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Hi all has been a while as we have been particularly busy with the completion of the first leg of the Africa tour and the start of the next. I think the last blog was from Chobe National Park, Botswana. Here we were well out of our station at the extravagant Safari Lodge most highlighted with Clive washing his thongs in the resturant sided pool.
The Safari Lodge bar was spectacular, though we didn’t need much encouragement to start drinking mid afternoon. Our poor guide Moses, more then once that week, had to negotiate plans for the following day with a herd of fully pissed Aussies cracking inside jokes and outlining each others drinking capacity on a dirt floor graph. Drinking and hanging out pool side was the order for a few days with my favourite pass time watching German families try to convince each other to get into the freezing water. Later in the evening we would spend the last of our Botwanian Kwocha on cocktails, encouraged by paying stupid drinking games or singing terrible 80‘s songs. The highlight of the night being Clive’s inpersonation of Jac, this still guarantees he gets dargers each time we mention it. I unforfortunently was a little bit too hang over to attend the game drive the next day only to be shown up by Clive whom had rolled into the tent at 3am after drinking on with some fat South African Hunters, drunken Clive refused to stop singing ‘total eciplse of the heart’ until I sung a deut with him.
Having supporting the Botswana local breweries we headed across the border to Zambia and onto Livingston, gate way to the Victorian Falls. Vic Falls is a massive waterfall which is a monumental border mark between Zambia and Zimbarwae. Vic Falls was amazingly….wet and misty from the Zambian side.. if you every get here don’t bother with the Zambian side, cross the border and see it from Zimbarwae it was three times bigger, far more visually stunning and far less wet. In Livingston activities are plentiful and we had two whole days to do as we liked. We all really enjoyed the morning lion walk - an initiative to attempt to re-introduce lions to the wild through graded, protected, generational, decreased interaction with humans, so far unsuccessful but it was amazing to walk through the plains with an animal that may eat you if it realises you bleed.
Being the fool that I am I signed up and paid the non-refundable sum of US$145 to flying fox, bungee jump and god swing. I would like to say that I was calm and enjoyed every second of the day but the fact is that the night before I worked myself into such a state that I threw up (note Zambian Bream should be chewed excessively if you think you may vomit otherwise you will struggle as I did). The next day I wasn’t in much better form, lucky enough the first of the trio of stupidity was the flying fox. It was a gentle zip out from the reception and waiver signing area to the bridge. From here we were lined up and consecutively jumped from the platform. The words ‘the bigger you jump the more fun” were lost on me as my video proves, I managed the knee flexion component of the jump but then only managed to fall forwards. To my credit I didn’t hesitate, didn’t need to be pushed and made it off the platform. I will tell anyone that will listen, never, ever is there a need to bungy jump, it goes against every evoluntionary self preservation instinct you have. What you may not fully appreciate watching a jump is that on the recoil you manage to get three quarters of the way back up to the bridge and for a moment you are nearly upright again, suspended in space before plummeting back to Earth. Never ever will I feel the need to bungy jump again. After that I was quietly happy that Cathy the Brit wanted to share a god swing as I wasn’t 100% I would have done it myself. The god swing is much the same as a bungy but you run off a platform and fall until the slack of your rope tightens and you pendulum swing across the gorge. After all this we bolted back through no mans land, through the Zambian immigration jumped into a taxi that needed to be push started, returning to the campsite literally needing to jump onto the sun set booze cruiser as it pulled from the campsite port. Full credit to Simon who was running with us ever though he was suffering still from a major case of food posioning and had only been released from hospital two days prior.
With a few hangovers from the booze cruize the next day Jac, Clive, Mark and I decided to cross the bridge to Zimbarwe. The border crossing was unremarkable other than a police officer mistaking me sidestepping him to avoid a van as fear of gun wielding men in uniform. His cure for this was to hold my hand for 200m as we approached immigration. He only let go as we run out of small talk and the other three cleared 50m infront - not at all concerned for my wellbeing. Spending the US$60 to travel across the border to Zimbarwae seemed to be lost to Cathy the Brit. In all seriousness she suggested we all just ‘throw a shoe from the Zambia side, it’s the same principle isn’t it?” (we all miss her contributions now she’s headed to Turkey). It was lunch time so after buying some compulsory trillion dollar Zimbarwian notes we rolled up to the Victorian Falls Hotel where we asked the coneurgeue Shinea if he could point us towards the resturant. With our directions we more aside and a pleasant American behind us asked Shinea if there was any tours of the hotel. “I can give you a tour if you would like, and would you Australians like to come” no brainer. The Vic Falls Hotel is five star safari all the way, even boasting a royal visit by Queen Elizabeth, with game animals on the walls, leather chesterfields, staff in British Safari attire, paintings to rival a local museum, beautifully kept grounds protected by a man who carried a .21 rifle to kill, not scare baboons. We had our second travel-gasm of the trip when Shinea asked if we would like to see the Royal/Presidential suite and let us take photos of ourselves on the bed and in the gallery as he flicked through a history album with us the same as if we were Sultans. As Mark poosed for a photo in the Presidential chair we asked how many Presidents had stayed in the room. Shineo in his slowly deep voice suggested “just the two, Hillary Clinton (some may say that she wore the pants so we let that side) and Chuck Norris” we lost it completely as we had only just been cracking Chuck Norris jokes the night before. For fans Chuck is taller then he appears on television but just as nice according to Shinea. After a lovely lunch at the resturant and a few average Zimbarweian beers Jac and I had our photo taken at a marker outlining the distance from Cape Town to Cairo (starting point of this trip and the next). We were excorted from the grounds via the private back entarnace but couldn’t quiet understand why we needed a guard to walk us back to the falls until one of us noticed the elephant less then 20m from us happily grazing on bushes.
That afternoon we said goodbye to the very entertaining Brit girls plus Angus are token Irish traveller, and met with the new 12 people for the second leg of the trip. The make up of the group is a little bit older and there are a few odd balls, it only highlights how lucky we were on the first leg of the trip.
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