Day 7

Monday, June 29, 2026

Johannesburg to Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe

06:00	Breakfast. On the bus by seven.
Morning	The airport, and a very long line. Then north.
Midday	Across the border into Zimbabwe.
Afternoon	Robert Schiffner Elementary. Then the lodge, on the river.
Evening	Zambezi Lager, mongooses, crocodiles, and dancers.

The tour proper began with breakfast around six and the whole group on a bus by seven — everybody's luggage in one pile, Dylan counting heads, the early start that would shortly turn out to matter more than any of us expected.

Dylan, on the shuttle bus, telling us what will happen at the airport and the border crossing before it happens. This is most of what a good tour director does: he removes the small frictions before you knew they were coming.

Gold

Dylan used the drive to talk about the city we were leaving, and Johannesburg turns out to have a very short and very specific reason for existing. Gold. In 1886 somebody found the Witwatersrand reef — the largest gold deposit ever discovered anywhere on earth — and a stretch of empty highveld grassland became, within a couple of decades, the largest city in South Africa. It was not built on a river or a harbor or a crossroads. It was built on the rock underneath it, because of what was in the rock, and everything else about Johannesburg — the banks, the corporate towers, the money — followed the gold up out of the ground.

Across the Border

Then we flew north, and somewhere over the bush we crossed out of South Africa and into Zimbabwe, and landed at Victoria Falls.

Passport control. Five booths, two officers, and the entire flight in a single line behind us.

The airport is where the early start paid off. Passport control had five booths and exactly two people working them, and the line for those two people was enormous — the whole flight, funneled into one slow queue. We were still in it fifteen minutes before boarding was supposed to close. Everybody made it, but only just, and Dylan spent the morning quietly pleased with himself for getting us there early, which he had every right to be. Bill nearly didn't make it. Security found a small pair of scissors in his bag and held him up over it, and by the time that was sorted the rest of us were long gone — so he and Debbie ended up being walked to the front and skipped past the line to catch the flight. There is a version of this trip in which the scissors cost him Zimbabwe.

Everything Is Victoria Falls

From the airport, before anything else, we got a driving tour of the area, and our driver — Lungi, I believe, though I am hedging slightly on the spelling — turned out to be the kind of local guide who makes a place make sense. There were baboons everywhere. Not a baboon, occasionally, as a special event — baboons as a fact of the roadside, sitting on walls, crossing the road, conducting their business with the total unconcern of an animal that has decided the town is also theirs. And Lungi had a running joke about the name of the place, which is that everything in Victoria Falls is called Victoria Falls. The Victoria Falls library. The Victoria Falls bank. The Victoria Falls this and the Victoria Falls that. “And when you marry,” he said, “she is in Victoria” — which took us a second, and then got everybody.

The School

Then the tour did something I did not expect, and it was the best thing it did all day. We stopped at a community school and orphanage.

Robert Schiffner Elementary School. The sign at the gate.

One of the staff, walking us through the work — how the program shelters, feeds, and educates children who have very little, and tries to build something more durable than charity.

There was a bulletin board inside built around four elements — shelter, education, empowerment, farming — with community outreach tying them together, each one laid out in photographs. One of the staff, a woman who clearly ran a good deal of it, walked us through all four. And there were children; one of them was asleep through the entire presentation, entirely unbothered by a room full of foreign visitors.

The four elements, pinned to a wall: shelter, education, empowerment, farming. An entire theory of how to lift a child.

We gave a donation, and I bought one of the wire animals they make and sell — a rhino, bent from wire by hand, which given how the rhino thread of this trip had been going felt like the correct one to come home with.

Robert Schiffner Elementary, and the Rose of Charity

The school is named for a real and specific American. Robert Schiffner was a prosecuting attorney in Grant County, Washington, who was fired for saying, out loud, that the county's contract defense lawyers were carrying more than six hundred felony cases each without meeting their clients or filing motions — and who then went into criminal defense himself and, in 2023, won a Champion of Justice award for it.

