(With a little technical help from “Wikipedia”)
Victoria Falls was somewhere I had particularly wanted to visit and helped me to select Namibia as my first choice country of placement for VSO. The falls are about 120km from Katima and we went with a knowledgeable guide/ driver.
From quite a distance away you can see low clouds appearing which become like steam as you approach the entrance to the falls park. This is the spray, almost like heavy showers of rain, that is kicked up when the water reaches the bottom of the gorge especially when the river of full in the rainy season (from late November to early April). “The spray from the falls typically rises to a height of over 400 metres (1,300 ft), and sometimes even twice as high and is visible from up to 50 km (30 miles) away.”
From the Zimbabwean side a footpath takes you right along the full length of the falls, traversing from west to east, so your view is opposite to the falls. It was impossible to see the foot of the falls and for most of the time, its face, as it was the rainy season and the river was in flood. The walks along the cliff top path were in a constant shower and shrouded in mist. Special rain clothing had to be worn but we still were saturated.
“Close to the edge of the cliff, spray shoots upward like inverted rain”.
“The minimum flow, which occurs in November, is around a tenth of the April figure”. Victoria Falls is roughly twice the height of North America's Niagara Falls which I almost visited when I was on an International Headteacher visit in Pittsburgh, USA.
The falls themselves are the first stage in a series of gorges where the whole volume of the Zambezi River pours over the falls and then enters a zigzagging series of gorges as it heads east, eventually to the sea. “The walls of the gorges are nearly vertical and generally about 120 metres (400 ft) high, but the level of the river in them varies by up to 20 meters (65 ft) between wet and dry seasons” (try looking for a Google Earth satellite image).
This is how the gorges and falls were formed:
In Katima Mulilo, the back garden of the house where I am staying leads to an areas of scrubland which is only about 200m from the banks of the Upper Zambezi (flowing west / east). Here the river divides Namibia with Zambia (and Namibia with Angola in Rundu). Travelling east beyond Namibia, the Zambezi then becomes the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. The landscape for hundreds of miles is flat; the river does not travel through a ‘valley’ as such but across a broad plateau. The plateau is made of basalt (an igneous / volcanic rock) above the falls and is horizontally bedded. The basalt has “many large cracks filled with weaker sandstone. In the area of the current falls the largest cracks run roughly east to west (some run nearly north-east to south-west), with smaller north-south cracks connecting them.”
“Over at least 100,000 years, the falls have been receding upstream through the Batoka Gorges, eroding the sandstone-filled cracks to form the gorges. The river's course in the current vicinity of the falls is north to south, so it opens up the large east-west cracks across its full width, and then it cuts back through a short north-south crack to the next east-west one. The river has fallen in different eras into different chasms which now form a series of sharply zigzagging gorges downstream from the falls.”
“The falls have already started cutting back the next major gorge, at the dip in one side of the "Devil's Cataract" (also known as "Leaping Waters") section of the falls. This is not actually a north-south crack, but a large east-northeast line of weakness across the river, where the next full-width falls will eventually form” (see photos 1, 3 and 5).
At the entrance to the park (entry fee £20) there is a large statue of David Livingstone who was the first European to explore the falls on 17th November 1855. He was journeying from the Upper Zambezi to the mouth of the river (1852 -1856). The falls were well known to local tribes at that time. At first, “Europeans were sceptical of their reports, perhaps thinking that the lack of mountains and valleys on the plateau made large falls unlikely.”
“Livingstone had been told about the falls before he reached them from upriver and was paddled across to a small island that now bears the name Livingstone Island in Zambia. Livingstone had previously been impressed by the Ngonye Falls further upstream, but found the new falls much more impressive, and gave them their English name in honour of Queen Victoria.”
“He wrote of the falls, "No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed in England. It had never been seen before by European eyes; but scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight."
“The rainforest is nurtured by the spray from the falls and contains plants rare for the area such as pod mahogany, ebony, ivory palm, wild date palm and a number of creepers and lianas”.
I found the falls awe-inspiring and loved the atmosphere of both hot and wet. There is a real jungle feel to the vegetation with long entwined creepers in the trees. Everything glistened!
