finally managed to convince another
houseboat owner that he should take pity on us and let us have the use of his
boat for the duration. He reluctantly
agreed, with the condition that two nights would have to be spent in the
harbour instead of ‘at sea’ as it were, due to the crew not being available for
those 2 days. In desperation, we took
it.
Christmas Day on a houseboat is a very
different scenario and certainly recommended if you need to escape the hustle
and bustle of an urban Christmas such as one experiences in Gauteng. This part of the trip was incredible with
wonderful game viewing, stunning sunsets and the sense of isolation from modern
day technology, such as phones, TV’s and radios. It was heaven waking up to the call of
numerous fish eagles standing on petrified tree stumps duplicated in the mirror
image of the calm water!
The second leg of our holiday arrived before we knew it. Our party consisted of 4 adults, three
teenagers and one child of 10. We piled
into the double-cab 4x4, hitched the trailer to this and set off for Victoria
Falls with great enthusiasm. When we
turned off the main road at Karoi onto what looked like a fairly decent tar
road, we thought this was a breeze.
Ten kilometers later our
illusion was shattered and we spent the next 7 to 8 hours bouncing around on a
gravel road that defies description.
This road kinks and winds in such a manner that each tribal chief in the
area is assured of frontage onto this road, and in fact, each Chieftain’s house
is quaintly sign-posted with his name and a welcome to his house. We ascertained later that these name signs
are in fact bus-stops and that there is a Putco-style bus which careers around
in the wilderness – its suspension obviously far superior to the tough 4x4
vehicles designed for this purpose, or perhaps the driver just likes to ride
with gay abandon, after all he doesn’t pay an arm and a leg for the bus. This bus overtook us on more than one
occasion. Naturally, the ‘men’ in our
party would not stop and ask the bus-driver if we were on the right road and
this caused some friction within the vehicle.
Halfway along this road of
hell, a rock bounced up, hit the trailer and came back and smashed through the
back window of the 4x4. This resulted in
a suffocating cloud of sand and grit enveloping all the youngsters in the back
and we tried all sorts of tricks to try and keep the dust out. Eventually one of the ‘ladies’ in the party
hit on the idea of rigging up a wet towel tied with fishing gut around the door
and this worked like a charm. We were
now getting into the swing of things and the city slicker image was fast
disappearing, together with the paint of the gravel-blasted trailer; which by
the way was just your standard light-weight ‘Vaalie to the Coast” type of
trailer but it withstood the road test and did its manufacturers proud.
We reached a stretch of tar
at a three-way stop street in the middle of this wilderness and our driver
leapt out of the vehicle and, to the amazement of ourselves and some locals
standing around, he kissed the road – 500 meters later the anguish on his face
was almost laughable as the tar came to an abrupt end and we started off again
on the endless gravel and sand nightmare.
The local council’s budget must have run out within minutes of this road
project taking off.
We reached Mlbizi (where our
Zim friends had booked our Vic Falls stay) totally exhausted, half asphyxiated
and too tired to actually be surprised when we found out that Vic Falls was in
fact a three hour drive away! This
meant that the next morning we had to leave the hotel at 4am in the morning to
get to Vic Falls in time for the white water rafting. Despite this, the experience of white water
rafting on the Zambezi was awesome. The
high level of professionalism shown by the rafting guides was unbelievable and
we highly recommend this fantastic day’s entertainment, only slightly spoilt by
the 3 hour trek back to the hotel.
Following on the advice of locals (we
never learn), we decided to return to the Kariba Wall area via Zambia as this
is apparently a tarred road all the way.
Due to major delays at the border post and the fact that one of our
party was a British Citizen (Zambians don’t like them), it cost us a fortune
for a transit visa which has to be obtained in the middle of the town, not at
the border post, and we left much later than anticipated. To add to our woes, half way to Kariba we
encountered the most torrential rain which slowed us further, especially
because the ‘tarred’ road consisted of huge potholes which one had to drive
into and out of on the other side. We
were further held up by an accident in one of the mountain passes which
involved a couple of pantechnicons and we had to wait for the road to be
cleared. The potholes deteriorated into
mud holes and the vehicle we were travelling in took a major pounding. It is one of the few 4x4’s from Gauteng
which has actually fulfilled its design purpose and not just been a status symbol. Hats off to our driver – he could have won
the Roof of Africa rally with his driving skills, especially with 7 navigators
in the car.
So, to top it all – we
missed the border post and now we were sitting in Zambia, without any Zambian
kwacha, travelers cheques endorsed “Payable in Zimbabwe” only and some South
African Rands. To our dismay, all the
hotels in Zambia only dealt in Cash and this had to be in US Dollars – the age
of plastic had not arrived there yet.
We were fortunate to be rescued by a kind soul who saw us beating it up
and down the streets in the pouring rain trying to find accommodation as the
kids were now saturated in the back of vehicle because of the missing window
and being teenagers, starving. He very
kindly took us to a little fishing resort and paid for us in Kwacha and we paid
him in Travellers Cheques. They were
wonderful and opened their kitchen at 10 o’clock at night to feed us and we
collapsed into the rondavels onto incredibly clean sheets to sleep like the
dead, albeit that the spiders were the size of dinner plates and the invasion
of 12 inch shongololos trying to escape the rain made it look like a Steven
Spielberg movie. We will always be
grateful to this unknown knight who came to our rescue in the depths of what we
termed our African despair.
Our final week spent in a
cottage on the shores of Lake Kariba was calm, peaceful and fortunately without
any major hazards – we did meet up with elephants on the roads at night but
they weren’t particularly interested in us, some of our party actually caught
tiger fish and the sunsets and sundowners mellowed all the traumas into a rosy
haze of memory. In retrospect, we
started laughing about our misadventures.
But we learnt a hard lesson
– if you are going to visit an unknown country in Africa – do a lot of research
and then some more – AND DON’T ALWAYS RELY ON THE LOCALS!!!!
