Missing the Drop

The only thing that we'd planned about this whole jaunt prior to leaving Blighty was that we weren't going to visit Southern Rhodesia, thereby avoiding supporting that moronic autocrat and his totalitarian regime. Seeing as the British Government don't want to do anything useful, I had decided that action was required; and as Great (sic) Western Railway shareholders will tell you, the Etchell sanctions really do hurt where it counts. Unfortunately, this put us at something of a disadvantage as the trip to Windhoek presented us with two options: a) take an air-conditioned, comfortable bus direct from the town of Victoria Falls (which is in the South) to Windhoek; b) take four different buses and taxis from Livingstone across unmade roads, then a pontoon ferry, just to get into Namibia itself.

Of course, once it had become apparent that a quick visit to Zimbabwe was actually going to relieve a lot of travel difficulties, political and moral objections were straight out the window at a speed of which P. Wylie Esq. would have been proud. (Anyway, hey, who we trying to kid here, such behaviour only really hurts the poor bar stewards on the ground who've got nothing left anyway.) Notwithstanding this, I checked on Zimbabwe's tourism board's website to ensure that we didn't require a visa and hence wouldn't be contributing to the government's coffers. So we booked up the bus tickets, intending to cross the border just in time to catch the bus. Then there was the lure of afternoon tea at the Victoria Falls hotel, thus our intended one hour visit became twenty four, and off we set for the border post.

I had a bad feeling when we were getting our exit stamp at the Zambia border post. This quickly changed to a mood of impending doom when, or arrival at the Zimbabwe post, it became apparent that we did in fact need to pay for a visa (why should the tourist board's site be up to speed when it can be ten month's out of date) and lo and behold as Brits this meant that we paid twice as much as anyone else and because we were paying in GBP (thank Christmas we had some hard currency with us) that meant we got to pay a premium because they're not USD so there we were faced with the prospect of handing over SEVENTY (fgs) folding ones but seeing as we'd already spent a ton on the bus tickets and we couldn't get back into Zambia anyway we paid up and pushed on into Victoria Falls town by which time the great outdoors had already received a good verbal assault and then things really started to warm up as on arrival it only turned out that this wonderful bus we were catching didn't actually leave from Zimbabwe any more but in fact from Zambia as it had done for the previous two months jm&j you couldn't make it up and this meant that not only had we wasted money to enter a country we hadn't really wanted to visit we were now faced with a further fifty sheets visa fee to get back into Zambia well it's a good job you weren't within earshot mum and the final insult followed when it became apparent that a new road had been built along with a bridge which meant the route out of Zambia was actually in fact pretty straight forward jc give me strength.

(Which to be fair, He did. The accountant's charm meant that the very kind gentlemen back at the Zambia border post let us back through the next day without charging us a re-entry fee; which I think was mainly due to the fact that we were British.)