MONDAY 14TH - LAST DAY IN VICTORIA FALLS

Early start today. We were picked up at 6:20 for a bird watching tour by Charles in his converted Land Rover, not that we know anything about bird watching but it was a great way to explore the local wilderness, in particular, a small portion of Zimbabwe's largest national park along the Zambezi River.

 

 

Even before we left the outskirts of Victoria Falls, we encountered some elephants.

 

 

Apart from seeing 50+ species of birds which our fellow travellers seemed to know a lot about, we encountered a water buffalo, water buck, impala, kudu, crocodiles, hippos, giraffes, a squirrel, baboons, mongoose and a variety of other animals the names of which I can't remember and we haven't been more than 10 klms from town yet. The pictures are below.

After returning from the birding tour, we went to a Vulture Culture display where, as part of an educational exercise to demonstrate why vultures are endangered in the wild and need to be protected, an extraordinary number of vultures fought over a quantity of meat scraps put out for them.

We finished the day with a very leisurely dinner cruise on the river. Several groups of hippos provided the before dinner entertainment. 

Tomorrow we head into Botswana where we apparently get into the seriously good wildlife viewing. Wifi is going to get intermittent from here so there may be a gap in the posts but I will catch up.

So that's it. The sun sets on Victoria Falls, a fantastic place to visit but I wouldn't want to live here.

                                                   THE ANIMALS