Our first four days in Zambia were spent enjoying creature comforts. Michael and I ditched our tents for a waterfront room on the Zambesi and a group of us headed out to the Livingstone Golf Club for the morning. We teamed up with Cho and Moon, who proved to be excellent first-time golfers. As a treat we hired caddies for a very reasonable price and enjoyed their expert advice and bag carrying service. After seven holes it was getting very hot and cold drinks at the clubhouse was becoming rather enticing, so we called it a day.
Comforts continued with a small group of us taking high tea at the Royal Livingstone, a very posh colonial-style hotel. Decadent amounts of delicious food were polished off, with a refreshing swim in the pristine pool and cocktails on the riverfront deck to conclude. Cheeky monkeys swooped onto our table to steal snacks and wrestle with Tanith for her cocktail. Tanith having successfully saved her cocktail, we farewelled the high life and were pleasantly surprised to encounter giraffe and zebra crossing the hotel driveway as we left.
While in Livingstone we of course visited Victoria Falls, Livingstone's star attraction. We were blown away by the power and immensity of the falls. Lax health and safety regulations let us get as close as we liked to the waters edge at the top of the falls and we watched one crazy adventurer paddle his body board scarily near the lip of the falls. The ways you could die by going over the falls were varied and gruesome, so none of us were tempted to take a dip for ourselves. The spray from the falls was pretty much torrential rain, so we emerged saturated from the viewing walk, with the exception of Cho and Moon who had their own incredibly waterproof ponchos (you could hire ponchos or wear a jacket, but the water still poured in any gap).
The adventure seekers in our group chose to bungy jump from a bridge over the Zambesi river near the falls. We enjoyed spurring them on, but I thought the jumps looked so terrifying I decided I'd be quite content to never bungy jump!
Livingstone was the departure point for most of our group, so we celebrated Bree and Cho's birthdays at a local Indian restaurant and enjoyed a laid back pizza night before saying our goodbyes. Four group members were leaving to continue their own travels, eight were joining another group heading to Johannesburg, leaving Michael, Bree, Satoshi and I continuing up to Nairobi. We had expected at least a few people, if not lots, to join the tour at Livingstone, but the only addition was a trainee called Arnold, giving us nearly as many crew as tour members. As we pulled out of Livingstone to start a new leg of the tour, the truck felt empty and a little lonely with so few of us on board. Still, we figured the next 21 days would give us time to adjust and come to appreciate the benefits of being a smaller group.
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