Dr. Livingstone, I presume?

I am writing from the sky. We are flying from the Kasane Airport in Botswana to the Baines' Camp landing strip in the bush. Appropriately, we're flying on a bush plane.

The plane seats twelve passengers, a pilot, and a co-pilot; right now there are nine people on board including our solo pilot. We're stopping twice before we arrive at Baines' to pick up and drop off other passengers.

We spent the last two nights at the Stanley & Livingstone hotel at Victoria Falls, in Zimbabwe. The hotel was beautiful. It's a few miles outside the small town that's populated mostly by Zimbabweans who work in the tourist industry at the Falls. It has only 16 rooms, 8 of which were occupied while we were there.

Yesterday morning we met Abiat (our guide for the Zim leg of our trip) outside the main lodge. We boarded a small bus and headed for town, where we stopped outside the Shearwater activities office. There, we got on another small bus and drove around town to the other hotels, collecting tourists. We were going to ride elephants.

Just so you know, I had reserved my grandmother as my elephant riding partner since the day I realized such a ridiculous activity might be possible. My grandma seemed as excited as the rest of us about the idea, and it was settled. Allison rode with her dad, my mom rode with hers, and I went with Grandma.

We climbed onto our elephant from a platform and sat behind out guide, Wellington. Our elephant's name was Doma--he had been named after the river where he'd been found. He was 31 years old and had been orphaned during the 1982 floods, like all the elephants owned by the company. Wellington told us that it can take up to four years to train an elephant to allow people to ride on its back, and I think I understand why. Although the experience was unlike any other, it felt pretty unnatural to be perched on top of an elephant. It was weird, but how often to you get to ride an elephant with your grandma?

Once on top of Doma, we rode around the property for a while. On our mini, elephant-back safari we saw warthogs, sable antelope, waterbucks, kudu, and the carcass of another antelope that had been eaten by lions the day before. Tasty.

When our ride was over was took some pictures and "interacted" with the elephants, which basically meant we poured deed into their trunks and they put it in their mouths and we said "Oooh, wow!" Then, the staff served us breakfast. They had cooked it over a fire while we were gone. There were eggs, potatoes, tomatoes and onions, and toast. It was the best breakfast we've had yet (although the only competition is the airplane cuisine and the Joberg hotel buffet).

When the elephant extravaganza was over, we went back to the office. Abiat met us with the bus and we headed to Victoria Falls. We spent two hours walking around the park and admiring the Falls, which is one of the seven natural wonders of the world. Admission was about 15$ USD; or 400 Billion Zim dollars. I'm sure it's more today.

It was pretty wonderful. The Zambezi river pours over hundreds of feet of rock and tumbles into basins below. The depths of the basins were determined by where the nearby volcano decided to throw its rocks thousands of years ago. It was beautiful and threatening all at once. The Falls extend into Zambia, but most of the water falls in Zim. During the height of the dry season, visitors to the Zambia side see little (if any) water.

In the park there is a statue of Dr. Livingstone, the British explorer who explored what is now Zim and other areas of Africa in the name of his monarch, Queen Victoria. According to Abiat, he originally intended to bring God to the natives, but then he discovered the wealth of mineral deposits in the area and religion took a backseat to his campaign for commercial empire.

He renamed the falls after the Queen (they were originally called Mosi-oa-Tunya) and set out to explore the region. Eventually he caught malaria in Botswana. When it became clear he was dying, he instructed the two African men with whom he was traveling to bury his heart in Africa but repatriate his body to England. Soon enough he died, and his travel companions removed his heart. Then they tied his body to a tree, where it dried out. Then they carried it for 8 weeks and over a thousand miles. Eventually Livingstone's body made it back to Britain, where it was buried in Westminster Abbey.

There's your history lesson for today. I'm not sure how much of it is actually true, but it's what the Victoria Falls tourist industry holds as fact.

***

I know my exposure to life in Zim was limited, but I was surprised by the candidness expressed by the few Zimbabweans I did talk to about the "current situation." Television channels and radio stations frequently featured news and opinions about Mugabe and the world's reactions to him. People were quick to cite "the current situation in Zimbabwe" as the explanation for shortages, hunger, etc. Inflation was obvious and immense: like I said before, admission to the Falls cost 400 Billion Zim Dollars; gas prices couldn't fit on the stations' signs. People don't bank any more because in the amount of time one spends waiting in line, the money they want to deposit devalues tenfold. No one will accept Zim currency from anyone who's not Zimbabwean, and the American dollar goes a long, long way.

I think I prepared for more veneration (albeit forced) of Mugabe. I think I was expecting people to constantly talk about him, but I never heard his name mentioned by a Zimbabwean, not once. I would have expected to see some posters and billboards with his photo and some kind of slogan about how he's working for Zim, but the only photo I saw of him was in the immigration office we stopped at before crossing into Botswana.

I was surprised by how many Zimbabwean guests were at the Stanley & Livingstone before or while we were there. There's obviously a class that's less affected by "the current situation" than the majority. Did you know 70% of Zimbabweans live in rural areas? Those are the people who are hungry and most affected by this crisis--not those Zimbabweans who signed the Stanley & Livingstone guestbook before us.

More later. We're close to landing at Baines' camp. I just saw a heard of elephants and a giraffe out the window!

-Em

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