Kasane, the town that we were staying in, is really close to the Zimbabwe and Zambia border, so we took a day trip over to the seventh wonder of the world, Victoria Falls. It was just a short drive to the border. We quickly got our passport stamped on the Botswana side, and then proceeded to the border gate. At the gate, the guard asked us for our gate pass… which we didn’t have. Not sure what to do, we waited to see what happened next. He then glanced at our car, and tells us that we’re not allowed to take petrol over the border. We have 4 large jerry cans of petrol attached to our land cruiser in case we need extra fuel. Crap. What do we do? There was no way in hell we were going to hand over the jerry cans since we would probably need them later in our trip. And obviously, just dumping the fuel out of them onto the ground or something wasn’t really an option. We just sat there at a loss. the guard stared at us. We stared at him. Ages passed by with us just sitting there panicking. Finally we asked, “Sooooo… ummm… what do we do now?”. More time went by with more staring, and finally he just waved us on and said to keep going. Despite the lack of gate pass and the 4 jerry cans of fuel. Well.. that was lucky.
The Zimbabwe part of the border was even more complicated. You can’t just freely take cars from other countries over the border, and since our car was registered in Botswana, that was a problem. But our agency had sent a guy out to meet us at the border to take care of this. It’s crazy that this dude had come all the way out here to meet us at the border, just to help us cross, despite having no idea what time we’d be arriving. He filled out all sort of forms, and got everything sorted, and eventually we were free to go, and here we are in Zimbabwe.
After about an hour drive, we arrive in Victoria Falls town. We go to the park to see the falls. Wow! The falls were massive. There are numerous viewpoints to see the falls from different angles. These are some of the largest falls in the world and we’re definitely spectacular. At some view points there was so much mist that giant rainbows, sometimes even double rainbows appeared. Stunning.
After our day at the falls, we tried to go out to dinner. There was this amazing spot called Dusty’s township that we had read about. We get there and the place looks so cool… the decor is so good, totally funky spot with seating made out of a bathtub, flower pots made of shoes, and other decor that I could just as easily imagine seeing in a hip SF spot. The only problem was… they weren’t open for dinner for another hour. Normally, this wouldn’t matter as we could just wait, but we absolutely had to be back at the Botswana border by 8pm before it closed. So, we had to go elsewhere for dinner. We found a great place called Goat which served African food. We had warthog stew, and some other spicy meat dish. Despite being in Africa for almost 3 weeks, we had hardly eaten any African food at all. Most of the time we were either cooking ourselves at the campsites, or eating at the lodges which more or less just served game meats or westernized food. So it was nice to finally have some of the local cuisine.
But as is often the case while traveling, these things take a lot of time. As we ate, we nervously watched the clock. Finally, we knew we really needed to book it to get to the border on time. so we hastily paid, got to go boxes, and rushed out. Unfortunately, we’re not really sure how to get to the border. Verizon doesn’t wok in Zimbabwe, so we don’t have access to google maps. We had downloaded offline maps before the trip, but only to Namibia/Botswana… not Zimbabwe. the waiter gives us some vague directions and we’re off…. Sort of. Are we going the right way? It… doesn’t look right. We drive for a bit, before deciding this can’t be right, and flipping a uturn. We then make a left and are racing down a road, but still have no idea if we’re on the right track. We’re so low on precious time that we can’t stop for directions, and we can’t afford to be going the wrong way. I’m driving and Yana is desperately trying to look through our paper map to try to figure out where the hell we are. Finally, I see a sign towards some small random town that I recognize as being near Kasane. We’re on the right track! But… we’re also very late. So we are racing down the highway in the dark, yet again thinking of the whole “never drive in Africa at night” thing. A few times we have to dodge antelope darting across the road.
Finally we get to the border. It’s 10 minutes to 8. We rush in to the Zimbabwe border post. They look at us like, “what the fuck are you doing here”, but then process our documents. then they tell us you better hurry! Go go go, RUN!! Shit. We jump in the car and race to the Botswana side. It crosses our minds… what happens if the Botswana side is closed, and we’ve already left Zimbabwe. Do we have to spend the night in our car, straddling the border of two different countries? We screech into the Botswana border post and run inside. It’s 7:58. We frantically ask them to stamp our documents. There’s a lot of confusion about the car again, but when they realize our car is registered in Botswana, we finally get waived through. We look at the clock. 8pm on the dot. So fucking lucky. This last hour literally felt like an episode of “Amazing Race”.
We drive the last bit to Kasane, and finally go to bed for the last time on top of our car.
