zim, zam, make a plan (and go to botswana and back)

I'm back in Cape Town rushing to finish this post before this cafe closes, my jeans only just now dry from the time I spent at Victoria Falls on the Zambian side this morning--it's been a full several days...

After failing repeatedly to connect with my cousin Matthew Cooper late last week in Cape Town we finally managed to connect over gchat Monday night. My orders we to be waiting for him and Jess at the British Air counter at 6.30 am the following morning, ready to head fly to Zimbabwe until Friday.

After a bleary-eyed joyful reunion in the Cape Town airport we got right down to logistics: Jess and I had our tickets booked, but a mysterious anti-flight booking robot had deleted Matthew's registration the night before and the BA flight to Johannesburg, where we would catch our plane to Zimbabwe (here on referred to as Zim), was booked solid. A couple phone calls later Matthew found himself another flight, Jess and I only barely managed to get tickets on ours, and we reunited three hours later in Joburg. From there we had half an hour to pick up our boarding passes, change South African Rand into USD, clear customs, and in Matthew's case make a series of calls to his coworkers back in Dubai. The clearest mental image of that time was of Jess and I standing at the boarding gate pleading with the attendants to wait for Matthew--"he'll be here in 30 seconds, I swear!" "I'll give him one more minute"--and being elated to see him come hustling around the corner and run down the escalator just in time for us to make the final bus that would take us to our plane on the tarmac.

Sigh... So we'd made the flight to Zimbabwe. As I settled back into my seat to sleep off the drag of the early morning I wondered what we would find there. If you've been reading your African news these day you'd get a pretty bleak picture: 230 million percent inflation in 2008, the collapse of public services infrastructure, government-sponsored violence against white Zimbabweans, rigged elections, and the MDC's painful struggle with Mugabe's ZANU-PF have shaped the perceptions of outside Western observers, and I was no exception. I had this idea of our plane lurching to a halt on a pock-marked runway across from a rusty, tin-roofed terminal, and from there working our way through Harare in an armored jeep, weaving our way around burning tires and hordes of rioting, cholera-stricken civilians.

I was surprised, therefore, by the scene we encountered at the Zimbabwe airport, our first introduction to the country. The airport looked like it had been remodeled within the last 5 years or so. It was airy and clean, with stone paneling on the floor and even an advertisement posted by a company that may or may not have still been in business. It was also the only airport I'd ever been to where the citizens' line for entry was longer than for foreign visitors. We paid our entry fees in USD without any hassle, then proceeded to head out into the lobby where our friend, Karo, had planned to pick us up. The arrivals area was quiet, dimly-lit, and clean, with an airport employee or two shuffling around in the background and a couple stragglers from our flight milling around waiting for their rides. "It's a real country," Matthew noted. "Yeah, and a pretty quiet one, too," I thought. This overwhelming impression of stillness, lack of movement, ended up being my dominant association with our time spent in Zimbabwe.

We met Karo outside and piled into her light pickup with our luggage for the trip to the guest house no the outskirts of Harare where we would spend the night. We spent that evening with a family of white Zimbabweans, a mother and her two grown children, and simply recounting their narrative as I understood it would take up several pages. Suffice to say that they were remarkable, warm people, who's resourceful capacities had been honed to the highest degree under a set of extraordinary circumstances. After dropping off our bags we headed out with Karo and Tristan, the son of the family, for a ride around Harare. As in the airport, I was amazed at how quiet Harare was. I came to Zimbabwe expecting to find a place as ruined as Mogadishu or as chaotic as Baghdad (or at least the falsifiable images of these places that I have) but found instead a faded, well-ordered, formerly bustling city whose life blood had been drained by a combination of population flight and economic freefall. As we drove Tristin shared his perspectives on current events and Zimbabwe's people. Shona's, the dominant tribal group in the country, are a peaceful people, he said. Zimbabwean's want Mugabe and ZANU-PF to leave, but they are not willing to further decimate their county by fighting a civil war. Though we did not see the poorest areas of the city, we felt safe the entire time, and despite the small number of remaining white Zimbabweans we arouse little to no special interest on the streets or in the flea market we visited where Matthew picked up a couple of batik prints.

