From Victoria Falls to the Skeleton Coast – Day 1: Soaking shoes in Victoria Falls

My flight from Nairobi to Victoria Falls was a bit chaotic. Since transiting in Addis Ababa was twice as cheap as flying directly, I decided to take up Ethiopian Airlines on its offer of a free room in an airport hotel and continue to Victoria Falls the following morning. Unhelpfully, the Ethiopian Airlines website does not have a proper explanation of how this arrangement works, so I started getting a little nervous when I got to my gate at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport without receiving any information on how to get my hotel voucher. I was doubly perplexed when I found out that my friend Wei, with whom I was travelling, had already received her voucher by email.

The lady at the gate in Nairobi told me that she had not yet received hotel vouchers for the people on my flight, and this did not change when I checked in with her again just before the plane departed. Just to make a point to myself of not giving up, I also asked the flight attendants, who promised to get back to me but never did. Fortunately, once we got to Addis Ababa, Wei remembered she needed to use the bathroom right by the help desk, where I proceeded to have both my voucher and my physical boarding pass printed.

Much to my surprise, the hotel was not at the airport itself: we were ushered through immigration using our hotel vouchers in lieu of transit visas. This was where Wei found out the hard way that she had to have a physical copy of both her boarding pass and the hotel voucher, and she was sent back to the help desk where I had just been given mine. After about half an hour’s delay, we finally made it out of the airport and found the van to our hotel. It was not the hotel broadly advertised on the pages of Ethiopian Airlines. I imagine that the main one must have been overbooked, and that the one we were sent to was a partnering business.

We slept around seven hours before returning to the airport by hotel shuttle. The security check at the gate took almost half an hour, and with everything else taking quite long due to the sheer number of people, we only arrived at our gate about twenty minutes before boarding. I was impressed by how many flights were constantly streaming out of the airport. Looking at the destinations of Ethiopian Airlines on the plane, I saw it covered almost every country in sub-Saharan Africa as well as a vast array of destinations outside it.

About fifteen minutes before landing, the pilot announced that the Victoria Falls were clearly visible on the left. Since we were seated on the right, we rushed behind the toilets to the little window of the emergency door and just managed to catch a view of the waterfalls and the grey plume of vapour above them. I have read that in the wet season, the falls can be heard – and that the mist above them can be seen – from miles away. Nowadays, the first part of this sentence is true with some exceptions, as tourist planes and helicopters often drown out the sound of the waterfalls even at a short distance.

We had to queue at immigration for a good half an hour, during which I caught up on my correspondence and a few tasks. The system must have been quite overwhelmed by our arrival, as our plane with nine seats per row was by far the biggest at the little airport. From the airport, we caught a taxi to our hotel where we dropped off our things before continuing to the falls. The driver told us it was winter and thus the most pleasant season in the area, while the wet season in Victoria Falls is hot and teeming with insects. In fact, our hotel was the first place I ever found an anti-bug lotion along with the usual array of free cosmetics.

The falls were just a fifteen-minute walk from our hotel, and we spent about two hours walking opposite them on the Zimbabwean side. I was impressed by their sheer scale. There are over a dozen viewpoints from the Zimbabwean side, each with a completely different perspective of the sprawling waterfalls. Due to the wind and mist, some of the viewpoints barely merited the name viewpoint at all, while others offered breathtaking views in several directions. Perspicaciously, Wei decided to rent a raincoat, while I foolhardily decided to rough it without one. In the end, it was not my hair, camera or jacket that suffered but my shoes, which got thoroughly soaked. I spent the rest of the day worrying about how to get them dry, but at Wei’s suggestion I managed to procure a hairdryer from the hotel.