With a short interval for Christmas, we travel through a sad Zimbabwe from 19 to 31 December.
Not that we have experienced an intense sadness, but in everything we experienced it sounded, especially in one statement. Right before we were to fly to Tanzania for Christmas we wish the parking attendant at the store a Merry Christmas. His answer was “I do not celebrate Christmas, there is no money.” Then we had to swallow.
We also noticed long queues waiting at the banks, really hundreds of people. We enquired with a taxi driver, he said you can up to $ 50 at a time, everything is paid in US dollars, and you just have to wait and see if there is money in the bank anyway.
Zimbabwe is nevertheless beautiful, stunning scenery, friendly people, but expensive, even for us Westerners. That is, considerably more expensive than neighboring countries. At the regular roadblocks the police is clearly instructed to pick tourists make driving expensive. Happily we only once had a penalty for an unsafe strap on the bonnet, USD 20 …
Our first night is at Lake Kariba in the north. Reportedly, this is the largest lake in Africa and it provides large parts of both Zambia and Zimbabwe electricity and drinking water.
The camp, Warthogs Bush Camp is right on the lake and is regularly visited by elephants and hippos. In this rainy season, the animals are far away, there is plenty to drink and eat in the surrounding forests. We are the only campers and specially for us a night watchman keeps an eye on things. We drink a few beers in the bar and cook our own supper, the cook is free today.
We leave early and decide, after visiting a few campsites and lodges down the lake, to drive to the Chinhoyi Caves that have a campsite.
It is a lovely campsite with plenty of room and good toilet and shower facilities, unfortunately for us, as we are the only campers hot water is not fired. We take a beer in the hotel next door and make our own food again.
The next morning we visit the cave. As campers we get a huge discount, we paid $ 6 total as we otherwise would pay about $ 10 per person. In the afternoon and evening we have seen different people entering the cave, even with diving equipment, we are curious.
Our not so high expectations, we have seen more caves, are surpassed by far. The water turns out to be very, very blue and tremendously clear and the silence is disturbed only by the wind and the bats despite the nearby highway. The path towards the caveo is fine landscaped, though something is missing here and there, a bar of the fence and a step not quite right. This is truly a must do for anyone traveling through Zimbabwe!
We continue to Harare and check in at the It’s a Small World Backpackers where they have one site for the car with roof tent, we’re lucky.
In the evening we meet Wilma and Richard who travel 6 months through southern Africa with a rental car (Volkswagen Polo). Later a young Dutch couple joins with us, they ended up more or less by accident in Zimbabwe, they do freelance marketing work for various NGO’s in African countries, have just begun and thus full of inspiration and ambition, enthusiastic people!
On Thursday, December 22 we celebrate Sonja’s birthday extensively,
first a nice lunch at Mugg and Bean
nd in the evening a sumptuous dinner at Amanzi. The pictures speak for themselves …
On Friday we visit the Lion & Cheetahpark where I make a new friend.
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That night we fly to Dar es Salam to celebrate Christmas with the children.
Milady is now parked in the courtyard of the Backpackers and we find her unharmed when we return the night of 28-29th of December. We sleep inside that night, in our own room.
We get up in time and travel to the camp site at the Great Zimbabwe National Monument. It is dry when we set up our tent and we can not prevent a monkey to steal bananas from the car.
When we finish our food, or actually while eating, it starts to rain and it keeps raining the whole night, all our laundry gets soaked. Fortunately the tent keeps well so we can sleep dry in the rain.
In the morning we do a guided tour of the ruins, our guide Teach, he has been a teacher in a past life, can tell a lot about the history of the site, the country and the people. His story speaks a genuine pride for his country and people, despite the sad current political situation, nice to experience.
When we return to the car show it doesn’t start, but fortunately I can get help from the park rangers who happened to just come by with their Toyota pickup. Later in South Africa there appears to be a short in the wire from the alternator to the batteries.
We can again drive in the afternoon and reach the campsite of The Lion & Elephant Motel nicely before dark. Somewhere in a corner of the garden, to be honest, Sonja sees them first, are two I think Series I Land Rover rusting away. Unfortunately, the owner is not present otherwise I might have been tempted to bid …
On Saturday morning, we drive into South Africa via the Beitbridge border post, the charges, all together 9 USD.