End of the African Adventure

So this is long over due but this is the summary of the rest of my holiday trip. So we did the Boma on Tuesday night and then Wednesday morning we got up bright and early to catch a cab and head to Victoria Falls so we could also see it on the Zimbabwe side. SUCH a different experience, the falls were so much bigger from the Zimbabwe side but so much less of an experience. There wasn’t a crazy death bridge that you had to cross to see the falls this time, just a path with marked sight seeing spots. Obviously it was still absolutely gorgeous, it is one of the seven wonders for shits sake. 

Traci, Sarah, and I lovin the falls

So yeah we snatched a cab back to our backpacker and headed on out to the border to get back into Zambia. We decided that it would be cool to walk across the bridge to the Zambie instead of taking a cab. Right. Well, it was quite a bit futher than we thought and the only other people who were walking across the border were crazy black immigrant trying to hop the fence and black women carrying babies on the backs, and the only thing holding the baby on was a bath towel. To put it into perspective this is the scene. The 3 others I was traveling with all had backpacks and what not, but me being the idiot brought a rolly suitcase and a backpack. So here I was dragging my suitcase over the non paved roads inbetween Zimbabwe and Zambia in a little sundress and aviators.  I couldn’t have looked more like an idiot if someone paid me.

One way/ two way road to cross the bridge? Had to make the lady move out of the way to roll my self across the bridge, she wasn't happy.

We obviously got hasseled numerous times by guys who were just hanging out in the no mans land between the two countries. Weird. What were they doing? So anyways we made it to the other side and couldn’t have been happier to be at the waterfront lodge where we had been staying all week. So we grabbed some lunch and hung by the pool for the day. Seemed like it was going to be a totally normal relaxing day, this was until we met the “scrap metal” dealers. These old fat men who proclaimed they were in the scrapmetal business and their two African businessmen who were doing the deals with them this week. Not sketchy at all. We got talking to them and realized that they were going on the same sunset cruise that we were going on that night. Awesome. The time comes for the cruise and it’s just the four of us, the scrap metal dealers, an old couple, and two younger women. In a nutshell the cruise was a joke and the old couple ended up taking Yeager bombs with everyone. T.I.A.  The cruise was actually beautiful though, it was down the Zambezi river and we ended up seeing numerous wild elephants crossing the river and crocodiles all over the shore. Neat! Plus it was open bar and free food on the boat, double plus.

Here's the sunset on the Zambezi, note the elephants crossing the river on the left! So cool!

The next morning it was time to head back to Cape Town and all of us were very ready to go back. We grabbed some breakfast and then grabbed our ride to the airport. We picked up everyone and their mother on the way to the airport and once we got there, there was a line that was practically out the door. Great. Finally got our boarding passes and while we were waiting for our plane I vaguly heard something about our flight on the loud speaker and found out that our flight was delayed 2 hours. GREAT, another traveling dilemma. This meant that there was no way we were going to make our connection in jo-burg to cape town. We ended up landing with 35 minutes before our flight was supposed to take off so we ran through the entire airport, got to the desk to get our boarding passes and they tell us the flight is closed, there was still 20 minutes before the plane was supposed to leave too. As I’m talking to the guy behind the desk he begins to tell me that I need to pay a stand by fee of $100. Joke. I totally lost my mind and it comes to find out that the flight had been delayed another hour and we were totally going to make it. The people at the desk were just idiots and didn’t even realize the flight we were trying to get on was the one that was delayed. Pretty typical, and once again T.I.A. We finally made it home and grabbed some subway in the airport for dinner. The 1^st deli sandwhich I have had since being here and it was GLORIOUS!

So yeah that about sums up my african adventure, and once again sorry for the delay!

BOMAAAAA

Tuesday we had to be checked out of our.. tent? by 10:30AM because we were going to Zimbabwe for the night. We didn't end up checking out until 10:45 and were on the road to Zimbabwe by 11. We crossed the border, got our passports stamped, and headed into Zimbabwe. It was definitely A LOT different than I had imagined Zimbabwe would look like, and definitely a lot more sketch. We drove through the town and then arrive at the Savannah backpackers lodge where we were staying for the night. Interesting place. I think we were the only ones staying there and all of the workers stunk, literally B.O. status.

