Glamorous Only in Retrospect: 24 December

24 December

Livingstone, Vic Falls

0 Miles

Steph:

I can't describe to you how old I feel when I say this, but I'm so glad they didn't play loud music until 2:30am again last night. Oi. Those young people and their partying. Haha! No, but really. Also, I'm very glad for my sleeping bag. That thing is top quality, but it is waaaaay too hot for these temperatures. Because of the rain, the nights have become pleasantly chilly. Just not cold enough for a -10C bag. It's really uncomfortable to be cold and be sweating at the same time. All night.

That's a little side note for everyone. Hope you enjoyed it :)

So anyway, the hostel we're staying in offers free transport to Victoria Falls every morning. We hopped on it at 10am along with our new friend, Misaka (from Japan). The first thing we saw when we arrived was a baboon trying to non-chalantly stroll into the ticket office and having to be literally chased away. They turned out to be everywhere. One would just walk down the path right next to all the humans and look at us like we were in his way. They're clearly not intimidated by the fact that we're taller. Why would they be? They've got fangs big enough to rip my throat out in one bite. And they're tushies are shockingly bright red. I'm not sure why that's scary but it's definitely noteworthy. It was cool to see them interact with each other and us. You can really see the intelligence when they look at you.

The falls were amazing. I didn't really know what to expect because we had heard so many things about the Zimbabwean side being better and that Zambia was just "ehh", and that sometimes there's not really that much water falling this time of the year. But it was grreat! The first thing we did was take a little hike down the gorge to the base of the falls. I felt like Indy at the beginning of Raiders going through the jungle. Beautiful and humid, with the thunder of the falls getting louder and louder. After that, we went around the other side and got our first actual glimpse. It was awesome. We got immediatly soaked by the mist and it felt amazing. I'll just show you pictures rather than try to describe it. Definitely worth the $20usd to get in.

At Faulty Towers, I took a nice long nap and woke up to find that Erik and a few guys (Tom from Japan and Zach from NYC) had already started the festivities without me. The night was incredibly fun. We had a few drinks, looked at each others pictures, sang songs, told stories, later joined some lovely ladies from Holland, told some more stories and had a great time. It was the first Christmas Eve I spent away from my family, which was a little tough for me. But these people were so nice that it made it a little better :)