Our last week in Malawi was hectic running around saying our goodbyes but we finished on a high with a great party! The local staff who we have been working with have been amazing and became good friends and we were very sad to say goodbye to them. As a surprise we told them all to meet us at 12 at the house, played a few games and then took them out for a boat trip on a posh boat that we had borrowed from a nearby lodge. They absolutely loved it and spent the entire time singing and dancing (oh and drinking!). We then continued the party back at the house, where we had traditional dancers in and a few goats roasting on the fire, some fireworks and the atmosphere was great as most of the village came.
The next morning we headed off on the next leg of our adventure. We crossed into Zambia and headed to Chipata for a much needed rest after our busy week. The following day we hit Lusaka with the aim of getting our visas for Angola.
It is now day 4 in Lusaka and we are still waiting to see if we are successful in getting the visas. Angola is not an easy country to get the visa for, so we have our fingers crossed! Marc has made friends with the embassy receptionist on Facebook so hopefully that will help!!!
8th December
Success in getting the Angola visa! Many people had told us that we wouldn’t get it so we were pleased to have it and headed straight to the Democratic Republic of Congo Embassy to get that visa, which was a lot more straight forward and ready the same day for us.
The next day we headed to Livingstone to check out Vic Falls. It was great to see, as when we had seen it from the Zimbabwe side in May there was so much water thundering over we could barely see anything through all the spray. We took the walk, quite literally along the top of the falls, to Livingstone island and jumped into Devil’s Pool, which is a small pool on the lip of the falls that is safe (ish) to jump into. You had to swim across the river just a few metres back from the falls and head for ‘safe areas’ as the water was neck deep with strong currents in some places. Once we were at the pool and perched on the edge of the falls, the guide then informed us it was quite dangerous today, due to the rain and high water and that they would stop tourists going in any time from now!
We did chuckle (afterwards!), as the group who went in following us consisted of a man who clearly was not a confident swimmer and decided to swim back stroke, not looking where he was going, nor following the guide and kept ending up in the strong currents, which resulted in everyone fearing that he was going to get swept over the edge. Even once he jumped into the pool the group had to shout at him to come closer to them as he was heading for the ‘no return’ bit of the pool! It was a great day and we headed back to find a nice campsite on the edge of the Zambezi River for sundowners.
The rains have staretd here and we have had some intense thunderstorms, although this has resulted in a slightly soggy car inside, due to Bob’s holes and gaps in the floor and doors! We have also had a bit of mechanical work done on Bob, by Foleys Africa, here to make sure he is ready for his adventure home and hopefully should be on our way to Zimbabwe tomorrow!
13th December
With Bob mechanically checked over and ready to carry on our journey we headed into Zimbabwe to Hwange National Park. We had a great time in Hwange and once again had the park to ourselves, as very few tourists go there still. We had good game viewing and spent the last night sleeping out in a hide by a water hole. As soon as it got dark, the elephants began to appear silently from all directions to drink from the waterhole. Our spotlight had run out, but there was a huge electric storm on the horizon and the flashes kept lighting up the elephants white against the darkness and there were soon 40-50! They continued to appear throughout the night only given away by the sound as they sucked the water up through their trunks.
It was a little scary with all the animals around and no barrier between us and them, and Felicity was worried about spiders crawling on her in the night. However, in the night she jumped up saying she had tomato in her eyes and was scooping the tomato off!……it was actually a frog not tomato that had jumped onto her face and she flicked it off on to Marc!
After a relaxing few days in Hwange we carried on to Botswana to spend the night in Chobe before continuing to Namibia the next day.