Nobody believes me when I say that the 80 days thing is a coincidence. But it is.
We leave the day after Isabel's last exam and return the day before the first full day of school. 80 days.
Actually from take off to touch down at Winnipeg International is 79 days and 20 hours, but door to door from our house... precisely 80 days.

And a bit about the backstory. In 1993 after three years in veterinary practice Lorraine and I quit our jobs and backpacked around the world for eight months, doing everything from living in a cave in Greece (a very nice cave mind you) to camel trekking across the Rajastani desert to celebrating Christmas in Hong Kong to island hopping in Thailand to volcano climbing in Indonesia to living with a family in Samoa to... well, the list does go on and on. Everyone said, "Wow, that was the trip of a lifetime!" To which we responded, "Nooo! It can't be the only time we do that! It just can't be." We swore we would do something similar again when we had kids. It's 22 years later. Isabel is 13. Alexander is 10.
It's time.

Sunday, July 26, 2015

Day 35 Zambezi Flashback

I'm going have to jump back and forth a little in time. The last post had us in the Okavango in Botswana and today we're in Namibia, but I want to go back to Zimbabwe first.

A week ago today the Dragoman truck arrived, with Emma, the Welsh leader, Denford, the Zimbabwean cook, and Chris, the Kenyan driver. Four other families joined us - two from England and one each from Australia and Switzerland. Plus my brother Daniel who had spent the previous week to roaming southern Zimbabwe on his own (ask him about his train out of Bulawayo...). Dragoman runs long distance overland trips in Africa, Asia and South America. Lorraine and I crossed Pakistan. India and Nepal with them in 1993. "Overlanding" is a very particular and special form of travel. I hope to give you a better sense of this in the coming posts.

But Zimbabwe. The reason this trip starts in Victoria Falls is immediately evident when you arrive. The spray is visible from a great distance and the sound was often the only thing we heard late at night, four kilometers away. Words and photos and even panorama shots and video can only provide feeble representations. Victoria Falls are enormous and deeply impressive. Being in a wild National Park they are more dramatic than the more domesticated and developed Niagara.

And the Zambezi offers more than the Falls and the gorge below (earlier post) -  the wide meandering hippo infested stretch above is also attractive. A sharply dressed fellow named Reliable, whose phone kept going off with a Mission Impossible theme ring tone, sold us tickets on a upper Zambezi sunset cruise. Yes, pretty much as romantic as it sounds (if you plug your ears and squint enough that you don't hear or see the children...).

Photos will follow. Internet remains wobbly.

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