The British Empire

Buhle and I decided that no trip to Victoria Falls was complete without afternoon tea at The Victoria Falls Hotel…the oldest hotel  here.  Unfortunately, we just couldn’t fit it into our schedule, so we settled for lunch instead.  The building is typical colonial grandeur…a huge sprawling white building with wood paneled smoking rooms and sitting rooms.  There’s furniture covered with animal skins, and large photographs of members of the royal family.  There are old maps showing England’s dominion over the world, including one that says “the sun never sets on the British Empire.”  The doormen are clad in white trousers and pith helmets, and the guests appear to be largely wearing safari garments.

The location of the site is spectacular, below the falls and looking across the bridge to Zambia towards the falls.  It was started in 1904, originally to house the engineers for the. bridge, which was an essential part of Cecil Rhodes dream for a Capetown to Cairo railway.  There is a sign on the grounds showing the distance to Capetown in one direction and Cairo the other way.  As soon as the railway from Capetown was open, a tourism industry was started.  Apparently there were trolley cars down to look at the falls, but staff had to push them back uphill. We sat on the terrace and had a very nice (expensive) lunch, and watched the world go by.

Later we went for a boat ride on the Zambezi River.  The ticket included all the wine, beer or spirits we could drink, but strangely, not cider, which was $5 a bottle.  We sat looking out at the river bank and drank our wine and floated along the river, between Zimbabwe and Zambia.  Apparently sometimes there are elephants and other animals, but today we only saw crocodiles and hippos.

I learned lots about hippos and they really don’t sound very nice.  A family has one male and several females.  The male is so protective that he will kill any other males, including his own male children, so the mothers hide male children in the bushes until they are old enough to make their own way.  The thing that surprised me most is that hippos can’t swim, they walk along the bottom, staying submerged for up to none minutes, and then pop up to breathe.  That explains something that I heard here earlier…that in high water times, sometimes hippos get swept over the falls.  The other things that I learned is that when they open their mouths, when they look like they are yawning, that is a sign that they are very angry and about to charge.  The males mark their territory by flicking their dung around with their tails…which led to several jokes about shit hitting fans.

Although hippos are considered to be one of the most dangerous animals around, and there are really a lot of crocodiles, more people are killed in Zimbabwe every year by elephants than by any other animals.

The name Zambezi comes from a local Tonga word, Kasambezi, which means the place where adults swim.  They believed that the river was enchanted and that you couldn’t go there without magical protection.  As well as animals, there were mermaids in the river. The Tonga are the only local people who swim in the river…they believe that they have a special relationship with crocodiles, they don’t both the animals, and the crocodiles don’t bother them.  Yesterday we actually saw a man climb out of the water, so perhaps it is true.

There were only about 40 people on the boat, but strangely, two were from Edmonton, and even more strangely, one was the ex-wife of a close friend.  The world is indeed an odd place.