If waterfalls were wrestling pay per views, Victoria Falls would be the grandaddy of them all – Wrestlemania. I think Iguazu Falls would be Summerslam and Niagara Falls would probably be Royal Rumble. Basically, it’s the best of them all. Nested on the border of Zimbabwe and Zambia, Victoria Falls is classified as the largest waterfall in the world and one of the many things about Africa that seduced me into visiting this continent.
Getting to Victoria Falls is tricky. Despite it’s popularity, the area around Victoria Falls is sparsely populated, with two small towns acting as the main hub for tourists. There is Livingstone, in Zambia and the actual town of Victoria Falls, in Zimbabwe. Most people fly to Livingstone and then cross the border into Victoria Falls, due to some more developed accommodations in that city and the fact that you can walk to the falls from your hotel there. There are no easy ways to fly there. If you are coming from North America, you are connecting via Joburg or Nairobi. That’s a lot more hours added to your journey, but hey, you can rewatch Speed on the airplane, just like me!
One thing you come to appreciate in North America when you visit Africa is border crossings. In North America, you go up and usually show your passport and go on through. In Africa, you go to the country you are departing, sometimes fill out a form, line up, get your passport stamped and then after that, walk a few hundred meters to the other country and do the same thing. It’s rather time consuming.
Arriving in Victoria Falls, the first thing you notice is the heat. It’s fucking hot. This is a theme that will be common throughout my trip. The next thing you realize is that you are in Africa because unlike well developed urban cities like Cape Town, Victoria Falls is still a small town in the wild. As such, there are animals randomly walking around – warthogs, elephants, monkeys, ostriches and baboons are commonly seen in and around the area. Pretty damn cool. You are never quite sure in these scenarios how far you should stay away from those animals – my usual instinct is to stay..far.
Now on to the falls. Victoria Falls (named after the Queen) or “Mosi-oa-Tunya” as the locals call it, is indeed spectacular. It’s twice the height of Niagara Falls, and really damn long. The national park costs 30 USD to enter but then after that it is about a 2 hour walk that takes you all along the waterfall. The view points are quite spectacular as you watch all the water from the Zambezi river fall down into a rocky abyss. There is something soothing about watching a ton of water fall. I can’t explain it. We went during a somewhat lower season, so the falls did not have full volume. A nice thing about this is that we can actually see the falls (less mist) and I didn’t get drenched. Obviously seeing it at full power would have been super cool as well.
For reference, here is Vic Falls during low season vs high season. My visit was somewhere in between:
One of the first questions people ask me about my trip is safety and realistically, at no point in Africa did I feel unsafe. Of all the places I went to, Victoria Falls the town had the most amount of people who would come up to you. Most of them want to sell you their old currency (we all have seen the four trillion dollar bills) and they will simply go away after you tell them ‘no business’.
Being located in basically the middle of nowhere, Victoria Falls is one of those destinations that are a bitch to get to, but when you see it, you will marvel at it, just like David Livingstone did when he first laid his eyes upon it and all the people after.
Instgramibility: 5 / 5