This is the view of the place when you drive in.

So we met with the "accountant"aka some random african who worked at the hotel and figured out what we were going to do while we were in Zim. We decided on the Boma dinner. All we knew about it was that it was that it was a "traditional african dinner" and that there was going to be a buffet and an interactive drumming session. YES. I could finally use my bongo skills that I learned in my African Instruments Class! We also decided to hit Victoria Falls in the morning to get the experience from the Zim side and not just the Zambia side. After we got everything sorted out we decided to get a cab and go into town to these markets that everyone kept telling us we NEEDED to go to while we were in Zim. So we get to the markets and it was super sketch, didn't really see/still don't see why people are always raving about these markets. The only thing I really wanted from these markets were the Zimbabwean money that was no longer used because of the HUGE inflation that the country had. Now they just use U.S. currency. But the old money is so cool, for $2 and 4 hair-ties I got a 100 trillion dollar bill. The guy was saying how back when they used the currency, 100 trillion could only get you a loaf of bread! How crazy! He also said that people would bring briefcases full of money to go grocery shopping. I cannot even imagine what that was like. After about an hour and a half we were done with the markets and had to catch a cab back to our place. I found a cop on the street and asked him where to get a cab and he being the nice lad that he was snatched us up one. I didn't know at the time but the cab we got in was a guy who just opened his door and sniped us from the guy who's cab we were actually supposed to be getting in. Obviously I didn't notice so I hopped in this cab and pushed all the way over to the window. Bad idea. I put my leg down and it touched something very cold and wet. I figured it was just a soda or something and didn't think it was a big deal, that was until I actually looked to see what it was. What I saw right next to my leg was a bag with something skinned and dead in it. It was very bloody and definitely parts of an animal... or a human. O.M.G. I started freaking out literally having a panic attack and I had no idea what the thing actually was. I was not trying to have the driver hear me just incase he was actually going to take us and kill us too, who even knew what the hell else he had in his trunk!! I was trying to tell sarah what was going on and she just looked over at the bag and had the exact same reaction I had. Meanwhile, Matt was chatting it up with the cab driver in the front and had ZERO idea what was going on in the backseat. I was convinced that we were the next victims and our bodies were about to be the next ones in the bag. NOT OKAY. We got to our lodge and I literally pushed Sarah and Tracey out of the cab so that I could get away from the dead body that was in the bag. We didn't get minced and Matt thought it was hilarious that we were freaking out the whole time. Not cool.

Dead Body.

The next thing of the day was the Boma dinner. We got picked up at 7 by Geoff, what a guy, and drove about 10 minutes into the bush of Zimbabwe and all of a sudden we ended up at a resort and the BOMA was on the other side. We walk up and they were playing the bongos and wrapping everyone in their traditional african dress. The inside was insane. SO many asians, I was so excited. The buffet was HUGE literally so many different stations and so much good food to be eaten. We ordered our drinks and made our way to the "starters" portion of the buffet. I made an azn friend in line and got some delicious foods to startoff the night.

My azn friend!

After we finished the starters it was on to the meats. I ended up getting warthog, ostrich, impala, chicken, and sirloin. The warthog was SO good. Can't wait to have it again. The guys at our lodge told us that we had to eat the worm that they serve because it is a African speciality. We found the worm station and had to try it. Sarah and I were the only brave ones but we thought we were going to be able to try it at our leisure at the table but that was not the case. They made you try it right there so they could give you a certificate to prove that you ate the worm. Sarah choked on it so I was definitely a little nervous when it was my time to take a bite. Surprisingly it wasn't THAT bad, I'm not saying I would ever do it again but it really wasn't horrible.

