Like a Hundred Million Hotdogs

Today I am in Lusaka after almost two weeks on the road. I got here via Botswana and Victoria Falls (sadly, the Zambian side only, I opted against a brief foray into Zimbabwe as a gift to you, mom) and tomorrow I start making my way into Malawi.

Northern Botswana is every image you have in your head about Africa, all distilled into one half of one country. Its full of huge expanses of bush and forests, crap roads, occasional small towns that are nothing much more than a couple of gas stations and a lady selling oranges, and rich tourists flying into remote $600 a night bush lodges on chartered planes to enjoy personal butlers and the chance to shoot/photograph something. Elephants, ostriches, giraffe, and all sorts of other animals wander the highways. A truck driver showed me the massive dent a buffalo made in the passenger-door one morning at 5am, a security guard at a campsite/lodge in the middle of nowhere (that I accessed by foot and not charter plane, by the way) told me stories of having to chase elephants out of the swimming pool with nothing more than a strobing flashlight (apparently elephants hate strobes, they run away from them instantly. So should you ever find yourself in the bush facing down an elephant... you're welcome.) I personally saw the ostriches and a giraffe just hanging out by the side of the road, not all that interested in the busload full of pointing Batswana -- and me.
Baobab trees also line the roads, and there's something really amazing and beautiful about those trees. I can't explain it, but there's a reason that they carry with them such a strong image of "the real Africa" (for whatever that phrase is worth) and are so iconic in so many people's imagination. They are, of course, enormous. As tall as a 3 or 4 story building, as big around as many houses I've seen, but their is also something vaguely silly about them. They're upside down trees, with their roots reaching up and who knows what going into the ground. But they are beautiful, and preposessing in a regal sort of way. They are old, old trees, that have seen a lot come and go over the centuries. If none of it bothered them, its hard to see a reason for you to get upset about what happened just an hour ago.

After Botswana I made my way into Zambia, across one of the tiniest borders in the world. The Botswana/Zambia border consists of about 25 feet of the Zambezi river, across which ferries that can hold all of 3 trucks and 40 people chug back and forth continually. Why the can't just build a bridge is a mystery to me -- the river can't be more than 30 feet across, and the lines of semis waiting for their turn on the ferry stretches at least the equivelant in miles -- but all the same, if you're on foot its pretty fun to cross borders on a ferry.
Crossing from Botswana to Zambia reminds me, in retrospect, of the crossing from South Africa into Mozambique -- calm to chaos, logic (as far as these things go) to anarchy. There is no line in the Zambian customs office (as much as there's ever a line anywhere in southern Africa) just a bunch of people shoving passports and 'temporary documents' at the customs officer, who stamped everything in site without much concern for the huge hordes of people, or the actual identity or nationality of the paper in front of him.
From the border I caught a public taxi with a driver who had decided to hang the days catch outside the window, and then drive at what couldn't have been over 70k/hour the whole 60k to Livingstone and so everything I own now reeks of dead Zambezi fish. On the plus side, he did drop me off exactly at the front door of where I was going -- after consulting 3 police officers, two other passengers, 5 ladies selling more dead fish at an open air market, and the guy who kept telling him he knew the exact address not once.

So, finally the next day I made it to Victoria Falls. Which is outstanding. I don't really have the words to describe it, its just the biggest thing you've ever seen, a cliff hundreds of feet long and that drops down sheer hundreds of feet down. Kayakers paddling around below you look like toys, and as the water falls over the cliff it hits with an unbelievable impact that -- in the rainy season -- can throw up plumes that can be seen as far as 2k away. I was reminded, watching the falls smash into the gorge below (and that is the word, the water falls so far that it literally smashes into the river underneath it) of nothing more than a sack of cement hitting the ground from 20 feet up, and throwing up dust all around it. And thats all water. Victoria Falls was originally known as Mosi Oa Tunya, the smoke that thunders, before Livingstone re-christened it, and the water is thrown up so far it looks like smoke, and hits so hard you can only be reminded of thunder. In the words of Eddie Izzard, we're going to have to take 'awesome' back (from who? from people like me, most of the time, unfortunately) because you can't just say that Victoria Falls, Mosi oa Tunya, is really really cool. It's awesome, in the original sense of the word.