We returned to our house for the night and when on a quick run around the neighborhood. Though the lack of lighting on the streets made finding our footing a bit tricky at times, the darkness allowed the stars to shine brilliantly, with the milky way clearly observable overhead. After the run Jess and I headed out with Tristan and one of the house helps to buy some scud, so-named after the first Gulf War, from a nearby corner store. We'd heard this home-grown brew of fermented mealy meal had the taste of bile and consistency of vomit, and were anxious to see for ourselves if it could really be that bad. We found out later that evening, after a fantastic meal of steak and potatoes, that no, it wasn't quite that bad, but disgusting nonetheless. After chugging around a quarter of a gallon of the stuff I felt full more than anything else--the mealy meal kind of expands in your stomach, and the bile-ish tang is fairly unpleasant. Having killed the scud we settled down on the outside patio to listen to Tristan and his siter recount stories of life in Zimbabwe. We learned that the government had just discontinued the official currency the day before, which had been essentially been inflating so quickly that they could not run the presses fast enough to generate any revenue. It creates a bizarre set of incentives when the government tells the market that they are only allowed to trade in such a currency, with a small number of exceptions, and Tristin was happy to regale us with tales of his black market exploits. Until that week, just about everyone had been required to pay salaries, charge prices, and make purchases using zim dollars. If you broke the rules you could end up in prison or have your business expropriated, something that had happened to far too many people over the last several years. My favorite story was of Tristan changing of a couple truck beds of zim dollars for a suitcase of USD. We learned a bit about the timing of these exchanges as well. Apparently the government would give the presses a break over the weekends, but the hyper-inflationary cycle would begin again in earnest on Monday. If you changed your zim at the beginning of the week you might do all right, but if you held on to it till Friday you could lose a fortune. We'd also been surprised to see BMWs and Mercedes around Harare. According to Tristan many of the officials in the Finance Ministry had grown fabulously wealthy buying outrageous amounts of zim on the black market with USD, and then changing that zim back to USD at the official, criminally-overvalued rate that only the elites had access to.

We retired for the evening full of steak, potatoes, scud, and beer, and got an early start back to the airport the next morning for our trip to Victoria Falls. Our brief sojourn in Harare hadn't felt like nearly long enough, and I would have loved to have stayed for longer chatting a bit more with Zimbabweans in the city about their lives under ZANU and hope for the future. Yet with such a short amount of time at our disposal we had to do the best we could. Victoria Falls is supposedly one of the more impressive scenes that one can see in nature, certainly one of the more incredible waterfalls, and we were eager to visit for ourselves. Perhaps the most informative conversation of my time in Zim came out of our flight there, as well, when I set next to a young guy about my age named Cain who had completed his Computer Science degree in Bulowayo and now worked for an IT company in Harare. As he introduced himself I marveled internally at what a testimony it is to the resilience of Zimbabwe's people and economy that an enterprise that does tech audits for domestic firms could have possibly continued to operate over the years. It hadn't been east, he said. Throughout 2008 the company, which had been legally obligated to pay its employees in zim, had opted instead to pay with foodstuffs imported from its South African partner organization, if it paid at all, and had taken IOUs from trusted clients or accepted bartered goods as payment rather than cash. We spoke of Western perceptions of Zimbabwe, and I told him how surprised I'd been by what I'd encountered so far. I asked what he thought of the MDC and recent events, and he expressed optimism that things would get better. He hoped that the U.S. would support the lifting of economic sanctions sooner or later, which in his view only served to punish helpless Zimbabweans while entrenching ZANU and undermining the MDC's economic reform agenda (the MDC has at least nominal control of economic and social service ministries since ZANU-PF grudgingly accepted a power-sharing agreement). Cain was sharp, kind, well-spoken, apparently quite resourceful, and a generally a personification of all I'd encountered that was positive in Zimbabwe in under 24 hours. Hopefully men and women like him will have a voice in how their country is run in the years to come. From what we could see and the conversations I've had since getting back to South Africa is seems that Zim is at a crossroads right now, and nobody is really sure how things will pan out. If I took nothing else away from our short stay around Harare it was that it is easy to create caricatures in your mind of what a place is or isn't, but that human contact with people outside the political melee or media filters can totally reinvent your perspective.

The phrase "make a plan" came up repeatedly in these conversations, and embodies the enterprising spirit of the people who have scraped by in Zimbabwe under the most adverse set of circumstances. When times get tough strong people get tougher, and employ as much creative energy as they can muster to the business of getting by. No time for self-sympathy or regrets: plan, execute, live, repeat. Of course this only gets you so far, and the tragic reality of Zimbabwe's economic collapse is that thousands of people have gone hungry, died from cholera, been arbitrarily imprisoned, or fled the country. It is also true that much of the hard currency and tradeable commodities that keep the informal economy running flow in from the Zimbabwean diaspora abroad. Yet where I expected to find utter devesation I was humbled and inspired to encounter people getting along by making the most of things as they were, rather than dwelling on how they wished them to be, hopefully anticipating a brighter future.

The Victoria Falls Safari Lodge, where we would stay for the next several nights, was a surprise as well. It had clearly been built during better times, with only a sparse showing of tourists and African business men to be found on a lovely, sprawling complex that meant to accommodate a bustling crowd of safari-goers and vacationers. Set right up against a waterhole in the Zimbabwean outback, the lodge is a wonderful collision of the wild and the cultivated: warthog root around in the grass, baboons troop across open roads, and elephants frequently wander into town. Yet the Lodge--an expansive central hotel with soaring thatched ceilings and a restaurant, pool, and bar, with guest houses scattered around the rest of the premises--is clean and tastefully-decorated, the staff are friendly and courteous, and the selections at the restaurant are excellent. This is where we would make our home base for the next several days of exploring the region. Over the course of a couple days we went "walking with the lions," visited Victoria Falls on both the Zimbabwe and Zambia side, went on a jeep safari in the Chobe game reserve, Botswana, and drank as varied a selection of southern African beers are we could manage. We were all agreed that Windhoek beer, a brew from Namibia, is the best the region has to offer. In my opinion Black Label, Zimbabwe ("America's lusty *something something* beer") came in second.

