New Year’s Eve at Victoria Falls

Waterfalls have always enthralled me, and the bigger the better.

I’ve lived within a three-hour drive of Niagara Falls, which separates Canada and the United States, all of my life. In the fall of 2017 I had the pleasure of seeing Iguazu Falls from both the Brazilian and Argentinean sides. The last piece in my trifecta of visiting huge waterfalls dividing nations fell into place recently when I viewed Victoria Falls from Zambian and Zimbabwean soil.

It’s a less than two-hour flight from Johannesburg, South Africa to Livingstone, the nearest Zambian city to Victoria Falls. I’d purchased a Kaza entry visa, which granted me entry into both Zambia and Zimbabwe, online for U.S.$50.55 before my arrival at Harry Mwanga Nuumbula International Airport. Other travellers didn’t have that foresight, unfortunately, so I still had to wait in line quite a while to be processed while they purchased their visas.

Named after David Livingstone, the Scottish explorer and missionary who was the first white man to explore the area in 1855, the city of approximately 140,000 people doesn’t offer a lot to visitors beyond its role as a gateway. So after getting a ride from the airport into town and checking in to my private room at the charming Jollyboys Backpackers at 2 p.m., I immediately caught a cab for the 10-kilometre ride to Victoria Falls.

The driver agreed to a U.S.$16 round-trip price and would pick me up when Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park closed three hours later. The entry fee to the park was U.S.$20, a small price to pay to view one of the seven natural wonders of the world.

Mosi-oa-Tunya translates from the Lozi language into English as “The Smoke Which Thunders.” When high water season hits in March and April after heavy rains, that name would certainly make sense due to the thick mists and crashing sounds that can be heard from several kilometres away. But even during my visit at the end of December, when the Zambezi River was still moving pretty slowly a month after the dry season ended, the views of the 1,700-metre long falls were still spectacular.

I wanted to build up to that, however, by first walking down the steep Palm Grove Trail through a rain forest to Boiling Pot, where a small waterfall flows into the Zambezi. It offers good views of a gorge and Victoria Falls Bridge, and some folks opted to climb on to rocks in the falls to cool off. But, knowing I had a timeline to adhere to and the main event still to come, I climbed back up, making it a 30-minute round trip.

The Knife Edge Island Trail takes you along a ledge, and across a footbridge over a gorge, to face the eastern cataract. This included Armchair Falls, a natural depression on the lip of the falls where those braver than me immersed themselves in the water. The trail ends with a view of Rainbow Falls and the first gorge’s exit to Boiling Pot in the second gorge.

The third, and least busy, walking option was what I found to be the ironically named Photographic Trail. The views of the falls aren’t as good, or available at all, on this path. About one-third of the way along, I found myself alone amidst a couple of dozen baboons — including some large dominant males. Since I’d had unpleasant experiences with primates in India, I became a bit nervous and turned back.

My driver was true to his word and was there to take me back into town, which has one main commercial street that’s also part of the T1 highway that takes you to the capital city of Lusaka.

It was time for dinner and a restaurant called Na Lelo served me a delicious half a piri piri chicken, French fries and two bottles of Zambia’s quite decent national beer, Mosi, for 84 kwacha (U.S.$7). 

Jollyboy's Backpackers' pool.

Jollyboy's is located just off the main street and, after returning and ordering a beer at its outdoor bar, three women invited me to sit at a table with them. It wasn’t long before they invited me to a nearby club called Limpo’s to celebrate New Year’s Eve with them. Four other women, and two men, also joined us.

My new friends knew people at the door and we were let in without paying a cover charge. We started at an inside bar where a band was playing a mix of reggae, top 40 hits and local music, including an instrumental reggae version of Europe’s “The Final Countdown” which almost gave me an unironic appreciation of the song.

When the band took a break we went to a semi-open-air club with a DJ that was part of the same complex. A bottle of Mosi was just 10 kwacha (U.S.80 cents) and they went down easily in the 30-degree night-time heat.

Zambia is a former British colony previously known as Northern Rhodesia before it gained independence in 1964. Most of the white residents left the country at that time and the population was comprised of 98.2 per cent Black Africans in the 2010 census.

So perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that I was the only white man in a club with 1,000 people, and apparently earned novelty status from it. People bought me beers, asked me to pose in photos with them, and a few women offered more intimate proposals.

The stroke of midnight was celebrated with fireworks — not carefully set off by professional technicians providing a show, but by dozens of people who brought their own to the club and set them off freely.

This lasted for quite a while and, with the noise and smoke from the fireworks combined with the loud dance music blasting from the speakers, I'd had enough and felt no guilt in calling it an early night and leaving with a Rasta named Eric to accompany a young Korean woman named Uri back to Jollyboy's because it probably wasn’t safe for her to walk alone.

I was in bed by 1:30 a.m., the earliest that had happened on New Year’s Eve that I can remember since I was a kid — aside from 2012 when I returned home from Mexico and most of my body broke out into hives and I spent the night hooked up to an intravenous tube in a hospital bed. But that’s a story for another time.