Josem 2019 travel blog

We travelled from Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, to Grootbos (East of Cape Town), South Africa, today. Grrrrrr.... not fun. The first thing that irritated me was that our hotel (Old Drift Lodge) suggested to catch our 11:45am flight, we better leave the lodge at about 8:30. The 40-minute trip meant that we arrived at the airport 45 minutes before check-in was even open. And then the fun started with the airport having a power failure. Somehow in the process of losing power and restarting their computers half a dozen times, the redundancy plan clearly couldn't cope. So we stood in the check-in line for about 90 minutes. The IT people tried repeating the same failed operation a few times and then finally the suits (management) decided that we're going fully manual for check-in. Do you remember the days when each counter operator had a paper-based passenger list with the seat allocation written on it, and then they ticked your name off the list and wrote out one of those ...

Travelling the high life has many dangers. But you can learn a lot while skirting the perils. For example, I managed to teach my self that combining malaria medicine poisoning with Gin & Tonic poisoning is a good way to have a great way to get an hour or two deep sleep, but its not a satisfactory longer term union. This morning was a struggle, but, the thought of missing out on visiting the Victoria Falls spurred me on. So off we went.  After a short walk in the Vic Falls area we came around a bend in the path.  Was I still seeing double or were we being greeted by a huge double rainbow: Thankfully, the latter. Time for a selfie just to prove its real. I have mentioned in earlier postings that the rainfall during this year's "rainy season" was much less than normally received, and this has had an effect on the scope of Victoria Falls. Looking away from where the water was cascading, we get to see the the land formation that makes up Victoria Falls:...

We left Kanga Camp and Mana Pools to fly to Victoria Falls. Bit of a milk run really, with a stop to refuel after a 10 minute flight on another 6-seater Cessna. Then we dropped a couple of passengers off at their camp at a place called Bumi Hills.  It looked very inviting indeed.  Here are a couple of pics I took out of the window as we left them behind. Then we flew to Kariba for a change of plane - upgrading to a 12 seater. Here we are at the transit lounge: We eventually arrived at our accommodation, The Old Drift Lodge. Joining us for lunch was a family of mongooses. The Old Drift Lodge is about 7km down the road from the actual Victoria Falls lookout - a clever selection by our travel agent, Belinda Gallenti of Travel Insights, because we were far away enough from the falls not to be disturbed by the constant flow of scenic helicopter flights. And apart from that, this place was very,very nice to stay at.  I can see that Belinda has chosen pl...