Our South Africa and Victoria Falls Trip

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Introduction

I do not remember exactly when Avi checked his calendar and gave me a green signal to go ahead and plan for a South Africa and Victoria Falls trip in December 2010. I rather think it was in September.

I immediately shelved all my projects and started working on the tour. After all, I had dreamt of visiting South Africa and Victoria Falls ever since I had read Agatha Christie’s mystery novel ‘The Man in the Brown Suit’ in my teens. (Let me be honest. I had also dreamt of meeting a brave romantic hero in a brown suit, who would rescue me from the hippos of Limpopo, crocodiles of Nile and tigers of Kruger. Silly me! Only much later I came to know that there are NO tigers in the Kruger National Park or anywhere else in Africa for that matter, but it is inhabited by lions and leopards and cheetahs.)

Africa is a fascinating land. Its gold and diamond mines, its fierce tribes, fiercer Afrikaners and ferocious animals, its ‘bush’ and velvety ‘veldt’, its croc-infested rivers and lion-festooned ‘kopjes’, the Karoo and the Big Hole, its ‘The Smoke that Thunders’ and the royal Blue Train, its Big Apes and tiny Pygmy humans -- everything is grist to the mill of the fertile imaginations of the Authors, who have churned out umpteen classics and novels with an African background.

From H. Rider Haggard to Hemingway, from Agatha Christie to Sydney Sheldon, from Edgar Rice Burroughs to Wilbur Smith, the author-list reads like ‘who is who’ of the literary world.

And they all have portrayed only small facets of this big, beautiful, brilliant diamond that is Africa. It is too huge to be seen in its entirety.

As soon as I started to prepare for the trip, I ran into difficulties. The wild animals did not worry me much but I was scared of being mugged/robbed/murdered. After all, South Africa is notorious for having the second HIGHEST crime rate in the world, surpassed only by Columbia.

All the same, I kept at it and with the help of a travel agent from Cape Town, planned a beautifully tailored trip where we would only do what we wanted and NOT visit silly casinos, fake gold-mines or bone-rattling roller-coasters.

I prepared well but we embarked on this trip with trepidation. The murder of ‘Annie Dewani’ in Cape Town just before this trip did not help the matters either, especially since I read that she was murdered for a measly sum of 6000 Rands.

That was exactly the amount I had converted from the Indian currency and had given to Avi for the expenses of this trip.

Anyway, we DID go to South Africa and Zimbabwe and saw everything that we wanted to see and came back safe and sound (though much poorer in the pocket) and I am immensely happy about it all.

And I want to tell you about it.

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