Livingstone Trip

A couple of weeks ago we took a trip to Livingstone over the long weekend here (the country has Friday and Monday off around Easter).  We stayed at a lodge called Toka Leya in the smallest Zambian national park called Mosi-oa-Tunya. The drive from Lusaka to Livingstone is about 6 hours and apparently much easier than it used to be as the road is now paved all the way. The drive is a lot of open space.

Once we got to Livingstone, we had to drive to the Lodge in the national park, right next to the city. It's kind of weird to have a park so close to a city. Apparently this park, while the smallest has elephants, rhinos, zebra, and a bunch of other animals but no predators.

The first day we took a trip to Victoria Falls, which was really pretty amazing to see. The water at this time of year is really high.We both got soaked and our camera at some point threatened to die but then dried out and decided that it wanted to live!!!




The chalets at the lodge where we stayed was a 'tent' basically solid walls and ceiling with a canvas roof on pylons above the ground.  Each were located on the Zambezi with partial water views and since the water was really high, there water was actually under the house we were sleeping in.  We had our very own dugout canoe on the deck.


Did I mentioned that monkeys would play on the tent and wake us up in morning?


Most of the time we spent relaxing but we did do a couple of activity type things that were really cool such as the game drive and the less interesting croc farm. The way this lodge works, and I guess others as way is you pay a nightly rate which includes meals and activities.  The one activity we elected to do through the lodge was a game drive.  We started the drive and not far from the lodge we encountered an elephant (truck included for scale):


We got to see a white rhino mama and calf, there are only 7 white rhinos in Zambia, and each has a 24 hour guard assigned to it to guard against poaching. The guards or conservation officers(?) follow it around all day and night with an AK47 assault rifles.


As we drove along we saw a whole of different animals  this next picture is of a kudu(?)

and a monitor lizard... which is not a cool as the crocs... more on that later.

we also saw wildebeasts and warthogs and another white rhino...

 what a cute warthog...

Also there was a secretary bird and water buffalo.

  Our guide stopped 50 ft away from the water buffalo and said "Buffalo very aggressive.."  yeah thanks bud lets back up the truck.

 The park was apparently the original town of Livingstone that then relocated because so many of the people died of what is now malaria.  There is a graveyard in the park.  We had a sundowner in the park, which is usually by the river but we broke down and had it next to a group of monkeys.  Apologies for the quality of the photos).

And last is the croc farm, which had a bunch of huge crocs in pits with walk ways in between them.  The walk ways had 4 ft chain link between you and the crocs, many of which were missing parts of limbs.  I was kind of convinced we were going end up in the next 'faces of death' video.

 

 They did a feeding at one point and one of the staff got in the pit with one of the huge crocs and poked it with a stick trying to get it to eat.  What a job.

It was a really relaxing trip and the trip was a good reminder of one of the reasons we've moved here.