And on the seventh day they rested

The Zambezi  Sun is in the town of Livingstone, Zambia, which was named after the famous explorer. It’s a decent sized community and its growth has really been driven by its proximity to the Victoria Falls. It was pushed into tourism apparently by the greediness of the officials on the other side of the bridge who wanted a lot of favors from the developers of the hotel. It became so egregious that they built in Zambia at a lesser site but with no political interference.

After that welcome buffet the previous night, we got up and walked around Victoria Falls The view of them is quite different from the Zambian side, but still very impressive even in the dry season. At about noon we took a van over to the Zimbabwe side and after running a couple of errands  in town, some folks went to look at the Falls from this side and some went to the Victoria Falls Hotel, one of the great old ladies of the Victorian era.  There was a unanimous decision not to do the bungee jump.

The only word for the hotel is spectacular. It has scale, perspective, and most of all it reeks of a bygone era when that region of Africa was very much part of an empire devoted to England's economic growth. There are some interesting posters inside from about 1933 that show by country the principal trade commodities of the time and a caption that says that the total trade with the colonies of the British Empire was about L33 million annually. Not even a hundred years ago and yet so small.

We went outside, had a light lunch because we were anticipating a large dinner. The other big event of the day was that Diane flew in and joined us there from her trip around Southern Namibia. After some serious discussion we decided that rather than exert ourselves by walking,  we should relax, have high tea and smoke cigars on the patio. I could have been wearing a pith helmet. Allan concluded that the Bulawayo Room was a good place to take an afternoon nap. 

Our arrangement was that the van was to collect us and we would leave for another hotel at 5 p.m. sharp. At that hour everyone was there except Johnny,  so we left with the thought that he is old enough to look after himself and he would find his own way. Sure enough as we were driving through town we spotted him meandering around the shops, and he told us that he wasn’t too late and could have found a taxi back to Zambia. Anyway we went off to have sunset drinks at the Limpopo Hotel and watch the animals at the waterhole, followed by a dinner with drums and exotic African foods at the Boma. We had the drinks but in determining the schedule for the next day, decided to head back to the hotel early instead. We had made that awful decision to leave at 5 a.m. which meant a 4:15 wake up call.