Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe to Zambia to Johannesburg, South Africa (Sat. Sep 9)

This morning after 22 days, 5,750 km in our trusty truck/bus, several thousand pictures and many adventures, our Cape Town to Victoria Falls Tour is over this morning. “Happy Days” is the favourite expression of our Leader, Innocent, so it seemed appropriate to have that added to our custom t-shirts.

After an “unsettled” night, the antibiotics, Imodium and Gravol kicked in and I finally stopped the upchucking etc. However, I felt like a wet noodle.

We are transferring to Vic Falls International to head to Johannesburg today so I struggled to get my sorry butt out of the bed and get packed up. We said our goodbyes to our travel mates who we saw at the breakfast (carefully avoiding the smells of food which threatened to re-kindle the gag response). Some of them I enjoyed being with and with whom I will stay in touch. Some I’ll cheerfully forget.

Before heading to the airport, we had a stupid mission to accomplish this morning. For paperwork reasons I won’t get in to here, we had to go across the Zambian border this morning and back again. I was not in the mood for this bureaucracy but we had no choice. So off we went to the border crossing over the Zambezi River. This crossing was as chaotic as the Botswana/Zimbabwe one, with the added interest of wild baboons wandering around looking to steal food out of people’s luggage or pockets, and dozens of locals making their daily journey back and forth across the border to get to work. Many of the transports here, coming from Zambia, were flat beds with multiple moulded metal chunks which turned out to be copper. After crossing the border, they apparently joined an armed convoy for the trip down to Durban because of the expensive cargo making it a target. Sorry I didn’t get pictures of any of that. First of all, no pics allowed at the border, but I also wasn’t of clear enough mind.

After our business at the border was complete it was time to head for the airport for our uneventful trip to Johannesburg where I was scheduled to start my 5 day tour to Kruger at 5:30am tomorrow. I have cancelled that portion of my trip. I’m just not up to the travel.

I’m disappointed but at least I did see the Big 5 plus so much more already. And it’s an easy trip to just fly into Vic Falls, when the Falls are more full, and down to Kruger from there. Easy, but not cheap and involved the long flights to get here. So we’ll see.

We were safely transferred to our hotel, mercifully, a Holiday Inn. After 21 days of adventure, and not feeling myself, it was wonderful to be in familiar and comfortable surroundings. After checking in, we both immediately crashed. Nanci is here tonight and then she is heading home on an overnight flight. I’ve decided to hang out here and give myself a chance to recover completely before the long flights home, and besides it was going to be over $1000 to make the changes to leave earlier.

I’ll put together some final thoughts about this amazing adventure over the next couple of days. Despite the crappy ending (pun intended), it has been as much as I’d hoped and more.