I think I speak for the three of as well when I say that our time spent at the Falls was the highlight of our time spent at the lodge. The water is higher now than it's been in several decades, and it is simply awe-inspiring to stand so close to nearly 500,000 cubic feet of water per second thundering into a massive 100 meter-deep trench. Visually I suppose the Falls would have been even more impressive during a lower-flow season, since the mist from the water pouring into the gorge obscures any long view one might otherwise have, but the trade off is that the experience of standing on the cliffs opposite the river is absolutely thrilling. The Zambezi river, which creates the natural border between Zambia and Zimbabwe, flows along through the Southern African plain until it tumbles abruptly into a massive gorge. From the air the gorge looks like what you might expect if God came down and made a cut in the grassy plain that the river flows through--it is an incredibly wide, unanticipated fissure in an otherwise quite flat landscape. Matthew speculated at the time, and I have since confirmed via Wikipedia, that the gorge is the result of the Zambezi steadily eroding away softer rock in the plain, in this case sandstone. Standing at a distance of a hundred meters or so from the falls inspired me to dwell on the power and majesty of God, and made me wonder if this was the kind of thing John struggled to describe in his visions of the end of the world set out in Revelation. Columns of water spray into the air before free falling to the gorge below, and tsunami waves dance about on the verge of that massive chasm, seemingly reaching for the opposite side but halted by vast, empty space. You have to yell to hear above the incessant thunder, and spray rockets up from the floor of the gorge as "inverted rain," stretching hundreds of meters into the sky before falling to the ground where you stand in a torrential downpour. As mentioned above you cannot see the falls when you are close, unless a gust of wind temporarily moves the mist in such a way that you catch a glimpse of the incredible span of water seemingly stretching toward the horizon on either side of you. On the Zimbabwe side Matthew and I climbed out onto a rocky outcropping with no fencing, as near to the thundering torrent as we could get, and stood for several moments in silence, arms and faces stretched upwards, taking in the moment. "He is mighty indeed," Matthew said, before we turned and stepped back into the gentle heat of the day. I feel so alive when I have a moving encounter with nature: not only does my spirit rejoice in the presence of something that speaks to me about who God is, but for that short period of time everything else that I am back home, and all the distractions and clutter of daily life get crowded out as I lose myself in the sheer sensory thrill of returning to the wilderness.

After just a couple long days and short nights it was time to return to Cape Town, where I would say goodbye to Jess and Matthew before rejoining my fellow rhodies. It's time to close this post, so I'll stay brief on the narrative of our border crossing experience and try to distill that time down to lessons learned:
-When using foreign currencies in country's where you don't know the exchange rate always carry small bills.
-Never tip a group of guys by giving one guy a lot of money and saying to the other two "split that up between the three of you." Those guys who took our photo on the Zim/Zam bridge crossing are probably still fightinging with each other of Matthew's 100R.
-Stay on your toes at backwater border crossings, but don't jump too quickly to the conclusion that border guards are trying to hassle you when they ask you for money--sometimes those visa fees are legit. I didn't make any friends when I all but told the Zambia border guards that I thought they were hussling us when they charged 50 USD for a transit visa...
-In Africa you often hear the phrase "Africa time," which generally means that schedules run 45 mins to a couple hours behind. Apparently this does not apply at airports. We showed up to the departures lobby three minutes after the first bording call in the Livingstone airport and found a scowling customs agent, irritated gate attendant, and angry stewardesses waving us on board as we ran out onto the tarmac. We were basically the last people to board every flight we took over our four days of travel :-P

As we sat at a pub in the JoBurg airport, watching our flight to Cape Town board while we finished up a late lunch and a couple pints, I felt satisfied with all that we'd seen, yet knew that those were places I might like to return to for much more time in the future. There are different ways to travel: widely verses intimately, on the cheap versus luxuriously, for business, pleasure, scholarship, or some combination of the three. The important thing, I guess, is to know why you go and be clear in your own mind about what you can accomplish given your chosen medium and the time available. In that sense I was satisfied to have seen and done about as much as anyone could reasonably hope for in four days, and richly blessed by the time to connect with my cousin. Yet it was everything that I just barely touched, the beauty and stark contradictions of a country wracked by turmoil but with so much to offer, that made me hope to return in the future.

As we were getting ready to take our bill and board our flight Matthew asked our waitress if there was anyway he could pay her for the Windhoek tumblers that we'd had our pints in. She glanced around furtively, then leaned in and, with a knowing look and quiet voice said "I will make a plan for you." "I love these people," I thought, as we got up to leave, tumblers tucked in our backpacks. Hopefully it won't be too long before I visit again.