Victoria Falls or Mosi-oa-Tunya
Added on Monday, June 23rd, 2008 by Carole Nash Editor
Victoria Falls or Mosi-oa-Tunya
The journey has been getting hard in that there are no breaks. I have been riding close to 400 miles most days, sometimes over 500 miles during daylight hours which is close to 1000 mile days over 24 hour periods. If you take into account starts of 8am and then deduct filming time, I’d be arriving into my digs around 8pm, two hours into the night. After a quick shower, having written a story and downloaded the days filming from the cameras hard drives, it was midnight before I slept. This was seven days a week. I enjoy this workload but just a few days before the end of this first leg, and with so much yet to do and see, I know I needed to pace myself, but how?
Victoria Falls, or Mosi-oa-Tunya, as the name used by the local people, is a world heritage site of such relevance to the history of this part of Africa that I was awestruck. David Livingstone was the first white man to see the falls and is a hero of almost unparalleled proportions when you consider he journeyed there, alone with just indigenous tribes to help him. I think the history of the falls is required reading as one of the great geographical and historical features of Africa.
In 1983 I cycled to the source of the White Nile from Cairo to the most distant source of the waters past Lake Victoria to the Luvironza River in Burundi, which itself flows into the Rurubu River near the northern Burundian town of Kayanza. I stood there, by the pyramid that commemorates Livingstone being the first white man to see the source of the world’s longest river. His list of such achievements were wide.
Victoria Falls is neither the highest nor the widest waterfall in the world, but it does claim to be the largest based on combination of the height of 108 metres and the width of 1.7 kilometres so forming the largest sheet of falling water in the world.
Standing before the falls I couldn’t see it all face-on because of the plume of spray that gives this water the epithet the title of the ‘water that thunders,’ and is shared between Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The riding on a project like this is long and sometimes hard but the route is like joined up dots between magnificent locations. Already Parallel World has seen the Pyramids, the Nubia, Ethiopian Highlands, Mount Kilimanjaro and now Victoria Falls. Sometimes this project is to do with people, sometimes with places. Where I stand I can see a plume of spray rise up 100ft. Behind me there is a railway and road bridge across the Second Gorge that links Zambia with Zimbabwe. In 1900, and in response to the desire of Cecil Rhodes’ British South Africa Company for mineral rights and imperial rule north of the Zambezi, his vision of a Cape-Cairo railway drove plans for the first bridge across the Zambezi. He insisted it be built where the spray from the falls would fall on passing trains, hence the site at the gorge. Timber forests, northeast of the falls, and ivory and animal skins, were then able to be exploited.
Before 1905, the river was crossed above the falls at the Old Drift, by dugout canoe or a barge towed across with a steel cable. The railway now offered accessible travel to whites from as far as the Cape in the south and from 1909, as far as the Belgian Congo in the north. Interestingly, because the falls can be reached by bus, local tourists outnumber international travellers.
On the top of the falls you can see how the Zambezi flows over a level sheet of rock, basalt, in a shallow valley bounded by low and distant sandstone hills. Dotted with numerous tree-covered islands, these increase in the course of the river as it approaches the falls. To think that Livingstone sailed in a dug-out canoe to moor on an island right by the lip not knowing what he was going to see, but hearing the thunder, was a trick of the mind of an extraordinary quality.
Click here… to see all the latest images
