Clive grew up as a farmer’s son in Zimbabwe, but he turned his vocation to tourism when his father had to sell the family farm. “Once Robert Mugabe came to power, the Zimbabwean dollar became more valuable as kindling for the fire than for actual currency,” he explains. The country currently uses the US dollar, and Clive uses his own thatched-roof home as a house for tourists when they come to Victoria Falls. He makes a profitable living doing so.
Initially, we hesitated making the effort to come here. It’s appallingly expensive to get here, for one, and it’s not cheap once you’re on the ground, either. Only a few airlines fly here, and they all come via Johannesburg, South Africa, which is, for us, an incredible distance from where we already were in East Africa. Going to the falls for the weekend from Ethiopia is like going from Washington, DC, to Caracas, Venezuela, for a little three-day foray.
But we have no idea if we’ll be back on the continent with our children; so we booked a flight and guesthouse. We can only be here four days. It’s all we can afford.
Clive’s house is Colonial-style Africa: thatched roof, wood beams, plastered walls, a bank of windows facing the backyard. Sleeping porches dot the upstairs veranda, and every room has ceiling fans. This is the largest kitchen in all the guesthouses we’ve had, and it includes a dining table for eight. The living room has one wall of books, the other wall a collection of local wines and coffee, free for us to sample. I already mourn our fleeting three-night stay.
We meander out to the backyard. “Hear that?” asks Clive. “That’s the falls. When the birds aren’t chirping, you can hear them from here. During the wet season, it’s so loud it rattles the windows.”
It’s a faint white noise; I barely noticed it until Clive pointed it out. But now, I can’t ignore it. It’s hard to fathom we’re this close to another one of the world’s natural wonders.
We have no time to waste, so Clive drives us to the falls the next morning. At the entrance to the Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park, a rhythmic song of continual rain reverberates as background music. Water mists our cheeks and shoulders, and the temperature is ten degrees cooler than at Clive’s house three miles away. We walk through the entrance, past the stands where waterproof ponchos are sold, and head downward to the trail.
The air radiates a cool, damp humidity and our legs are freckled with water; we tread gingerly to avoid slick puddles and sloping slants. The water pounds louder with every inch closer we step; it mimics a ba-bump, ba-bump heartbeat as the Zambezi River pulses over the edge, 355 feet down to the basin. We still can’t see it yet, but its rhythmic call is deafening.
Here I am, seeing Victoria Falls for the first time.
It begins as a simple mist in the air, like a stroll on a rain-drizzling day. But I look up, and there’s not a cloud in the sky. The sun penetrates its heat and light through baobab leaves, but it’s still sprinkling. If I were wearing glasses, like Tate is right now, I’d continually have to wipe off my lenses, fruitlessly, until they were finally pocketed as useless. Everyone remarks on the non sequitur of cloudless sky with the thundering boom, growing louder and louder as we wind down the slick walkway, closer. Then, a bend in the path, and I see them—the falls.
There’s nothing quite like standing on a part of the earth that feels like the edge of it. A gash in the planet’s skin has created an outpouring of water so big that it’s impossible to see when it lands—a swirling mix of clouds and fog, spray and foam. Kids scream with delight at the sight of it and the up-pour of water now in their hair and skin. I keep walking, gingerly. Parts of the path have guardrails, set back just enough to observe only the top of the falls, but there are many more parts of the path without a barrier. I inch slowly, slowly across the slippery stones and grip my offsprings’ hands as though their lives depend on it (because they do).
And so I am witness to the top of the falls, where the Zambezi performs its downward kamikaze into a boiling pot, the name given to the foreign pool at its base, still so difficult to reach that researchers disagree on its true depth.
The deeper I move toward the falls, the wetter I become, until I’m finally at the meat of it all, its widespread body open for witness, and I’m wholly doused. I wring out the hem of my shirt, though it’s pointless.
Kyle turns, says, “I’m gonna run back to the entrance and buy some ponchos.” They’re of no use by now, but without them we feel like unseasoned travelers. The kids laugh at the hilarity of looking as if we all jumped in a pool fully dressed. I cover myself with cheap yellow plastic and don’t look any less ridiculous.
The late Lord Curzon of Kedleston, viceroy of India at the turn of the twentieth century, once said about the falls, “Such is the density and fury of the spray-storm rising into the air like the smoke of some vast cauldron, that the spectator within 100 yards of the cataract can see nothing at all, and gets little beyond a drenching for his pains.”1
Our pains are happily drenched.
We keep walking the path around the falls and discover a white, gleaming statue of David Livingstone, a monument to his “discovery” of the falls. Locals had already named the falls Mosi-oa-Tunya—“The Smoke Which Thunders”—generations before, but the British explorer romanticized the notion of exploring deepest, darkest Africa and finding a suitable route from west to east. Bumping into the falls was his happy accident. The Zambian town on the other side of the falls is named Livingstone, and the original 1904 Victoria Falls Hotel on the Zimbabwe side pays homage to his imperial Victorian British era. Livingstone wasn’t exactly a savior to the land. He loved it—or so they say—but he brought with him disease and a prejudiced perspective of God-ordained domination. Nonetheless, he is revered around here, at least by the booming tourist industry.
Clive spoke of the falls this morning as if we would soon behold his religion. “There is something magical about them; I can’t explain it,” he said. “It’s the sound, the feel of the air, the sheer size of the falls compared to your body. I go there to meditate. I sit at one of the benches for hours at a time, just to think.”
Victoria Falls was fashioned over time, after millennia of erosion smoothed away stones and the earth shook forth its gashes. God carved out of the earth yet another home for magnificence, a hidden repository. It’s just water falling, but Victoria Falls is the waterfall. It is the ultimate drink of the earth, kowtowing in obedience to the curvature of dirt and rock.