Photographs of Victoria Falls

Raging water in flood at the 'Devil's Cataract'

First view of main falls obscured by mist that falls as rain

Leaping Waters - another name for the Devil's Cataract

Smoke that Thunders - Mosi-oa-Tunya - Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe

UNESCO World Heritage Site - one of the seven natural wonders of the world

(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 17^th 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! 

Landscapes and clouds in Chobe

View over the floodplain

The sky becomming darker

And now the storm arrives!

Elephants!

Elaphants across the water with Egyptian Geece in the foreground

A family group playing in the water

Mother and baby moving back to the bush

Animals in Chobe National Park

Buffalo - very near and quite fierce

The family of giraffes - very graceful for such large animals

Rare sighting of zebra at this time of year.                                      In front, a group of impala.  

The water behind is the flooded River Chobe

Chobe National Park - Botswana

The minute you cross the border between Namibia and Botswana at Ngoma, you enter the vast National Park known as Chobe after the river along its northern border.  The Chobe is a tributary to the Zambezi River but is unique in that it can flow in both directions depending upon the level of water in the river.  When the water is high the Chobe flows north-easterly into the Zambezi.  During the rainy season the much of the flood plain in covered in water to make the river expand into a vast expanse of water, protected for many, many species of birds and animals.

To enter the park you pay a fee and then turn off the tar, main road under a thatched archway and begin the off-road trek.  A four-wheel drive vehicle is essential.

The bush is thick and very green and it takes a while for your eyes to adjust to the many shades and tangled undergrowth to begin to make sense of it at all and spot the animals grazing or moving about.  Grasses and shrubs are abundant with taller trees at intervals.

The beginning of the drive is very rocky under wheel, although this breaks down so the tracks are really sand.  The overall feeling is quite enclosed and lush.  

After a short drive the track heads downhill and runs along the bank of the huge river flood plain.  In the dry season there are driving tracks much lower and nearer to the water but for us we need to use a higher track due to flooding.  Every so often, there is a dead end track to explore leading down to the water’s edge.  Here you can really appreciate the calm stillness of the place and how the water attracts so many species of bird and provides drinking and playing space for even the big animals.  The sun sparkled on the water and the sky was forever changing.  Sometimes very dark storm clouds far away provided a photogenic backdrop and contrast to the water, sky and grass.

Animal groups seemed to appear a species at a time so there was time to concentrate and work out the differences and similarities between various antelopes or birds before the next appeared (various species of antelope appeared first - impala (so dainty), lechwe and kudu.  Travel was slow speed and the windows were open – about as good an experience as you could wish for.

We turned off the main track to the right, away from the river, and up a small rise.  Here the bush opened out into small hills and dips which were covered in shorter grass.  Bushes were further apart and tall trees grew.  Here we came across a group of eleven giraffes moving to a shallow waterhole.  The open bush spread for miles and the animals were not bothered by our presence at all.  This was true of the whole park – we just had to be quiet, stay still and watch everything.

Upon re-joining the main track we headed further into the park, making visits from time to time to the water’s edge.  We were fortunate to come across a large group of hippos playing in the water but they were lying so low it was difficult to gain a good impression of their size for any photograph.  Crocodiles were basking on the opposite bank – better to stay at least six feet from the bank just in case you don’t see one!

There is always something to spot and your eyes are quickly tired from staring into the surroundings, up and down.  A group of four zebras was an exciting discovery as these are rare near the water at this time.  They were smaller than you might imagine but the pattern on their skin was fascinating.

Then- just before lunch break we came across the first elephants!  Just like a picture, a family group was arranged under a single tree!  From then on many, many groups were observed.  If they were moving across the track we waited.  It’s not good advice to drive, even slowly, between groups of walking elephants.  You should wait for the whole group to move across first and then move on.

