So, Zimbabwe. I’ve already misled you - I was in Zimbabwe for all of 30 minutes, but it sounds much more intense to say I trucked off to Zimbabwe for a week than Zambia - Zambia, don’t you know that relative peace and (sort of) prosperity is uncool! Even though Zambia isn’t nearly as Bad A as its run-into-the-ground-by-a-terrible-dictator neighbor, I had the most amazing trip of my young life. I use a lot of superlatives in everyday speech because I think a lot of things are the coolest or a lot of days are the best of my life, but this week was the most awesome thing I’ve ever done. My friend Hannah and I were daladala-ing home from the orphanage Monday evening and she mentioned that she’d like to see Victoria Falls someday. 20 hours later, after picking up Elizabeth and moving into our new rooms (they finally got this worked out - I am in the same room, two floors up) and checking visa requirements ($25, said that lying piece of you know website) on the internet, we were sitting in the train station and congratulating ourselves for how well things had worked out thus far considering our utter failure to plan one single thing. They boarded the train (on time, surprisingly) and everyone rushed to their cars. Tanzanian women don‘t play around. Mom, you need to learn how to do this with your suitcase so you can fit in when you come here:
We hopped into our compartment, noted its cleanliness, and were delighted to find a seemingly nice, mild-mannered Zambian woman who was to be our roommate for the 43-hour journey. She sat in a mound of shopping bags stuffed with cheap Tanzanian goods that she was smuggling across the border so she could jack up the prices and extort the Zambian public, but her maternal smile put me at ease. First impressions are deceiving. She was not nice. She was not mild-mannered. She was not maternal. I am shaking my head violently right now. No no no. Children, cover your ears: this woman was a heinous bia. Throughout the course of our journey, I came to realize that she was nothing good at all, just karma for every terrible thing I’ve done manifesting itself in the form of a pushy, bosomy Zambian.
We took some obligatory we're on trains! pictures and then staked out spots and happily settled into our reading material. Here is a little fact about me: I am very content to just sit and be transported. I love riding airplanes, buses, trains, cars, whatever. I don’t get bored, I don’t need to play cards or be actively engaged all the time. Sometimes I like to just sit. When I’m traveling across the continent and have the opportunity to see exotic terrain, I like to sit next to the window, but that a-hole Zambian lady immediately started squawking at me for stealing “her” seat, never mind the fact that she, in her own words, makes this journey 6 times a year. Whatever, that’s okay, I’m not picky and I was going to do nothing anyways, just in a different spot. Three hours passed without event. Around dinnertime the three of us left for the dinner car, taking all of our belongings with us so she wouldn’t feel obligated to watch our stuff, and when we got back 45 minutes later she started barking at us for holding her up and not watching her stuff so she could go to her friend’s compartment. She’s a little temperamental, also okay. She left to go talk with her friend, probably about being a terrible person, and we were exhausted so we went to bed around 9 pm. I was abruptly awakened when she forcefully flung open the door and flicked on the light at 11 pm. Fine, the old bat needs to get her bearings. She proceeded to hang her girdle from the ceiling, about six inches from my face, and be as loud as possible before finally turning the lights off and going to bed. I fell asleep. I woke up, to lights again, at midnight. She was lumbering around the room, braying like a donkey about being cold (it was hot) and I watched her shake Elizabeth awake so that Elizabeth could close the window for her. Elizabeth did this. She turned off the lights. We went to sleep. At 1 I woke, lights on, to her screaming at the attendants outside the door to run and get her more blankets. Lights off. I fell asleep. At 2 I woke because many people were screaming right next to my head. I will give you sixteen guesses to figure out what was happening. That’s how many it took me.
Whatever you guessed, you are wrong. Our a-hole roommate was bargaining for rice out the window of our compartment. At 2 am. She was shouting prices and slamming her meaty fists on the table with each price named, to prove that she was mean and terrible, I think, and village women were yelling back, and I was just so, so sad. The banshees were going at it for an hour and a half, and I was not sleeping for an hour and a half, and finally she swindled them out of, like, 50% of their annual income, and laid down with a satisfied I-just-ruined-some-lives smile on her face. And we slept. Until 5, when she was up and bumping into things. I hate this woman. Here is a picture of Hannah hating this woman:
Wednesday we napped while she went to her friend’s car to discuss ruining our lives, and when she came back around dinnertime we simply moved our things to the drinks car and refused to deal with her. That was a great plan, I thought, especially when a darling 5-ish year old boy came and sat by me. His dad was drinking with his buddies at a table nearby, and the car was relatively full of men enjoying nightcaps. We were sort of but not really conversing in Swahili - I can barely understand it when real people speak Swahili, a tiny person version is out of the question - but all of a sudden he grabbed my boob and said Maziwa, maziwa! Milk, milk! And that got everyone’s attention. All the men were laughing really loudly, and I do not know what was happening exactly, except that it was very awkward and lasted a very long time. Here is that tiny person scrunching my face up so that I have a lot of chins. Isn’t he precious?
