Victoria Falls.

"You will get wet," Gustav was telling us. "It doesn't matter what you wear. I always laugh when I see the tourists wearing plastic bags and shit...you will get wet. I promise you."

Gustav decided to take us to the Falls. We piled into the back of his powder blue pickup (the backie, they call it here), and jostled around as we drove through the pot-hole ridden dirt roads to the main road. We followed the main road past the Spar strip mall, for about 8km. The parking lot for the Falls is small. There are about twenty or so permanent stalls for people to sell the wooden and painted trinkets and souvenirs that they sell in the ethnic sections of Pier 1, etc. These stalls seem cobbled together of temporary materials, as corrugated tin (or some soft, flimsy metal), scrawny poles, and thatch. The parking lot and visitor center is as you would expect from some small, out of the way tourist destination in the states, and though the traffic is probably a bit more brisk, it is not busy nor does it really feel crowded...most of the time, the only people we saw was ourselves, and then we would pass some locals, and then would be alone some more. At the end we ran into a large group of 25 tourists with the pastiest looking legs you ever saw, all covered with those plastic garbage bags.

There is a park entrance fee. The locals (any Zambian resident) pays ~2600 kwacha to enter the park, or about $0.50, and the foreigner pays $10. We forked over $50, using up the last of the money we had taken out of the ATM to pay this fee, and then walked through the little office onto a rough concrete path.

Immediately the path opens onto a view of the falls. The view happened upon us all of a sudden, an opening in the trees and there it was: a white torrent of water. It was very picturesque: there was enough water flow for the rush to be white and full, but low enough that we could still see the rocks pushing the river to this side or that in the fall. The fall is deep and the drop appears suddenly...one minute you are in a dripping rainforest and the next there is open air and a straight drop down, opening up an impassible space between you and the water.

We walked along the path, which follows the edge of the drop opposite the water fall. The first opening I took a couple pictures but after that I hid my camera in a ziploc bag because there was so much water I didn't trust my rainjacket to keep it dry and I definitely wasn't about to try to take a picture. Within a minute or two we were all completely soaked. My rainjacket helped some, but the water still creeped in around my wrists and through my hood. In the rainforest, the water came mostly down, but when we came to a clearing and looked over the falls, there was a mist everywhere. And the water wasn't all falling down...it was splashing up! From all directions!

The mist, the white mist that was not mild and gentle the way that a fog is, but blinding in the way that when you turn the hose onto the mist setting and spray it in your face is blinding. And the flow was a bit variable...sometimes you could peer in one direction and through the mist to the waterfall, the sound thundering around you the whole time, the next second the mist would change and would start coming into your eyes and you had to turn away. It was fun to follow the narrow, two person-wide concrete path. The path wound around through the rainforest (it is only rainforest right at the falls, where the mist feeds the plants that like it...the rest of the area is similar to other parts of the area in that there is a distinct wet season and dry season where the dry season is very dry), where the way was clear except for a bit of mist but mostly rain just dripping gently but persistently from the foliage above and a constant torrent covering the trail and running along your feet. Then a few more steps and there was a lookout, with the white and the gorge and the thunder. So much water and the fall was so wide (it is ~1km across).

There was so much power there, the kind of majesty that does not dull with modernity, where I felt myself to be inconsequential to stand its presence. Standing there, blinded beside the falls or dripping as I walked through the rainforest, it felt to me like the kind of place where unusual things could happen...it felt very alive, and separate from human invention. Magical, is how I think of it.