Face to Face with the Falls'If you make it all the way to Danger Point, just remember, at this time of year, you won't see much because of the spray. But your other senses will be up for an almighty beating. Just close your eyes and feel the thunder.' The words of a fellow visitor to Victoria Falls NP came back with resonance as I battled my way through gusts of spray. He was right - approaching the most exposed vantage point on the Zimbabwean side of the Falls, every nerve in my body jangled with the smell, taste, sound and sheer vibration of the mighty cataracts. The fact that I couldn't actually see much didn't matter. I was suddenly very glad of the umbrella that had, till then, felt like an absurd accessory on this bright, cloudless April morning. Initially I'd thought him over-dramatic, but the spectacular power of Victoria Falls in full flood does that to people. Visitors come away claiming to be cleansed, spiritually elevated, even enlightened. By the time the Zambezi River reaches Victoria Falls it is over a mile wide, powerful but placid. Its sudden, cataclysmic tumble over a sheer basalt cliff into a narrow gorge about 100m deep changes its character entirely. Fuelled by energy from the plunge and crammed into a narrow channel, the river becomes a raging torrent surging through a steep-sided, zigzagging course. When the river's at its highest, between March and May, over 500 million cubic metres of water cascade into the gorge every minute, creating an immense updraught which sucks sheets of water skyward as vapour and spray, only to rain down again in showers. From 30 miles away, the spray looks like a graceful line of smoke rising from a bush fire. From 60m away, at Danger Point, it's more like a monumental car wash, and the bellow is deafening. It's at this time of year that the traditional Kololo name for the Falls, 'Mosi-oa-Tunya', or 'the Smoke that Thunders', seems utterly apt. The Victoria Falls NP encloses the Zimbabwean part of the sheer cliff that faces the Falls. Spray nurtures a pocket of lush green rainforest, a World Heritage Site, home to bushbuck, Vervet monkeys, butterflies and birds. I followed tidy paths, bordered by ferns and vine-draped ebonies, mahogonies and palms, between cliff-top viewpoints with different, eye-level, grandstand views of the mass of moving water. The section nearest Danger Point is called the Rainbow Falls, but I soon lost count of the rainbows. As for the pots of gold - until recently, Victoria Falls had seemed strewn with them, gripping the popular imagination since the mid-19th century, when David Livingstone re-named the Falls after Queen Victoria and publicised them in his notes and lectures. Once it was connected by rail to Bulawayo, as part of Cecil Rhodes' grand plan for a Cape to Cairo route, the site became accessible to travellers. A key moment came in 1905 with the completion of the bridge that spans the Batoka Gorge, running so close to the Falls that the spray rained down on trains as they crossed, in accordance with Rhodes' specific directions. Visitor numbers grew steadily during the 20th century, but it was the birth of the adventure sport industry in the early '80s that sent the tourist industry into orbit. By the 1990s Victoria Falls was a boom town, fizzing with new hotels and tour companies. White-water rafting was raging, punters queued up for what was then the world's highest bungee jump and new ideas for action-packed activities bounced from the drawing board into reality. But there was growing anxiety about the boom's impact on the natural environment. Noise pollution became a serious issue, as commercial helicopters, microlights and fixed-wing planes competed for airspace over the Zambezi. Boats began to crowd the river. Controversial schemes to flout planning restrictions by building higher than tree height, and to start developing the islands upstream from the Falls, were rumoured. The town's population doubled and its infrastructure struggled to keep pace. The last eighteen months have seen another radical change, as Zimbabwe's political disarray and negative public image have hit the tourist industry hard. Visitor numbers have plummeted, and a vital source of foreign currency has been lost. It's become a time for new approaches and creative strategic thinking. Before leaving the park I visited David Livingstone's statue. I was alone and it was hard to believe that just two years earlier, the rainforest was considered threatened by the sheer weight of visitor traffic.
Despite plans to erect a marker to set the record straight over the 'discovery' of the Falls (after all, there is evidence that the area has been populated since the late Stone Age), Livingstone remains a popular historical figure locally, largely thanks to his forthright stand against slavery. The statue depicts him striding gravely forward, eyes on the horizon. In his left hand is his Bible, his fingers clamped between the pages as if marking a suitably inspiring quote. Livingstone first approached the Falls by dugout canoe in November 1855, the season when they're at their driest. Having landed on an island above them that now bears his name, he walked right to the lip and peered over to see what he later described as 'the most wonderful sight I had witnessed in Africa'. Lowering a bullet on a string into the gorge, he measured their depth. Ironically, Livingstone's discovery was, for him, a great disappointment in practical terms, since it dashed his hopes of tracing a navigable trade route from the Upper Zambezi to the coast in order to undercut the slave trade. Step Back in TimeThe taxi drivers monitoring the National Park gates knew I was staying at the Victoria Falls Hotel from the colour of my umbrella and promised me a rock-bottom fare, but I felt like walking, trying to imagine what it must have been like for the tourists who, from the 1920s to the 1950s, travelled this route to and from the Falls on hand-pulled wooden trolleys. The path to the hotel gardens is a pleasant one, through mopane woodland and scrub, dotted with wild zinnia, like drops of flame. The Victoria Falls Hotel has been entertaining visitors in elegant style since 1904. Steeped in history, it celebrates its past through old photographs, paintings, posters, press cuttings and trophies lining the walls. Among the glut of memorabilia were a Rhodesia Railways advert from 1939 (which quotes Lord Curzon's militaristic description of the Falls - 'the shout of the cataract, the thunder of the watery phalanxes... spray spumes whizzing upwards like a battery of rockets into the air') and photos of King George VI's 1947 visit, when the royal party took over the entire hotel. |