The worm!... and the 12432490 different weird meats on my plate

By this time they had professional african drummers and dancers out and they were going wild. So entertaining. They left and we got desert. By the time we got back to our table the interactive drumming session had started and the azns were going nuts on these drums. LOVE IT. The drumming session ended and then it was time for a dance sesh! Everyone tried their most african dance they could think of and that was that. The night continued with some story tellers, medicine men, singers, and face painting. Such a great night overall. Geoff picked us back up at 10 and we headed back to the lodge for the night. Definitely tired after a long day.

Who are those hottie Africans?

Victoria Falls and Elephant Back Safari

Sooooooooo yeah continuing on with my "holiday" Monday we started off the day with a tour of Victoria Falls. We had a great guide who drove us to the falls in a safari vehicle, weird but still cool. So we started off the tour and got all the history of it and it seemed cool whatever. Everyone had told us how soaked you get when you go to the falls, the guy even brought us ponchos. I also had my rain jacket with me and he took one look at me and goes "is that your cover?" and then laughed. Great. The falls were BEAUTIFUL so cool, it was literally like this break in the land and this massive water flow into the break. There was a rainbow going into the falls and everything. Picture perfect, literally. We didn't seem to be getting that wet when we were on the tour and I was a little confused as to why everyone had gotten so soaked. It started to get a little misty in the area, I threw the rain jacket on and everything was totally cool. We then came to the last "checkpoint" where people are able to stay dry. At this check point they were handing out floor length ponchos and jackets hmm. The farther we walked the more and more it seemed as if it were raining, and then we hit the falls. Literally in a matter of 20 seconds it started DOWN POURING. We were totally soaked and the ponchos weren't doing anything. That's when we came to the bridge. This bridge was quite long and was actually in the falls. You couldn't see anything in front of you because the water was so strong and the bridge was incredibly slippery. The guide told us to take small steps and to definitely hang onto the hand rails. He was 100% correct. I literally could not take a step without slipping from one side to the other. I was sure that that was my last day alive, I was going to fall off the bridge into the falls and I would have been toasted. Needless to say after about 80 scares we all made it across safely and to the other side of the falls where you could see Zimbabwe and the bridge that connects the two countries. Cool. We got to the end of the tour and being the idiot that I am I just figured that we would have been right where we started and we could just get in the safari vehicle and hit the road. Wrong. We were at the other end and needed to backtrack everything that we had already gone through, THE BRIDGE. Oh god. So after round 2 of near death experiences we made it back to the vehicle and there were some markets that we could roam around and maybe get some stuff. Horrible idea once we got into it. As soon as you walk up to the market all of the guys come at you going "sista sista good price here, good price sista, sista." Oh god, these guys were crazy they all wanted my hairbands on my wrist. So after a few good trades we got the hell out of there and went back to the waterfront for a good swim and some delicious lunch.

 Here's the backside of the falls

 Cool rainbow!

 Hottie azn tourist?

 Real azn tourist with a cool african man.

A few hours later it was time for the Elephant Back Safari! Yay! We picked up a few folk on the way to the National Park and once we arrived we got briefed on what the plan was for the day and signed our lives away. All of a sudden all of the elephants started walking towards us and lined up waiting for us to hop on them. I love elephants. Everyone walked up the platform and got on their respected elephants. The one Matt and I were getting on did not seem very big and I was a little bummed because the big ones were so cool. On top of the elephant it was Matt, our guide Christopher, and I. We all started walking into the park and Christopher began to tell us about our elephant. It wasn't soon after that I was super excited that we got the elephant that we did because she was definitely the most badass out of any of them. Ours had left the herd a couple years back but then came back and she was pregnant! This crazy teen walked out on her fellow elephants just to get knocked up and come back! Cool. So basically ours was awesome and led the pack the entire time. We stopped at the "watering hole" aka the Zambezi river and let the elephants grab a drink before continuing on with the adventure.

