Day 84 – Finding Ferries

Our plans for a twenty two hour ferry journey along Lake Kariba sank when we found out that although the ferry was running, (very exciting news as we were unsure if it still existed,) it was fully booked and there was no space. This was a big spanner as Kariba was the place from which we’d planned on doing a four day canoe trip along the Zambezi. Furthermore Laura’s phone calls were starting to indicate that the canoe trips weren’t running either.

Without a ferry there were three remaining paths to Kariba; the first was to border hop into Zambia and along 600kms of tar road, by far the shortest and quickest route, but requiring entry fees, visas and red tape. The second would be 600kms through park land just south of the lake, consisting of varying road, some 4x4 track and some roads that are supposedly closed in the wet season; we were already in the wet season. The third and, though the longest, perhaps the most straightforward path was south to Bulawayo, north east to Harare and north to Kariba; twelve hundred kilometres of good tar road.

Laura spent a day and a half on the phone, speaking to local tourism agencies: e-mailing, faxing and pestering. The ferry man called every person already booked to check vehicle measurements. A chap called Edmore at the Wild Horizons office helped tirelessly in calling other contacts and allowing us to use a phone and internet. But Somers was making a plan and eventually her miracle came together nicely. Out of the blue, the next morning the chap at the ferry office called to say someone had cancelled and we had a spot. With Edmore’s help a company called Natureways had been located that was running a canoe trip the day after our ferry docked. The three days that we had to spare could be spent in Hwange National Park just south of Victoria Falls and we’d wake up on an island on the Zambezi on Christmas Day. I love it when a plan comes together. Somers had forced this plan together.