I can hardly believe that we have been here for one month already! We are still awaiting our residency permit, so until that happens, we will have to leave the country every 30 days to renew our visas. Zimbabwe is nearly walking distance from our house (as are Zambia and Namibia), so that makes it easy to go there for a long weekend. This time we visited the town and national park of Victoria Falls, about one hour from where we live. The falls is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the Seven Wonders of the World. Even though it is dry season, it was still jaw-dropping! I have wanted to visit the falls for a good part of my life and feel very lucky to have been able to see such an amazing natural wonder. Now I can't wait to see it after rainy season - apparently it gets so misty that you cannot even see the falls themselves!
We also ventured around town a bit. For all the unrest going on in Zimbabwe right now, you would have never known it in Vic Falls. Because it is such a tourist attraction, they are trying to keep things as 'normal' as possible there. There is a very apparent lack of tourists though - the streets and hotels are weirdly deserted. I think they are 1) afraid, and some are 2) not wanting to support President Mugabe's policies. He is starving his own people. He will not allow them to have fuel. Nothing is available there. Every weekend, masses of Zimbabwe citizens pour into our little town in Botswana to stock up on food and fuel. Our shelves here are literally bare by Saturday afternoon. The locals in Vic Falls are positively desperate. You cannot walk 10 feet without being pestered and followed by hawkers selling wood carvings, begging to sell you one for even a dollar. We went to a craft market and were bombarded by vendors vying for our business. They are so desperate, that some even begged us to trade ANYTHING with them - shampoo, hand lotion, ball point pens, our shoes, even the socks on our feet. It was hard for me to leave there without bursting into tears. I wish that I could buy something from every single one of them to help them, but unfortunately that is just not possible.
We took a walk around the enormous, sprawling Victoria Falls Hotel, from the post Victorian days - a beautiful place. You can almost picture it in the days of yore - decadent outdoor garden parties with proper chaps smoking pipes and talking of their hunting kills. Finely dressed ladies with parasols, eating cucumber sandwiches and sipping tea. A gorgeous place, but seems weirdly out of place given the current political climate.
Monday rolled around and it was back to work today. Spent literally all day picking teeny, tiny little worms from a necropsied mongooses' stomach contents. Ah yes, back to the grind…
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