$40 gets us to the Bridge and across to Zambia in no time at all. Probably because there are so few tourists, but anyway a welcome change from the hours spent in a queue in the old days. The cocky baboons are still patrolling the boarder post though, looking for open car windows and unguarded food.
We reach Maramba Lodge, a few kms down the road on a weed- choked tributary of the Zambezi. It's a very cheerful collection of thatched cottages in yellow and purple and luxury tents under acacia and mopane trees alive with birds and birdsong (mostly Toppies, the birds we used to shoot with our pellet guns as kids - tut, tut). Very soothing, anyway.'j
The trouble is that everything on the Zambian side of the Falls is scattered and you need to take taxis everywhere at a fixed rate of 5000 Kwacha ($10).
We taxi into Livingstone which is not the neat colonial former capital that I was expecting but instead a shabby charmless place with an unmemorable market (where have all the quality giraffe carvings, Illala palm baskets and malachite jewelry gone?).
In the local newspaper there is a headline about a riot at a Zambian mine in which local miners, angry about not being paid the new minimum wage, rampaged through the mine and killed 1 Chinese manager (by running him over with an ore trolley) and injured 2 others. This is the same Chinese-owned mine where 2 years a ago Chinese managers shot and wounded 17 mineworkers. The Chinese are everywhere in Africa and trouble is brewing.
Never mind,when you can sit at The Royal Livingstone Hotel,a 5 star affair on the Zambezi right above the Falls. Gin and tonic for me and Pims and lemonade for Sally on the sun deck with the sun setting over the Zambezi and the roar and smoke of the Falls just downriver.
Back at the Maramba Lodge I walk back to join Sally at our rondavel after dinner and almost walk into a huge hippo cropping the lawn 10 metres from our door. We fall asleep to the sound of him ripping and tearing at the grass. Zambezi lawnmower. .
We book a early morning walking safari in the Mosi Oya Tunya National Park. Small, no lions or hyenas and squeezed between the Zambezi and Livingstone town. We are 2 Germans,3 Americans and armed local game scout and Mukwesa, a local tour guide - , charming, dazzling white teeth and extremely knowledgeable about the bush. We walk in single file through the riverine scrub and forest and stop to examine animal s*** on a regular basis. Sally loves this and can barely be restrained from rummaging by hand through steaming dung. We learn that impala s*** together in middens to mark their territories and so do rhinos; hippos males scatter their dung to show who is boss; giraffes can be sexed by their droppings because the males who are more relaxed than the females dont squeeze their sphincters so hard. No honestly. Fascinating stuff , s***. We learned to identify animal spoor (rhino and hippo have very similar tracks but rhinos have 4 toes and hippos 3) and we got surprisingly close to giraffe,zebra and even buffalo. And we walked right up to 3 white rhinos looking like they had been shot but were in fact sleeping. We found them by the traditional African method of calling another game scout by mobile phone. There are 8 white rhinos in the park, reintroduced from South Africa. Like almost all of Africa's rhinos they are under 24 hour guard which is a bit depressing but understandable considering that the current price for a kilo of rhino horn is about $60,000 according to Mukwesa. So an entire horn could fetch $250,000. I don't like the chances for survival of any rhinos in the wild in a few years time.
Anyway, a really outstanding bush walk - one of the best we have done.
In the evening we finally get to see The Falls. I think they are most impressive at this time of the year because they are so low and you can see them much more clearly because there is a lot less spray. And Zambia definitely has the best view.
In no time at all Sally had befriended some ladies from Lusaka and was cuddling their babies who went from papooses on their backs to Sally arms in a flash. The ladies hooted with delight and I became the souvenir photographer for all and sundry. If a prerequisite for politics is an ability to clutch babies and smile for the cameras then Sally is a shoo-in for next PM.
There was better to come. We found a local fellow in a Bob Marley shirt called Derek who took us slightly upstream and across slippery rocks right to the very edge of the Falls. And I mean right to the very edge. It would be no exaggeration to say that a stumble would have seen us go straight over the Falls and eventually end up in the Indian Ocean off Mozambique. As it happens we didn't and i'm here to tell you the story. I don't think I have ever seen a more heart-stopping view.