Barnabas Mabhikwa picked me up the next morning in a white van owned by his employer, Abercrombie & Kent. He grinned with anticipation, as if he couldn’t wait to see Victoria Falls again. And by the time we reached the parking lot outside the entrance, I had caught the infection. This truly must be a remarkable place if even the guides get worked up about it.
Mabhikwa had been peppering me with statistics during our drive to the falls, but they sounded rather unimpressive. The falls cover an area about a mile wide, suddenly turning the mild Zambezi River into a torrent that plunges more than 340 feet, whereupon the river foams through a narrow gorge. Many waterfalls around the world drop considerably farther than that. The 35,400 cubic feet of water tumbling over the edge every second hardly matches Niagara’s 212,200.
And then, after a short walk into a rain forest perpetuated by Victoria Falls’ mist, I could understand. The dazzling sweep of it, the vibrating, heaving power of it, jolts the senses.
Mabhikwa led me to a statue of David Livingstone, the Scottish missionary/explorer who in 1855 first sent word to Britain about this African marvel. “I presume he stood over there on that island,” Mabhikwa said, pointing toward Livingstone Island, a green chunk of Zambian basalt still holding its own against the rushing water.
I had not arrived at an ideal time. Hot African summer (our late fall) was turning up the burners, and seasonal drought left some rocks dry. “But then if you were here in April or May, when it’s most wet,” Mabhikwa consoled, “there would be so much mist that you would not see anything. Your pictures would be no good.”
The David Livingstone statue towered above us, staring eastward over the raging Zambezi as it plummeted into its own mists, tossing off rainbows like pastel fireworks before taking a hard left toward its eventual meeting with the Indian Ocean.
Livingstone had tromped all over southern Africa, searching for the ultimate source of the Nile (not finding it here), fighting slavery and rapacious European colonizers and working to see that native tribes received a fair Christian shake from the white man. He was a hard-headed realist who suffered many setbacks, but when he came upon the falls and named them Victoria to honor the queen, his emotions overflowed.
“On sights as beautiful as this Angels in their flight must have gazed,” he reported to the folks back home.
Piper Cubs and Cessnas soared above our heads that day, so tourists in their flight might gaze. But the wails of trumpeter hornbills, the screeching of monkeys and the roaring cascades all nicely drowned out the engine noise. Mabhikwa and I hiked through a light drizzle along a path that affords views from different angles.
The geographical features, shaped over millions of years by volcanoes, continental shifts, flood, silting and erosion, have names: Cataract Island, Main Falls, Livingstone Island, Horseshoe Falls, Rainbow Falls, Eastern Cataract.
We stayed on the slippery path, obeying all the warning signs. We paused at little cul-de-sacs, each one serving up another postcard. At trail’s end, we reached Danger Point, a tiny nodule of land that allowed us to peer into the depths of the gorge from a smoothly treacherous spot mere inches from the edge.
Below us, we could pick out bobbing red specks — the rafts of whitewater junkies who come from all over the world to hurtle through rapids with heart-stopping labels: “Overland Truck Eater,” “Pearly Gates,” “The Terminator”…
Looking southeast, we could witness bungee-jumpers flailing and screaming as they leapt (or were pushed) off the Zambezi Bridge, attached to a cord that would stretch to 350 feet and no more. Somewhere out there, although I couldn’t see them, people were strapping on hang-glider wings or beating at the roiling gorge with kayak and canoe paddles.
There at Danger Point, I could sense a spray of adrenalin mixing with the rain forest dew. These risk-takers were the sort of tourists I rarely run into, the kind who consider natural splendor a personal dare.
In that sense, at least, Victoria Falls no longer felt like a travel-agent set piece.
———-
For more information about Victoria Falls and other Zimbabwe attractions, contact the Zimbabwe Tourist Board, 1270 Avenue of the Americas, Suite 2315, New York, N.Y. 10020; 212-332-1090.
![An extra-alarm fire destroyed a home and damaged two others on the near West side Wednesday night, though fire officials said no one was injured in the blaze. The fire broke out around 8:30 p.m. on the 1300 block of West 16th Street in the Pilsen neighborhood, according to a social media update from the Chicago Fire Department. Officials quickly upgraded the blaze to a 2-11 fire. Neighbors who clustered around the scene Wednesday night said the home had been under construction and appeared to be vacant. Although the fire was declared struck out at 9:30 p.m. in a social […]](https://www.chicagotribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/ctc-l-structure-fire-041724-06.jpg?w=525 "An extra-alarm fire destroyed a home and damaged two others on the near West side Wednesday night, though fire officials said no one was injured in the blaze. The fire broke out around 8:30 p.m. on the 1300 block of West 16th Street in the Pilsen neighborhood, according to a social media update from the Chicago Fire Department. Officials quickly upgraded the blaze to a 2-11 fire. Neighbors who clustered around the scene Wednesday night said the home had been under construction and appeared to be vacant. Although the fire was declared struck out at 9:30 p.m. in a social […]")