Here's the big girl herself! Note the watering hole

About an hour later we made it back to the site we began. We only saw impalas on the safari but who cares, we were riding elephants! Way cooler. We heard the lions growling or whatever they do but we never saw them. I almost forgot to mention on there were african men holding HUGE guns walking with us the entire time incase "wild" animals started to approach us on our safari. Luckily the guns never needed to be used. After we got off of our elephants they did a little bowing show for us and it was very obvious that they were hungry. Our guide gave us a bag of food and we got to sit on the elephants lap and feed it through it's trunk and into his mouth. The only way it would open its mouth is if you said truck up and all of a sudden he fly is trunk up and put is tongue out ready to be all NOM NOM NOM. The elephant then stood up and we could literally get right in front of it's mouth to fee it! It was SO cool.

 NOM NOM NOM

She kept trying to put her trunk in the bag to snatch up all the food. Her trunk was definitely quite snotty and I had elephant boogers all over my hand and arms. We washed up and they had set out some light snacks for us and had free drinks while we watched the video they made of us on the safari. Embarrassing. Such a cool day all around, saw 1 of the 7 wonders of the world in the morning and ended the day on the back of an elephant. This is the life.

Homeless Encounter Of The Day

The other night sarah and I were feeling adventurous so we decided to walk down to Rondenbosch (the next town over) and grab a bite to eat. Kings Wood chinese restaurant looked like the place to be so we stopped in and sat down. There was a table of about 15 people, all must have been a chinese family except for 2 white boys, random. Anyways, we snatched a table by the window thinking that we could do a little people watching while eating dinner. We ordered our dinner and the people watching was at a minimum. The only people we saw were bikers driving their bikes on the sidewalks and all of them had just purchased Vodka which was placed on the front of their motorcycles. We were unimpressed, that was until a lady with a stroller walked by with what looked like a baby was in it. The lady looked  a little homeless, but hey, who doesn't look homeless in my area? The harder I looked at the baby stroller I realized that there was actually no baby in the stroller and by this time the woman realized I was looking at her stroller. Shit. She quickly came up to the window and started asking us for money while rubbing her stomach. Her stomach was flat, no baby in there or in the stroller. This went on for about 2 minutes and then she looked away but kept her spot outside the window. What was this lady thinking? Did she actually think we were going to walk outside the restaurant and give her money? I would understand maybe if this was an open air type restaurant but it was a very obvious that these were huge glass panes that there was no way money could magically float through them. What a fool. Eventually she got the hint and rolled away with her babyless stroller. Wonder if the story worked on anyone else?

Chobe National Park in Botswana

After our horrible day of traveling on Saturday we were super pumped for our day in Botswana at the Chobe Nation Park (the best national park in the world!) on Sunday. We got picked up at our Lodge in the morning at around 7am to travel across the boarder into Botswana. We picked up this nice couple on the way and they spending the day with us! yay! So we drove for about 45 minutes and finally we got to the "boarder" between Zambia and Botswana. Mind you the "boarder" was literally a metal fence and one building and then a river which your crossed in a sketchy boat. There were 100's of trucks lined up for literally miles before we hit the boarder, I asked our driver what that was all about and he said that they are waiting to bring good across the boarder, but thing is that there is no bridge across the river, they only have 3 ferries (2 of which were broken), and each ferry can only take 1 truck at a time aka 1 truck every hour. He was saying how these trucks can wait for weeks before they get to the other side. T.I.A.

 Here are just a few of the trucks that were lined up

 Here is the "border" to get out of Zambia haha
So we get stamped and took our little boat over to Botswana where we got some more stamps. Funny though, in order to get into the coutry you have to walk over this "disinfecting" pad so that there won't be any diseases spread between countries. Mind you this is what the pad looked like:

 

 Definitely stopping the diseases from being spread. So we got picked up in our safari vehicle and headed off the Chobe. The first part of our day consisted of a river safari where we circled around the Chobe river looking for the wild creatures that were lurking in the wilderness. We were able to get so close to the animals, it was insaneee. On the river we saw elephants, hippos, all different kinds of birds, impalas, crocodiles, buffalo, and kudu. COOL. Hippos are HUGE literally enormous! And so scary, they are supposedly the mammal that kills the most people in a year. They are VERY territorial and literally will just start charging at you no matter what the circumstance. We had one that lunged at our boat so we had to literally out boat the hippo so it wouldn't smash the side of the boat and tip it over. omg. We saw so many hippos and elephants by the end of the river that I didn't even realize that many could live in one area.

