Day 1-2 - To Africa
I'm largely playing tour guide for the Cape Town part of the trip, but before we head to the beautiful Western Cape, the trip is taking me to a new place of Africa, with us visiting Victoria Falls and the surrounding areas for three days. A tag on to make it a full 10 day trip (including a lot of travel to start). The reason why this is Day 1-3 is because we're leaving Friday, leaving our house about 3:30pm, and will basically be doing our first really touristy thing Monday morning, with a walking tour of Victoria Falls. Not to say there was nothing notable of the Friday, Saturday and Sunday of our trip - highlighted by just the cool feeling of being in Zimbabwe for Christ sakes, but it was a slow to start to what will be an action packed last three quarters of the vacation.
The trip started in earnest at 3:30pm, taking an uber from my parents place to Newark, to start the vacation early with a long stint at the lounge. The whole time stressing about potential upgrades which largely came to nothing - my Dad did get an upgrade to premium economy, with me stuck in steerage. I guess nothing is a better sign of the recovery of travel than me having higher status than I did a year ago, but further away from getting upgraded to South Africa.
The new United Club in Newark is quite nice. It was chocked full when we got there around 5pm, but quickly thinned out by 6:30 or so. We were able to have surprisingly ok food (pasta, a interesting chicken thigh dish), enjoy a drink or two and take a shower. You know - airport stuff. From there we boarded our 14hr flight to Johannesburg, which was about as stress free as 14 hours in economy could be. Watched The Woman King (timely, with a trip deep into Africa ahead), Pacific Rim and Top Gun, and mixed in a 7-hour good sleep. Before you knew it, we were landing in Johannesburg. I hadn't been to South Africa's main hub since 2018, but it was like it was just yesterday, leaving the customs hall into the grand atrium at the heart of Johannesburg OR Tambo airport. I took a photo of my Dad in the same spot that I took a photo of myself 10 years back. It was quite a rush.
My Mom flew into Johannesburg from India earlier that morning, and we met her at our hotel for one night. To be honest, I've continued to give Johannesburg short shrift on all these trips. I spent a nice 1.75 days here in 2016 and a half-day in 2018, but nothing further. We didn't do too much in Jo'burg this time either, but because of the restaurant I picked for us (I'm basically the restaurant picker on this trip) was a nice 30 minute uber from the airport hotel to the other side of the city, we got to see a bit of Johannesburg.
A few clear takeaways - (1) the road conditions on Johannesburg are very impressive. The main highway from the airport hotel to part of the city was pristine, with conditions, signage and greenery that easily could've passed for Europe. The other takeaway was the same as it was in 2016 - every single property has a wall, with most having barbed wire. There are beautiful houses in siome of the posh neighborhoods we drove through, and all were covered with high walls. You get it, sure, but it also seems a bit unneccessary.
Dinner at Marble Restaurant, in Sandton, was excellent. The place is on the third floor of a nice little commercial building. The restaurant is huge, with high cielings, modern decor, and a buzz and bustle befitting a nice restaurant in Africa's most premier city. For the meal, we split a squash and cauliflower soup, and an octopus starter, and then had mains of beef sirloin with a great burnt tomato sauce, a decadent pork belly dish, and a crisped, custed sea bass with greens. The presentation was great, the food was great. Given how much of importance I give to food, I might be underrating Johannesburg quite a bit.
Day 3 - Zimbabwe Awaits
We woke up early, needing to head back to Johannesburg OR Tambo around 9:30am for our 11:30am flight to Victoria Falls. OR Tambo airport is quite impressive, even if it's largely unchanged from my 2013 memories. Their priority pass lounge was effective, and before we knew it we were boarding our flight on Airlink (new airline, on a technicality as it spun-off from South African Airways years ago) to Victoria Falls (new airport). The flgiht was short, but good, with Airlink finding time on the 1:25 flight to give us a quite well pre-made roast beef sandwhich, and a drink service with wine available to all passengers. After a bumpy descent, we landed in rainy Victoria Falls.
The rain wasn;t a surprise. What was a very nice surprise is that tomorrow and Tuesday seem to be quite dry, and the rain returning one after our flight to Cape Town leaves on Wedensday. Today was mainly going to be a slow day, so no real issue on that. There was a weird feeling when being in Zimbabwe. A lot of factors contributed to this, from Zimbabwe somehow not having WiFi, to the just weird feeling we were in a completely new place, to so much else. Victoria Falls the town is built around Victoria Falls the site. The city Livingstone on the Zambia side of Victoria Falls is a little bit more built up, but also a bit more expensive and with fewer flight options. The one place that was built up really well was our AirBNB, which was a great little 2-bedroom apartment with all the modern trappings, aside from a maddening inconsistency on what type of outlets they have.
Our only real tourism of the day was to drive into "town", which is a few blocks in all directions off of a main road. The real reason to go was to go get some groceries for our breakfasts and what-not. The grocery store itself was quite clean, upmarket and well presented. Zimbabwe has mostly decided to just have people pay dollars, but for some reason the prices were all shown in the local currency with a roughly 1,000 : 1 exchange rate. Anyway, we got our wares, took a little walk aroudn the town and headed back to teh AirBNB to unpack and rest up.
Dinner the first night in Victoria Falls was at The Cassia Restaurant, a lovely open-air, covered under thatched roof spot in the ilala Lounge, a fancy hotel/lounge. The restaurant was really well decorated and presented, even if the prices didn't match the prices of the rooms in the hotel. The restuarant also had a truly talented piano player playing soft piano versions of various old country, blues and rock hits which set a great mood. For food, my Dad and I shared two well made crocodile cutlets, with my mom having another squash soup. Squash seems to be a real thing here. The cutlets had this great, tangy sauce - and like always the presentation was excellent. For mains, my mom had a really well made pork belly, I had a lamb curry served with roti, rice and tomato chutney, which was a bit too Indian than it needed but was absolutely tasty. My dad got an Ostrich fillet with beet sauce which was amazing. So far, we're 2 for 2 in terms of dinners.
This is the low season for Victoria Falls tourism, which impacted my post dinner ideas. Victoria Falls somehow has its beautiful little craft brewery, that most websites (including their own) say is open until 11pm daily. We showed up at 9:01, only to be told in low season, it closes at 9pm. I do want to come back for their brews at some point in our remaining two days in Victoria Falls, but tonight was not one of them. Luckily, down the street was the 3 Monkeys bar, which was a nice open-air, roof covered, bar that was filled with seemingly way more locals (at least when compared to the posh Cassia restaurant). Sadly they only had their local beer - Zambezi - on draft, but it was cold enough to make the night pretty damn cool. We retired then to the AirBNB, ready for our real first day of the trip on its third day. Such is life when you travel all the way to Africa.
