Victoria Falls - Part II/ Cruise

While it is the Zambezi River that creates the powerful falls, upstream from the falls, the Zambezi River is a quiet, slow moving river, with its riverbanks filled with wildlife, such as hippos, elephants and crocodiles. One of the best ways to experience the Zambezi is on a sunset cruise. Now you can do the sunset cruise as a "booze cruise", but we decided to take it down a notch and just take the standard cruise (Our agent looked at us and thought we'd prefer the more sedate one, whereas the other person booking was recommended to the party boat. We were not sure if this was an insult or compliment.) Even though we decided to skip the booze cruise, we were quite excited to find out drinks on the boat were still unlimited. Some say the more drinks you have, the more amazing the animals seem. But despite making good use of the open bar, we know the animals we saw would have looked good even without the cocktails. Speaking of drinks, one thing we've always enjoyed when traveling, is trying each country's own beer. In South Africa, the most popular and best tasting (in our opinion) was Castle. In Zambia, the beer was Mosi. This is our favorite so far. We weren't in Zimbabwe long enough to try their beer, Zambezi. And as this blog is being written from Botswana, we've also tried their beer called Lion. The word on the street is that Namibia, with a strong German influence in its culture, has the best beer in Southern Africa. On our cruise, we saw our first hippos since being in Africa. Hippos spend all day in the water and then come onto land to sleep. So sunset is the perfect time to see them be a bit active, but some still were floating and swimming near shore. Somehow this huge grey animal with short legs is just really cute, especially as it waddles around. But as we saw, if provoked by another, a hippo can make move pretty fast when it needs to. We also saw a number of crocodiles, elephants and some pretty birds.

Location:Zambia