Day 24, August 17: Victoria Falls

 We woke at 5 a.m., only to discover the power was out. We struggled with flashlights and eventually I went downstairs to see if I could get outside. All the exterior doors were locked; we were imprisoned. I tried the key they'd given us, but it didn't open the doors. 

At around 5:30 a.m., the owners turned up. They struggled for about 10 minutes with the front door, eventually managed to get the lock to cooperate, and then turned on the generator, much too late  to provide hot water for a shower, but at least making coffee possible. I told Her Highness that locking people into a building was a feature of a prison, not a lodge. She argued she had shown me how to unlock the front door (she hadn't, and in any case the key didn't turn when I tried it). I told her I adamantly refused to be locked in for another night, and would sleep out on the deck if necessary. She said go ahead', but I noticed after we returned from our safari drive all the locks had been freshly oiled, and turned smoothly, and there was a key in one of the doors. The squeaky wheel quite literally got the oil this time.  

The real problem, of course, was the antiquated locks, which had no option to lock the outside while allowing exit from the inside. I am sure these violate all sorts of safety regulations -- locking people into a building has a long and terrible history -- but who knows in the corrupt state of Zimbabwe?

The madame of the house insisted that power outages are rare in Victoria Falls. Apparently the corruptocrats spare VF because it's a tourist Mecca. However, this is the weekend of the international SADC summit, and local theory is they choked off the power to VF to keep it on in Harare and con the local dictators of neighboring countries into thinking that Zimbabwe has a functioning electric grid. 

Anyway, the safari drive was surprisingly good, probably because we changed plans on the fly and drove down a long grassy valley and not through the miambo. Some critters, photos taken with my 75 - 300 mm lens because I broke the UV filter on my 200-800 mm and can't get it off in a lodge room...

Spotted hyena

Southern yellow billed hyena

Blue waxbill

Natal spurfowl.

Dinner, at Dusty Roads, was OK. They were pushing native township cuisine, which features spiced meat stews and rather crunchy, tart green kale-like stuff -- not bad at all. Oh, and caterpillars, which I refused. Talked to the maitresse-d, who extolled the virtues of the previous white hegemony and the ineptitude and corruption of black rule. Honestly can't say she's wrong about the latter, though I suspect Ian Smith's crowd were not quite as beneficent as she claims. But Zimbabwe can't go on like this, with an exploding population, massive unemployment and crumbling infrastructure. Harare probably has a population of 2.5 million, but no one knows. Newcomers won't admit they live there, because they needed permission from the gummint to migrate in from rural provinces and didn't have it. 

A country with incessant sunshine should be able to manage solar power.