Saturday, 5 July 1986: Descending to the Boiling Pot & Playing Currency Games

August 12, 11:00AM, Halfway House, South Africa.

On Saturday morning, I found a cab that took me to the Inter-Continental Hotel.  There I stored my bags with the bellman and headed down a trail to see the Boiling Pot, a huge whirlpool which lies between Knife Edge and the Victoria Falls Bridge.  

The trail descended through a dense forest which gets a regular mist from the falls depending on which way the wind is blowing.  As the 300 million liters of water flow over the falls every minute, Mother Nature forces them through a narrow gorge between Knife Edge on the Zambia side and Danger Point on the Zimbabwe side.  Some of this torrent gets pushed over toward the left side of the gorge and hits a cliff.  From there it gets forced into a counterclockwise eddy.  When you’re standing on the bank next to this “boiling pot”, the water closest to you is actually flowing upstream.  It was a little scary out on the rocks next to this giant eddy taking pictures of it.  There was a load roar from the water rushing through the gorge combined with the noise from the falls themselves.  I kept getting this paranoid sensation that water would surge over the rock I was standing on carrying me off to Never-Never Land.  Thus, I only spent a few seconds on this rock – just time enough to get a few photos while struggling to keep the mist off my lens.

The Boiling Pot and Victoria Falls Bridge

 

After leaving the Boiling Pot, I stopped to change lenses and dropped a lens cap into a narrow space between two boulders.  I could see my lens cap sitting on the ground about four feet below and not having Wilt Chamberlain’s long arms, there was no way I could reach it.  Then I remembered my baby tripod.  I took it out of the pack, extended two of the legs to their full length, and used them like chop sticks to recover the lens cap.  I was pleased with my inventiveness.

After lunch at the Inter-Continental, I had Kw18 left, just enough to tip the bellman holding my bags and pay for the cab to the Zimbabwean border post.  I had thought the fare would be Kw16, but the driver quoted me only 10.  So I rushed back into the restaurant and bought two chocolate eclairs to go, woofing them down as we crossed the bridge at the Zimbabwe border. 

One is only allowed to take Z$20 out of Zimbabwe.  I had planned for this also.  Two weeks earlier I had purchased my Vic Falls-Bulawayo train ticket in Harare.  I had my Bulawayo-Johannesburg train ticket which I had bought in Jo’burg.  I would need to show that to the Zimbabwe border agent to prove that I had paid for transport OUT of the country in order for them to let me INTO Zimbabwe.  I also had my return ticket from Jo’burg to New York which they might want to see to make sure I wouldn’t be turned back at the South African border (even though at that point, I would be in Botswana).  I had the Z$20 bill hidden inside my deodorant stick (I would have to take the stick apart to get to it), US$100 hidden among the pills in a bottle of Excedrin (hopefully, I wouldn’t run across a border official with a migraine headache who needed a favor), and Z$15 which I had hidden inside a package of lens cleaning paper to get it through Zambian customs but which I would now declare upon entering Zimbabwe.  It wasn’t that these guys ever checked that close for smuggled currency, but you never knew when one of them might want you to open a bag or empty your pockets if he had a hair up his ass.  The important thing was to know the restrictions on import/export of local and foreign currency and not give them the wrong answers to questions about same.

A Zimbabwean cabbie took me from the border to the stately Victoria Falls Hotel where I again checked my bags.  I had a couple hours left before I needed to be at the train station to catch the overnight steam train to Bulawayo.  So I walked back to the Zimbabwean side of the falls for some last looks and photos.  Since it was a Saturday, the park was much more crowded than it had been two days earlier.  Even after three days here, I was still spellbound by the falls.  God, I didn’t want to leave.  Finally, I stared at the falls from one of the vistas for several minutes, shut my eyes, turned around and walked out to the park entrance without looking back.  Odds were that I would never see Victoria Falls again.

Devil’s Cataract, the western end of Victoria Falls

Afterword, I made the following notes:  “What can one say about Victoria Falls?  Adjectives are trite and inadequate to describe them and the feelings they evoke.  They definitely have to rank with the ten most scenic wonders of the world – right up there with the Grand Canyon and Mount Rainier which I saw several years ago.  The setting is more beautiful than Niagara Falls which is sandwiched between two cities.  I’m sure these falls are rivaled by Iguazu Falls on the Argentina-Brazil border, Angels Falls in Venezuela (the world’s highest), and Kaieteur Falls in Guyana (the world’s largest single-drop waterfall).  If you love natural beauty, consider your life incomplete until you see Victoria Falls.”