We were heading to Zimbabwe to visit Victoria Falls the next day. I was in two minds about it, given the political state of the country: while the situation had improved, and the Zimbabwe side of Victoria Falls provided better views, it was still unnerving to take a young lad with autism to such a troubled place.
Tuhafeni had last visited Zimbabwe—or Zim, as it’s commonly known—eleven years earlier, and was still bruised by the experience. While escorting a group like ours, he’d been fleeced of all the tour company money by bogus demands from the border guards. They’d held him in a police cell for ten hours, trying to squeeze more out of him. Eventually, finally convinced that he had indeed run out of money, they’d released him into the night.
Understandably then, Tuhafeni seemed on edge the next morning. We all did. He had visited the border the previous afternoon to make sure all the paperwork for our visas and the truck was organised. We filed into the immigration office. A portrait of Robert Mugabe dominated the room. The immigration officials weren’t smiling, in contrast to every previous border post. I was chastised for not having the immigration form in my passport and the correct money, in US dollars, for the visas. It cost us thirty dollars each, except for the Englishwoman who had to pay fifty-five; the price of colonialism I suppose.
Flustered, I awkwardly retrieved the immigration form and notes as Sam observed that I was being a dork. He was right, of course. ‘Chop, chop, hurry up,’ they said, which became retrospectively hilarious during the ensuing delay. An official scowled at Sam, who was stimming in the corner of the room. It soon became clear there was a problem. What a surprise. It seemed the man who had spoken to Tuhafeni the previous day had been mistaken: the fee for our tour group was twice what had been quoted.
We moved outside where we languished in the glaring sun for over an hour. Sam played with the sand while Tuhafeni tried to keep his cool. The group postulated on the reasons for the delay. Corruption? Maladministration? Just toying with us? Eventually the border officials waved their hands and said we could go. A visibly relieved Tuhafeni hit the pedals and we zoomed past the boom gates. It was corruption, of course; they had just been trying to rip the company off.
At the dusty, dirty town of Victoria Falls, we stopped to ask for directions to our accommodation. As soon as we pulled up, a man approached the windows trying to sell small wooden carved statues. Another waved Zimbabwean banknotes in an attempt to change money. The notes I saw were for five billion and twenty billion Zimbabwean dollars. Sam was impressed. At the resort, our room was expensive, basic and poorly lit, the staff edgy, the security intense. The whole feel of the country was different to anything we had previously experienced. I was on high alert.
I managed to Skype Benison. ‘We’re in Zimbabwe,’ I told her.
‘What?’ she said, in alarm.
‘At Victoria Falls, on the Zimbabwe side.’
She frowned at me through cyberspace. ‘I didn’t know you were going there. Be careful.’
Victoria Falls, by far the largest waterfall on the planet, had long been a planned highlight of our trip. We’d been in Africa over two months now, but the moment of our first sighting of it had seemed to rush up on us, just as the broad and mighty Zambezi rushes up on the nearly two-kilometre long gaping chasm in the Earth’s surface, over which a million litres of water plummets every second.
The water, falling over the one-hundred-metre drop, creates a roar that you have to shout over, a force that literally thumps you in the chest, and a beauty that, as Livingstone described it in 1855, was ‘so lovely [it] must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight’.
I was in awe. Sam was too. We all were. You couldn’t help it.
But as we cruised along the cliff opposite the falls, the viewing points became progressively wetter and Sam became progressively more bored. He’d liked the falls, but he wanted out, telling me he’d had enough, he’d seen enough of the falls, and that he wanted to go back to the hostel. I made a deal: he’d get a bonus half point for the day if he completed the whole five-kilometre walk and went to all the lookouts.
‘Make it a whole point,’ he said.
‘Half is plenty.’ We negotiated as I followed him up the soaking path. ‘All you have to do is walk. That’s not hard.’
‘Half a point is weird and odd. Let’s round it up to a whole point.’
