Victoria Falls

Victoria Falls was not on our original itinerary for Africa, and I wasn’t really all that interested in going but our Travel Agent (with whom we booked the Safari portion of our trip) recommended it, and when our flights worked out, we included it on our trip.

We flew from Windhoek into the Victoria Falls airport, which we only realized after we’d landed was in Zimbabwe, which was in the midst of an internal struggle involving their current ruler and an upcoming election. But, we were only in the country for a few hours and we were far away from any of the trouble.

Because this was arranged for us by our travel agent (who, by the way I strongly recommend and if you are interested I can pass along her information), we were hand-held through the entire process of getting from Windhoek through the various countries’ check points, and into our hotel - the Royal Livingstone. This hotel was incredibly nice and perfect for our stay. Since we’d only be there for less than 24 hours it was great that the hotel is situated right adjacent to the Victoria Falls park. We could walk the 10 minutes walk through the hotel grounds and arrive right at the falls - which we did after our complimentary afternoon tea.

We spent the rest of the afternoon checking out the falls until we were able to get a couple of sunset photos. We then went back to the hotel where we had a river-side “sundowner” (sunset drink). After just having had tea, and after seeing how fancy the dining area was, we decided to skip dinner and retire to our room to watch the EuroCup finals.

The next morning we had a breakfast buffet like none other I’ve seen. It was on the scale of a Vegas hotel but the quality was excellent. We snacked on all sorts of delectables before walking back to the waterfall to check it out for the last time. It’s worth mentioning also that on the hotel grounds there are often non-registered guests, in the form of giraffes, monkeys, zebras, and even hippos (though we didn’t see any of those).

The falls really were great and in the end we were glad that we took the opportunity to see them (score 1 for our travel agent).