17 May Zambia — In Search of Ngonye Falls

Here’s something useful to know. After you’ve seen Victoria Falls and waved at tourists from the Devil’s Pool, just go back to the Royal Livingstone Victoria Falls Hotel and sit on the patio and enjoy the tea and tarts and little sandwiches with the edges cut off, and don’t go traipsing through guidebooks for what else there might to do while you’re in Zambia. Because the guidebook will tell you there’s another falls two-hundred miles up the Zambezi. Ngonye Falls. A falls that would be as famous as Victoria Falls, if only more people went there.

Ngonye Falls didn’t look all that hard to get to. The road there was paved, you could tell by the color of ink they used. If Peg and I set out early in the morning, we could motor up there, gaze in wonder at the falls, and still be home for tea.

The map company should have invested in more colors of ink because it would have been easier to drive along a riverbed. On the plus side, there weren’t any potholes. You don’t have potholes in loose sand. What there were, were craters big enough to swallow school buses. It was the kind of road a camel would have had trouble navigating, only a camel would have had more sense.

We didn’t see any camels, and we didn’t see any cars, either, so not getting caught in traffic was another plus. Let me repeat that. We spent the whole day until sunset on the M10, a major highway up the western side of Zambia, and didn’t see a single other vehicle unless you count the abandoned road grader being swallowed by sand.

                             The M10 up the west side of Zambia

The road did not improve as we headed north, it got worse. The craters became deeper, the sand softer, the dust swirling behind us thicker. Sometimes we’d have to leave the road entirely and deadhead through bush country to avoid some particularly sinister looking stretch of highway. When we arrived where the falls were supposed to be, the Zambezi didn’t look any different than it did anywhere else: big and placid and shimmering in the African sun. But, then, the shrubs were waist high and the river was a good thirty yards away. We clambered down to the water’s edge and squinted and there it was. Kind of.

Where Victoria Falls is a geological astonishment, Ngonye Falls is more of a literary caprice perpetuated by guidebooks.

A falls that would be as famous as Victoria Falls, if only more people went there  . . . and why they don’t

It might have served as a weir on a tame English river. It might even have served as a hindrance to navigation, I suppose. But lots of rivers drop a few feet every now and then and this one looked like something you could portage a kayak around without actually having to scramble up onto the bank.

We didn’t spend much time there, fifteen minutes, tops. It was already midafternoon and I pushed the Land Rover so hard trying to get to the hotel by dark that, when it flew over a bump, all four wheels grabbed air like a cartoon Land Rover. Peggy, who’s not famous for being squeamish inside speeding vehicles, became so alarmed she took over and, a few minutes later smacked into a crater and back up so fast we thought the hood had flown open. But none of it did any good. No matter how fast we sped, daylight sped by faster. Around dusk we finally did see another car, a Toyota sedan stuck hub-deep in the sand.

A South African had won a weekend’s stay at a fishing lodge a hundred miles on the wrong side of Ngonye Falls, checked the same map we had, and set out to collect his winnings. When we came across him he was at least two-hundred-and-fifty miles from the fishing lodge, the worst parts of the road were yet to come, night was falling and he was in his family car. After we pulled him out, he got a running start, launched the Toyota back onto the gentle slope we’d just pulled him out of, and bogged down. Which says a lot about the never-say-die spirit of white South Africans, not to mention their common sense.

By then, it was almost too dark to drive and we found a campground and pulled off for the night. It wasn’t much of a campground, just a couple of cleared spaces by the river. A gentleman came out to greet us, we paid him a couple of bucks and he brought out a load of wood and fired up the donkey boiler to heat the shower.

In the morning we awoke to the chatter of ladies washing clothes in the Zambezi. Peg and I showered, cooked breakfast over some of the wood the gentleman had left, then headed back out. By the time we made it to pavement, the land Rover was swaying from not one, but two, broken shock absorbers.