Zimbabwe – Day 3 & 4

After a restful night’s sleep and a long lay-in we head off in search of breakfast in 32 degrees.  It’s Saturday and feels really quiet strange as there’s no hockey kit to ready in preparation for a match, no fantasy football league to argue over and no Match of the Day to record. There’s also no attendance at birthday parties to celebrate the milestones of Ellen & Jo at 30 & 60 respectively!!

We take a wander around town to locate our Nomad truck meeting point for 2 days time. Its not busy and local traders are eager to engage us in conversation in the hope of making a sale of everything from wooden bowls, a set of carved “big 5” animals to an 8 foot giraffe beautifully welded from recycled metal!! We gently advise that we’re not in the market currently. Personally, I quite fancied this rhino but sadly he’s not for sale.

We return to the rest camp and retreat from the very hot sun. I catch-up by writing a chapter of my blog and a read of my book whilst Brownie concentrates on learning Spanish – trips to Spanish speaking destinations in 2023 are in the pipeline so we’ll be reliant on her resulting studies.

We head for the Lookout Cafe for a sundowner and early dinner. It overlooks a horseshoe bend in the Zambezi River and the bridge crossing in the distance being the border between Zimbabwe on the left and Zambia on the right.  It’s the night before full-moon and the Zambezi glistens as it glides by.  En-route to our watering hole very excitedly we book a helicopter flight over the falls for tomorrow afternoon.

The following day after large quantities of  wise water the night before, we have a very late lunch and a lounge by the pool. Our helicopter pick-up is at 4pm and the helipad is just a 5 mins drive from the rest camp. After a weigh-in and safety briefing we join our Flight of Angels with 2 other passengers. Everyone gets a window seat and I get the golden ticket up front next to the pilot.

The flight is just 12 mins but affords us with a fantastic opportunity to view the falls from above and appreciate just how vast they really are. It’s summer here currently and the resulting reduction in the water flow allows us to view the whole of the canyon as the water flows down which at other times of the year would be completely obscured by towering plumes of mist as vast quantities of water cascade over the falls. We see elephants crossing the river as we return to the helipad. It’s our first game sighting of the trip other than our resident pesky monkeys who when they’re not terrorising me in the washblocks are desperate to get through the windows into our hut!!

I mentioned previously that it was nearly full moon and tonight it is and we return to the Falls at around 7 to take a tour with the park guides to witness a lunar bow. Lunar rainbows are viewed when the moon is near to full (when it is at its brightest). A Lunar rainbow is a rainbow produced by light reflected off the surface of the moon refracting off of in this case the spray generated by the waterfall into the air.  Luna rainbows are relatively faint, due to the smaller amount of light reflected from the surface of the moon. Because the light is usually too faint to excite the cone color receptors in human eyes, it is difficult for the human eye to discern colors in a moonbow. As a result, they often appear to be white.

We spend around an hour marvelling at the truly awesome spectacle and feel very blessed to have been able to witness our first Lunar Bow. We head back to camp to pack after a truly memorable day. We are leaving camp at 6.30am to join our Nomad truck.