The landscape changed only slightly, mostly flat ground but the rocky terrain changed to more of sand which the elephants prefer.  Sometimes the scrub opened out to more open areas dotted with trees, sometimes it felt very enclosed.  It was difficult to imagine how different this would be in the Namibian winter (our summer) when all the grass would be burnt dry, the flood plain would be dry and the river shrunk back to its proper banks and all the leaves would be off the trees, for they are not evergreens.

Bird life was prolific and the sight of a pied kingfisher hovering and then diving vertically to reappear with a fish, which it then killed by whipping it onto its fallen-tree perch, was a highlight.

We entered the park at 7.30am and left around 4pm – with around 800 photographs between us!  The temperature was 34 degrees, no rain on us (although thunder storms around us by the afternoon) so bright sunshine all the way.

Animals seen included:

• impala
• lechwe
• kudu
• water buck
• puku
• giraffe
• zebra
• elephant
• hippo
• buffalo
• warthog
• crocodile
• jackal
• baboon
• water lizard
• meerkat
• mongoose

Birds seen included:

• kori bustard
• openbilled stork
• maribou stork
• fish eagle
• hornbill
• grey lourie
• lilacbreasted roller
• sacred ibis
• egyptian geese
• cormorants
• bee eaters (various including the carmine bee eater)
• kingfisher
• bataleurs
• tawny eagle
• knob-billed ducks
• african flycatcher
• blacksmith plover
• crowned plovers
• african jacanas

Have a great time looking them all up – believe me they are wonderful in real life – it was a paradise!

Song of the Namib - a poem

Song of the Namib

Jennifer Davis 1991 (Sponsored by Rossing Foundation, Oxfam UK, New Namibia Books)

(Published by New Namibia Books (Pty) Ltd, P.O. Box 21601. Windhoek. The Publisher has been contacted for permission to reproduce this poem)

Soo-oop-wa is a Nama name for the sound of the sighing wind of the desert.  The Namib is the desert which runs along the west coast of Namibia for 1350km.  See Blog dated 13th and 23rd February for information about the Desert and Rossing Mine.

Song of the Namib

Soo-oop-wa, Soo-oop-wa, where have you been?

To the sea in the West with the waves of green.

Soo-oop-wa, Soo-oop-wa, what did you there?

I brought in the fog for the desert to share.

Soo-oop-wa, now where are you going?

To play in the dunes for ever flowing.

Soo-oop-wa, Soo-oop-wa why do you blow?

To scatter the seeds that they might grow.

Soo-oop-wa, Soo-oop-wa, why blow from the East?

I bring heavenly gifts for a fine desert feast.

Soo-oop-wa, Soo-oop-wa, why do you moan?

In the waves of sand I can not find a home.

Soo-oop-wa, Soo-oop-wa, why do you sigh?

I must find things to do; forever restless am I.

Soo-oop-wa, Soo-oop-wa, is the desert so bare?

Look closely, my child, you’ll find wondrous things there.

There are creatures that swim beneath hot desert sand

And lizards that dance the song of the land.

See the scorpions that hunt only after it’s dark

See dainty footprints of the sweet desert lark

There are spiders that roll down the dunes just for fun

And sleep in silk tunnels away from the sun.

The tiny gecko with his little webbed feet

And the gerbils and snakes that all adapt to the heat.

The beetle that stands on his head may seem weird

But cool drops of dew fall down his legs into his beard!

There are aphids and beetles that live on milkweed

I play with these plants and spread their seed.

The ground squirrel nibbles on dry devil’s thorn

But when the rain comes a new world is born.

For then colourful plants spring to life from the sand

And spread like a patchwork quilt all over the land

I whistle through canyon crags, dark and old

And ancient Welwitschia leaves, fold upon fold.

I tease the golden mole and the wasp with no wings

Oh, my child, I have found such wonderful things!

Soo-oop-wa, Soo-oop-wa, do you blow in the night?

Yes, I play with the creatures of the silver moonlight.

I blow dust from the stars in the dark heavens high

So they sparkle and twinkle until the new dawn is nigh.

Then back to the golden waves I come

To play in the warmth of the great, burning sun!