Somewhere in there he began to travel, some twenty-nine countries of it, and in Victoria Falls he built a preschool and kindergarten for the children of the Rose of Charity Orphanage and the local low-income families around it. Later he added a five-acre garden to feed the orphanage and the community food bank.

Which explains the bulletin board. The four elements are his: shelter, so a child has somewhere to be; education, so they have somewhere to go; empowerment, so they can stand on their own; and farming — that is the five-acre garden, literally on the wall as a photograph. It is not an abstract theory of charity. It is one man's actual working model, run by the people in that room, and we walked through the middle of it on our way to a river lodge.

I want to be careful about this, because there is a way of writing about a stop like this that turns other people's hard lives into scenery for the tourist's own growth, and I would rather not do that. So I will just say what it was: a real place, doing difficult and unglamorous work, that let a busload of strangers see it for twenty minutes on the way to a river lodge. It was humbling in the specific sense that it made our itinerary — the game drives, the sunset cruises, the lager by the river — feel like exactly what it is, which is an enormous privilege, purchased, and briefly set next to the thing it is a privilege beside. A man from Washington State built a school here with his own convictions and his own money, and it will still be doing its work long after our bus has gone. That is a different order of thing from a sunset cruise, and the visit knew it, and so did we.

A'Zambezi River Lodge

And then the river. We stayed at the A'Zambezi River Lodge, on Parkway Drive, a few kilometers outside town and directly on the bank of the Zambezi. It is the kind of place where the wildlife does not respect the boundary between the grounds and the bush, which becomes apparent immediately.

The welcoming committee: a whole gang of banded mongooses filing across the lawn between us and the river, in single file, on business of their own and entirely unimpressed by us.

Closer. They travel in a pack and forage as one, which is the whole banded-mongoose survival strategy: safety in a moving crowd.

The bar list. Priorities, correctly ordered.

We got a Zambezi Lager and sat by the river, which is the correct thing to do at the A'Zambezi River Lodge, and were almost immediately joined by a vervet monkey, who took up a position among the tables with the calm entitlement of an animal that has done very well out of tourists before.

First beer in Zimbabwe, on the bank of the Zambezi. Somewhere behind this photograph a monkey is deciding whether to rob us.

What Lives in the River

Then somebody official told us to stay fifteen feet back from the water, and explained why, and the peaceful river got a great deal more interesting.

The Zambezi

The river in front of the lodge is not scenery; it is a working ecosystem, and most of it can hurt you.

Nile crocodiles line the banks — which is what the fifteen-feet rule is about. Hippos spend the day in the water and come out at night to graze on the very lawn where the mongooses were, and hippos kill more people in Africa than lions, leopards, and buffalo combined, because they are enormous, territorial, and faster than they have any right to be. African rock pythons live in the reeds, though you will almost never see one. And the river is full of fish, including the tigerfish — a sleek, toothed, bad-tempered predator that sport fishermen cross continents to catch.

So the view from the bar, which looks like the most peaceful thing in the world, is in fact a crocodile-and-hippo highway with pythons in the margins. We drank our lagers exactly fifteen feet back.

And at night the lodge covers the swimming pool — not against leaves or cold, but to keep the hippos out of it. They come up onto the lawn after dark to graze, and a swimming pool is, to a hippo, simply a small strange pond, and a hippo in your pool is a problem you do not want. So every evening the pool is closed over like a lunchbox, against the animals that own the night.

The Zambezi at the end of the afternoon. Flat, gold, and full of things that would like a word with you.

Dancers at dinner. There was something every night — music, performance, movement — and this was the first of them.

It was, by any measure, a full first day in Zimbabwe: a mining lecture, a border, a school that stayed with us, mongooses, a monkey, a crocodile warning, and a beer on the most dangerous peaceful river in the world.