Botswana is done and dusted, it was a sea of calm in the storm I've come to accept Africa is. The elephant incident aside that is! So from Maun we made our way to Zambia. 2 local busses, a ferry border crossing and an expensive as hell taxi ride later. We arrived in Livingstone, Zambia feeling pretty exhausted having watched the football the night before, getting 3 hours sleep then our mammoth journey. Livingstone is actually apretty cool place, totally livable. The mighty Victoria Falls was truly spectacular, thats theonly work I could think of to describe it and that doesn't even come close. We viewed the falls from the walks within the national park and got ridiculously saturated walking across a rickety bridge to view from a different area. I also almost entered Zimbabwe, there's a bridge between the 2 countries that you can walk across to the view the falls and as long as you don't actually enter Zim, you don't have to pay the $50 USD visa fee. Cos quite frankly, Mugabe has enough money. We also did a helicopter flight around the falls which was enjoyable despite my crazy hangover. Think 12 hours with my head over the toilet and somehow I managed to pull myself together for the flight. Straight after, the head was back over the toilet though I'm afraid.
Then came the rafting. I'm still not sure what possessed me to do it. I'm the biggest fraidy cat in the world. Because the water's so high we couldn't do the whole day of rafting which was just as well. Its a 45 minute hike down a cliff face just to get to the river. Needless to say my quads are destroyed. So we get into the boat and as part of the safety demo we all have to jump in the river to each practice a rescue. The water's freezing. We then start going down the river and on the first, yes thats right the first rapid our raft capsizes. The 8 of us are in the drink in the middle of the rapid. I felt like I was drowning cos I had water up my nose, in the throat and I couldn't catch my breathe. Wemade it back in the raft but not after I had bruised my hand, arm, both legs and bum. Not a happy chappy. Luckily we didn't flip again but we did lose a few people on the way, but goodthing the spotters in canoes are good at their jobs and got them back on the raft in a reasonable amount of time. I found out after that a few people die every year doing what i did. Thank f-u-c-k I didn't hear that before or I would've stayed on the bank. But I survived, I'd never do it again but I did it and it was actually pretty cool, flipping and almost drowning aside.
So now I sit on Zanzibar island, off the coast of Tanzania, truly paradise. The sand is powder white, the water is crystal clear and the beer is icy cold. After all the cold weather in southern Africa, its awesome to be somewhere thats a bit more like home. The sunshine is delicious! Well my dinner just arrived, Zanzibar beef curry, so I'd best be off to eat. Love, Love, Love!
