in honor of falls girl

We ventured to Vic Falls today and trekked through the rain forest. Before long, Emma was beside us, looking down and saying, “No, no, no, no, nooooo, no, no.” As soon as we thought these no’s would stop, another string of “NOOOOO, no, no, no, no” would chime in. Ems sliced her foot open. So we wobbled back to a hotel/casino to get some first aid attention for the poor girl. After leaving the pharmacy that happened to be in the casino, there was a torrential downpour. Taking my parent’s usual thinking that there is ALWAYS one day per vacation that gets completely screwed over, I wasn’t too stressed. But we all were a little skeptical about actually making it to the Falls.

Thank you, weatherman. Because the rain soon cleared, Emma was a trouper, and we continued on our way. We finally made it to the Falls to see the most beautiful Lucky Star rainbows suspended in the mist, and cliffs with the most powerful surges of water. For Anna, it was absolutely love at first sight. As soon as we turned around, “Falls Girl” was off exploring, getting lost in her passion and new-found obsession. We walked around for a bit and returned to the entrance, only to realize we just saw a tiny portion of the Falls. So while Emma passed out on a bench and watched our stuff, and while Anna was off on her own, Talya and I walked the rest of the way to see the main Falls. Some great people-watching ensued. Including a younger couple who hired a man to carry their umbrella and take pictures of them making mirror faces. We were convinced that they were Croatian (no offense to all of those Croatians out there)--until we heard their American accents. Shame.

We ate at this touristy Disney world of African culture. It’s usually how I’ve been trained not to travel (my family is relatively cruise-phobic, and I’m pretty phobic of looking and feeling too much like a tourist), but it was a really fun and definitely worthwhile. We were able to pick out warthog, impala knuckle, buffalo, crocodile, etc. for them to cook for us and it was all delicious. We wore some Zambian fabric (not nicer than the ones we bought ourselves at the market, however), people painted dot-designs on our faces, you can have your fortune read, Emma got her hair braided, and we were sung to by our amazing acapella African waiters as a thank you.

When we got back to Shoestrings, we met our friend, Kase! Kase decided to leave his group of traveling friends to go off on his own in Zimbabwe. He was randomly chilling at the hostel’s bar when we walked in. To bolster the random excitement of the night, I saw my first major fight! I definitely never need to see anything like it again. It entailed two big men throwing punches drunkenly over a girl. Chairs were thrown, women were shoved, and one too many plumbers cracks were shown (one is immediately too many, in my opinion).