He wore me down and I relented. A whole bonus point it was. As we exited the vast and sodden cloud that surrounds the falls and re-entered the sunlight, now all drenched, we visited the last viewing point on the cliff-top walk, which looked over to Victoria Falls Bridge, spanning the second gorge. The job done, Sam took off back up the path we had just come down. I half jogged after him. Well, there’s nowhere for him to go, I thought to myself.
But then I came to a fork in the path: the left turn was a shortcut to the exit, the right another path to viewing points along the cliff. I went left, and soon passed an African couple resting on a bench. ‘Did a teenage boy just come past here?’ I asked.
He hadn’t. Bugger. Adrenaline pumping, I jogged to the exit. He hadn’t been sighted here either. I asked the woman at the exit to not let him out. Over the next quarter of an hour I worriedly explored the maze of paths around the lookouts before finally hearing he’d returned to the exit. It hadn’t been as bad as the previous instances of losing Sam, but it had still not been pleasant.
Our group dined at the restaurant at our accommodation, not wanting to venture out the gates at night. It was scary enough during the day. A group of male singers appeared in the dining room, singing traditional songs in tribal dress. They were very good, but we waited for the inevitable request for money for the unsolicited performance. Did the facility get a kickback? Probably.
They sang a fascinating African version of ‘Swing Low, Sweet Chariot’, which brought the song full circle: it had started in Africa, had been taken to America on slave ships, and was now returned home. The last song was ‘Shosholoza’; the song I had heard so often in South Africa had originated in these parts.
The group had decided to splurge on a fifteen-minute helicopter ride. It would be expensive but unmissable. So the next morning we were bundled into the helicopter company’s minivan and driven to the heliport.
We were drilled on the safety protocols and procedures and Sam started to worry. ‘I am not going to die. I am not going to be chopped.’
‘No, Sam,’ I assured him, ‘just keep calm and keep your head low as you get on and off. I’ll look after you.’
As we approached the incredibly loud rotors, Sam sank lower and lower. He was practically crawling the last yard or two but I got him aboard okay. With headphones and mike in place, away we went.
Neither Sam nor I had ever been on a helicopter before. Within two minutes we were doing figure-eight loops over the smoke that thunders. As the helicopter banked, dipped and climbed, we were alternately pressed into the windows, and then away, thrust forward and then forced back into our seat. It was a rollercoaster hundreds of metres in the air.
From that height we could appreciate how the wide flat river was compressed first into a deep narrow gorge before the washing machine-like waters, frothing and swirling, would tumble through the subsequent series of gorges gouged out of the arid landscape. Wild rapids raced down alleyways, zigzagging into the distance.
Sam was remarkably calm and cool, and smiled the whole time, as he so often does. But as soon as we landed I had to stop him running to the safety of the terminal. Fair enough. The whole experience was a complete buzz.
That afternoon we went shopping in town. The first hawker approached us even before we’d passed the security guards and boom gates that marked the boundary of our resort.
‘Hello, sir! How are you?’ he yelled over the boom gate.
I didn’t respond.
‘You want white-water rafting? Bungy? Zimbabwean billion-dollar bills? Change money? Taxi?’
No response. I was used to being hassled, but not like this. His street colleagues queued up, one by one. They were also more aggressive and persistent than I’d been used to. When I ignored them, the tone became insistent. They walked beside me for minutes at a time. To them I was a big bag of money, bigger than anything they could imagine.
Sam had the perfect manner for street hawkers. He didn’t have to pretend to ignore them, it came naturally. He didn’t even notice them. I tried to follow his lead.
By GDP purchasing price parity, Zimbabwe is the second poorest country in Africa and indeed the world, second only to the Democratic Republic of Congo. The resource-rich country had been devastated by corruption, mismanagement and violence since Uncle Bob came to power in 1980. He’s been rated as the second-worst dictator in the world after North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Zim is also consistently ranked as one of the world’s most corrupt countries.
There are two major ethnic groups in Zimbabwe: the majority Shosa and minority Ndebele. In the mid-1980s, twenty thousand Ndebele were massacred by Mugabe’s thugs to prevent any political uprising. In 2000, Mugabe’s ZANU-PF supporters, led by unemployed war veterans armed with axes and machetes, invaded and seized white-owned farms with the president’s open support. In the same year Uncle Bob was awarded the winning prize in a lottery run by the state bank. No corruption there.