Border patrol came around shortly before we crossed the Zambian border Thursday morning and, having checked the $25 visa fee for American citizens, we handed him everything without a second thought. Mmm, wrong. The Zambian visa for American citizens is $100 USD. And we….did not have that. They were telling us they had to kick us off the train and throw us into the bush and whatnot, and Hannah was pleading with them, and it was a huge ordeal until we eventually ironed out a deal. We gave them $187 + the equivalent of $13 in Zambian kwacha (+ some bribe money, because this is Africa), they gave Hannah and I visas and handed Elizabeth deportation papers with the understanding that she had to get a visa in the next two days. It wasn’t such a big deal in the end, except that that is a lot of money, and the transaction wiped us clean of all our USD and all our kwacha. When we finally pulled into the train station at New Kapiri around noon, we had to walk downtown (no money for taxis, haha), withdraw kwacha from the ATM and then, in what was the most painful experience of my life, BUY American dollars at terrible exchange rates. I love exchange rates. I take full advantage of them when I convert dollars into Tanzanian shillings, but it’s a horrible thing to suffer the other way around. I BOUGHT my OWN money. I’m still very sad about this, especially since we’d have to buy more dollars to get back into Tanzania, since this country knows nothing of efficiency (for better or worse, in my opinion) and after two months still hasn’t processed our residence permits.
Anyways, we’d arrived in Kapiri more or less no worse for the wear, and had to bus our way to Lusaka and then on to Livingstone. The bus ride to Lusaka was supposed to take two hours. It took six. As with most things in Africa, I do not know why. The bus kept stopping for whatever reason and they kept making me get off the bus for whatever reason. The driver would yell at me and point at the door (this is in Bemba, which I don’t even sort of speak) and I would climb over people and stand just outside the bus while no one else moved. The driver would do nothing, the assistant would do nothing, no one would do anything. Then after three minutes they would say Okay! And let me climb back on the bus. This happened at least three times. Again, I haven’t a clue. We got to Lusaka around dusk, and a really nice lady let us stay in “the executive cottage” for a 40% reduced rate since it was all we had to spare. We made it to the bus station the next morning with little trouble and met some really friendly ticket guys. “You want baby? I can get you one. No, don’t be scared! I have a Bemba woman at home.”
This bus ride was a lot nicer. We had seats up front, and even though a tiny African baby kept scissor kicking my head through the seat cracks, they played the entire Backstreet Boys collection, on repeat, for all six hours of the trip. Dad, you would have been in heaven. That being said, the trip was a pleasant surprise, and our hostel added to our glee. Jolly Boys, as we found out later, was founded by “two queers” (political correctness is a purely American invention, I am sure of it), and is wonderful considering it’s only $8 per bed. It was clean and pretty and the staff was really friendly. And they had a really cool reading den:
Saturday morning we took our time, and hit the falls around 11am. It’s dry season so it’s not very green right now and instead of a mile of falls, it only pours in a few places. Still, it was beautiful and I don't want to sell it short. We hiked down to the bottom (Boiling Pot):
And then up around the top:
And I will explain my good friend Hannah to you later, but this Gator flag was obviously not my idea:
Then walked over to the Zimbabwean side about 300 meters, hit the Welcome to Zimbabwe sign, and turned around. $30 visas are too expensive sometimes.
We got back to Jolly Boys that night and I became obsessed with a flyer I’d found for what I thought was a ropes course over the gorge, basically. We signed up for the next day, and it was better than I could have imagined. We paid for a full day including breakfast, lunch, and free drinks. They picked us up at Jolly Boys at 8:30 in the morning and soon Hannah had rappelled to the bottom of a cliff and I was harnessed at the top trying to talk the assistants into letting me stay at the top. As with most everything else, I did it, I just needed some coaxing. After that we couldn’t get enough. I did the flying squirrel:
And then Hannah and I did the gorge swing tandem:
Before we did the gorge swing tandem, Hannah shotgunned one of the free beers. Her first words once we got to the bottom, "Wow, I think I can feel that beer!" Yeah, I bet she could, because if you watch the video you'll notice Hannah start counting down AFTER we began the freefall. Nevertheless, I was the happiest I've ever been, even though after 10 minutes of being instructed to KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN YOU WILL GET WHIPLASH KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN YOU WILL GET WHIPLASH the first thing I did as I felt myself fall was pop my head up and look around. You can kind of see my head jerk back at the bottom if you zoom in and squint, and my neck was sore for days. But it was absolutely worth it.
And this was just the kick off for what turned out to be an unimaginably absurd day, but we met some Peace Corps boys who have the night off tonight, so we're going out for dinner and dancing so I'll have to continue tomorrow. Problematically, the water in my dorm shut off yesterday evening and I have been unable to shower since...drumroll... Monday night! But Africa is a land of resourcefulness, and we'll...see what I come up with?
