The town of Livingston lies 11km/7miles away from where the water of the Zambezi river crashes down hundreds of metres to give us one of the most famous waterfalls in the world; The Victoria Falls. On the short drive out to the falls the wide river is visible from the road with a breathtaking plume of water spray visible in the distance.
After entering the national park area, the roaring sound of water is audible and the waterfall slowly emerges into view from the woodland that surrounds the opposite edge of the river high up. A bridge links the river edge to an island in the middle of the river from where the experience of being so close to the waterfall really becomes apparent. Walking across the bridge was like being in the biggest torrential downpour ever, with every part of your clothes getting absolutely soaked through with water within one minute, it was unbelievable.
We walked around getting extremely wet, but getting the best views of the falls that the other dry tourists would miss out on. The falls were even more spectacular due to the large amount of water in the Zambezi for that time of year. We had heard how full the Zambezi was from other tourists, as we had been told that the pontoon ferry between Zambia and Botswana wasn’t running as the banks had flooded.
We headed upstream to the ferry and found out that they had constructed some temporary piers for the cars to get onto the pontoon ferry, and so we would be able to get into Botswana after all. The drive on the opposite side of the border was through the middle of the Savanah where we saw more elephants than people along the road to Francistown where we camped for the night.
Day 102
In between Francistown and Gaberone is a small Rhino Sanctuary near the town of Serowe, and having read in the guidebooks how cheap it was, we decided to pay a visit and attempt to tick off a few more animals from our ‘spotted’ list (Not a physical list I hasten to add).
The roads throughout the sanctuary were in really good condition, and we managed to cover near enough every road of the 4,300hectare site within about three hours viewing kudus, wildebeast, gazelles, impalas, vultures, ostriches, giraffes, zebras, warthogs along with five rhinos.
Happy with our game viewing we aimed to get to the Botswanan capital of Gaberone by the evening, and after searching for illusive cheap accommodation, after a few hours we found a campsite on the edge of town for a reasonable rate. The plan in Gaberone was to try and get the first of our visas for the second part of the trip once we had arrived in Cape Town.
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