Politically motivated beatings, rape and murders were common, and their frequency rose prior to planned elections. In the 2005 election, the opposition, mainly supported by the urban poor who suffered most under the regime, dared to win some seats in parliament. In response, the government burned markets and homes across the country. Seven hundred thousand people lost their homes or livelihoods, and two million people were driven further into poverty.
In 2009, hyperinflation of over five billion per cent finally led to the suspension of the currency, but not before ridiculous one hundred trillion dollar banknotes were issued. The economy was bleeding out. Food became scarce. Life expectancy, exacerbated by rampant HIV, plummeted to the mid thirties.
The country was now paralysed by corruption, waiting for the abominable old criminal to die. But who knows what will come next.
As we walked back to our accommodation a warthog marched importantly down the footpath towards us. We crossed the road to avoid him; he had big tusks so he got right of way. After we crossed the road, a large male baboon glared at me from atop a parked car. The hawkers were not the only hazard on the streets of Victoria Falls.
That night Sam and I shared a warthog schnitzel for dinner, which was another impressive win on the food front. I felt a bit guilty eating our friend Pumbaa from The Lion King, but it did taste good.
In the morning, the English woman from our group discovered monkeys had broken into her tent and ate her antimalarials. At least one Zimbabwean monkey was going to have bad diarrhoea that day. When we returned, we found small vervet monkeys had surrounded our chalet. Sam approached one, and it screeched and advanced towards him aggressively, before I shouted at the small creature, frightening it off. Sam thought it was hilarious. Once we were safe in the chalet, the monkey glared at us through the window while he sat on the sill.
Later in the day when Sam and I visited the supermarket, we saw a blind old lady begging outside. She had sunken eye sockets, sunken cheeks, and a sunken spirit. Inside, as I looked at which juice bottle to buy, a young girl approached me and offered me ‘favours’ if I bought her one too. When we returned outside, a young boy, presumably the blind lady’s grandson, led her away by a stick. Sometimes all you have left is family.
I felt a seething anger well inside. This should never have happened to such a resource-rich country. I hated that ubiquitous portrait photo.
On the group’s last afternoon in Zim, we treated ourselves to high tea at the opulent and grand Victoria Falls Hotel, the oldest hotel in the area and the preferred way station of intrepid early white travellers who worked their way from Cairo to Cape Town or vice versa, by land or air. It was all very British, very indulgent and very cool.
With the camera rolling, Sam debriefed me, conducted a formal interview with Stephanie, a Swiss woman on our tour, and ordered drinks and food. His talk with Stephanie was a high point. I was heartened to see his reciprocal conversational skills were definitely advancing.
His questions were:
• What’s your name?
• Where have you been, where have you been travelling from?
• Where is Switzerland in?
• What town, what city do you live in?
• Have you ever been in Australia?
• Where abouts in?
• Did you went to any shops in Australia?
• Have you been to Coles? (He explained that it was a supermarket.)
• Have you been to New Zealand?
• Where else besides Africa have you been?
• Have you been to Japan?
• Have you enjoyed the trip?
Sam also made an appropriate welcome and farewell, but there were two long pauses, one over a minute long, that Stephanie tolerated and waited through. Stephanie, like so many people we’d met on the trip, was so supportive of what Sam and I were attempting.
As the sun lowered, rainbows formed in the iridescent mist rising up from the falls. The hotel had views up the second gorge to the elegant Victoria Falls Bridge, linking Zimbabwe to Zambia. The bridge, opened in 1905, was constructed by the same company that would go on to build the Sydney Harbour Bridge, and at the time of its construction it was the highest bridge in the world. The placement of the bridge, directly over the point where the water exits the first gorge into the second in a flurry of white water, referred to as the ‘boiling pot’, was specifically designed to give train travellers a view of the falls as they headed to the next destination for Sam and I, Zambia.