I am just back from a trip of a lifetime.  I have always wanted to go on safari in Africa, and I have now ticked this really significant item off of my personal bucket list. Most of the vacation was spent on safari hunting big game with my camera, but before we got into the serious wildlife part of the trip, my group visited one of the seven natural wonders of the world – Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe.

Known among locals as “Mosi-oa-Tunya”, meaning ‘the smoke that thunders’, this is an accurate description of Victoria Falls which is widely regarded as the world’s largest waterfall.  I love any body of water and am fascinated by waterfalls in general and this definitely lived up to its spectacular reputation. Victoria Falls is approximately twice as wide and twice as deep as Niagara Falls, which itself wowed me over twenty years ago when my husband took me to visit. Comprising four main channels (Devil’s Cataract, Main Falls, Rainbow Falls, and Eastern Cataract), the full width of the Zambezi River plummets down into a narrow ravine. Victoria Falls is located on the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, and it is about a mile wide!  At its maximum, the river plunges over a sheer precipice to a drop of 355 feet, and the falls’ average flow is almost 33,000 cubic feet per second, with spray that goes 1,500 feet into the air, sometimes more.  About one million tourists visit every year, and last month I travelled about 9,000 miles to become one of them.

It is difficult to really describe just how breathtakingly stunning these falls are.  Just think about the biggest waterfall you have ever seen, then go up an order of magnitude wider, higher, louder and more thunderous ….and then crank it up again.  That starts to give you an idea of Victoria Falls.  

I am fascinated by history and was interested to learn that the first non-Africans to reach the Zambezi River were Arab traders, who utilized the river’s lower reaches from the 10th century onward. They were followed in the 16th century by the Portuguese, who hoped to use the river to develop trade. Until the 19th century, the river, then called the Zanbere, was believed to flow south from a large inland sea that was also thought to be the origin of the River Nile. Accurate mapping of the Zambezi did not take place until the Scottish missionary and famous explorer David Livingstone charted most of the river’s course in the 1850s. Searching for a trade route to the East African coast, he traveled from Sesheke, a small town 150 miles above Victoria Falls in what is now the Western Province of Zambia, to the Indian Ocean.  The most spectacular discovery on this last leg of his great journey was to the thundering, smoke–like waters on the Zambezi at which he arrived on November 16, 1855, when he patriotically named them Victoria Falls after the British Queen Victoria. Livingstone returned to England a year later as a national hero. News from and about him during the previous three years had stirred the imagination of English-speaking people around the world to an unprecedented degree. His map of the river remained the most accurate until the 20th century, when further surveys finally traced the Zambezi to its source.

The land of my birth has many connections to southern Africa and the British politician and mining magnate, Cecil Rhodes, formed the British South Africa Company in 1889. The country of Rhodesia (which today is Zambia and Zimbabwe) was named after him and in 1905, with the completion of Victoria Falls Bridge and the railway line, the town of Livingstone (named after explorer David Livingstone) was founded. This became the capital of Northern Rhodesia from 1907 to 1935. Northern Rhodesia won independence from British rule in 1964 and became Zambia which celebrates its independence every October 24th.  Southern Rhodesia had a much harder time gaining its independence.  In 1965, the colonial government unilaterally declared itself independent of the British Empire, but it took fifteen years until the United Kingdom granted it independence on April 18th, 1980.  I remember as a child in England watching the news on BBC to learn that Rhodesia was now a country called Zimbabwe.

There is a lot more information at www.britannica.com

Seeing Victoria Falls brought to mind a quote from 20th century American photographer, Ansel Adams, who famously chronicled the American West:    “The world is incomprehensibly beautiful—an endless prospect of magic and wonder.”

God Bless America!

– ENDS – 

Lesley grew up in London, England and made Georgia her home in 2009.  She can be contacted at lesley@francis.com or via her full-service marketing agency at www.lesleyfrancispr.com.