nom,water

So after the river safari we went back to the Chobe Lodge and I had scrumptious lunch. So much food though, obviously I was super full after the meal but the gave us desert! I couldnt resist! Apple crumb cake? umm YES PLEASE! So we stuffed ourselves silly and then hopped on our safari vehicle to hit the Chobe National Park. Stuff belly and rugged roads to not mix well, just a little word of advice for the next time you are on a safari. So yeah we drove around for about 2 and a half hours literally on land, in the river, through the forest. Our guide was legit, he was making his own paths and everything. We saw a bunch of elephants, giraffs "grazing", warthogs (weird), impalas, mongooses, kudu, hippos, yeah. Unfortunately they had no rhinos and the lions were not liking us, they were hiding the whole time, how rude. I was just trying to snap some sweet pics. So after this day full of safaris it was back over the border into Zambia, still in the safari vehicle nbd. No need for the disinefction to get into Zambia, they love that mad cow disease. Super pooped after a long day we just hung by the pool and grabbed a late dinner. Boring evening.

Trip Of A Lifetime

For the past week I have been gallivanting around Africa and by Africa I mean Zambia, Botswana, and Zimbabwe having the time of my life, minus the HORRENDOUS traveling we had to do to get there. I'll start with our flights on Sunday on the way to Livingstone in Zambia.

4:30 am- Lenny, our rip off of a driver that arcardia "hired" to drive us places, even though he charges more than a cab company would, picks us up to head to the airport for our 6am flight to Johannesburg. We get to the airport, get on the flight and everything seems to be going smoothly. We landed in Joburg around 8am and our next flight was at 11am. This left us plenty of time to hit up the duty free store and gaze out into the rainy Joburg area. We boarded our flight on time and it seemed like we were in the clear to be on our way to Zambia! I decided to take a little snooze before the flight took off so that I wouldn't be so tired for our tour of Victoria Falls at 4:30. I woke up from this little nap and soon realized that we hadn't moved from our gate. It was now 11:30, I asked Sarah what was going on and she said that they announced we were having "technical" problems. Great. about 15 minutes later they informed us that we needed to get off the plane immediately and they had no idea when we were going to be able to get another flight to Zambia. Not happy. They told us to wait at the gate for a "representative" to come to tell us what our options are. Their idea of a representative was a girl wearing a bright yellow vest who actually had no idea that our plane even had technical problems. They sent us to a different gate down the hall where there had been another flight that had also been cancelled that was going to Zimbabwe. We found out that they were actually going to combine our flights and the plan would first land in Zimbabwe and then it would fly to Zambia. Mind you this flight from Zim to Zam was said to be 8 minutes. Only in Africa would they combine flights to 2 different locations. Whatever we thought as long as we can get to Zambia to make our tour. They told us that we would be leaving around 12:30-1:00 which would definitely leave us enough time to make the tour. At 12:45 they said that we were going to be boarding in 10 minutes. Yippee! That was until they told us the flight was going to be boarding in 10 minutes every 10 minutes for a solid 2 hours. By this time we were starving but didn't want to get out of line to go get any food. Also, our flight was supposed to give us a meal. We finally get to board the flight and of course my seat was changed to the back row middle seat. Typical and they also informed us that there was going to be food or drink on the flight because they couldn't get the "catering" figured out. Of course they couldn't this is Africa, they only took 3 hours trying to figure it out. Dumb. So needless to say we finally got to Zambia after more than 12 hours of traveling and missed our tour of the falls. By this time we just nommed down our dinner at our "adventure lodge" where we were staying and hit the sac. Had to rest up for our day in Botswana that was planned for Sunday.

 Customs/airport in Zambia. Totally not sketch

Here is our accommodation at the Waterfront adventure lodge in Zambia, real beds inside and everything!