We left our last safari camp at this point but we didn’t leave the area. Our last stop was in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe. Victoria Falls is the town nearest Victoria Falls. It sits on the southern bank of the Zambezi River and on the western end of Victoria Falls. It began as a settlement around 1901 when people were looking at Victoria Falls for hydro-electric power. Today the town has about 35,000 people and tourism is a major industry. Victoria Falls is near the meeting point of Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana and Namibia. Victoria Falls is located in northwestern Zimbabwe.

Victoria Falls (the Falls) was our first stop in Victoria Falls (the Town). The falls are just over a mile wide and some 355 feet high. The native name for the falls is Mosi-oa-Tunya which means Smoke that Thunders. The smoke is the mist that rises from the falls. The mist or spray can rise several thousand feet high and is visible from thirty miles away. The thunder is from the roar of the water as it hits the bottom of the canyon below. It can be very loud indeed. Victoria Falls is classified by some as the world’s largest falls, based on its width and height combined. David Livingstone, the Scottish missionary, was the first European to view Victoria Falls in 1855.

The rainy season here is March to May and that’s when the falls are at their peak. On our first trip to the falls back in late February 2001, the falls were at full capacity. In some ways, this was more interesting. This is the dry season, so the falls were not flowing anywhere near their capacity. If you look at this first photo, you can see down the canyon where the falls tumble. On our first trip, you couldn’t see into the canyon as it was all spray. On the lower left, the exposed rock would be covered with water during the wet season. Another point from this photo is that you can see that the Zambezi River runs parallel to the falls. So the water falls between two high rock faces or a rock canyon and the spray has nowhere to go but up, hence the spray rises several thousand feet into the air. This is the western end of the falls.

We are moving west to east along the falls trail. In the wet season, this would be a continuous line of falls. While they are having a severe drought right now, that’s still a lot of water coming over the falls.

This is approximately the middle of the falls and again, during the wet season, this is a solid line of waterfalls. But this allowed us to see plants growing on the side of the falls and many other things that we didn’t see when we were here in the wet season.

This is just a lovely photograph.

This is the eastern end of the falls and there was barely any water falling on that end. This would also be a continuous line of falls during the wet season. The dry season allowed us to see the bottom of the falls and the Zambezi river bottom.