Tell me, how does the mist thunder?

The word Victoria Falls began creeping up in our conversations from time to time. It started with an innocent comment from my wife, “Mosi-oa-Tunya, what does that really mean?” I answer, “The smoke that thunders.” She counters, “It’s the water that thunders. How can smoke thunder?” I explain that the water, which is falling from a great height, becomes mist (and looks like smoke) as it plunges downwards, making a noise like thunder. She insists once again that ‘mist’ cannot thunder. Mist is the most intangible thing in the world. You can even touch it. So yes, how can it thunder? Good point.

We decided to go and see the ‘thundering smoke’ in Zimbabwe for ourselves again last year. Leaving Johannesburg, we drove our Jeep Cherokee Sport from Johannesburg to Beitbridge. From the border, it was approximately 760 km to Victoria Falls, via Bulawayo.

As Zimbabwe was going through economic upheavals at the time, we didn’t want to spend any money there because the prices for everything were going through the roof. With this in mind, we decided to make it a 48-hour trip. Fast in. Fast out. And to ensure that we could drive as far as possible with reasonably priced petrol, we came prepared with two 20-litre petrol containers in our car.

The 320 km journey from the border to Bulawayo was punctuated by regular stops every 50 km or so at impromptu police road blocks, where the police tried their best to find something wrong either with the car, its occupants, the car’s papers or the occupants’ papers. At Gwanda, a small town about 90 km from Bulawayo, our luck ran out. The police discovered that our car did not have a carbon tax certificate. As visitors to the country, we thought that the border officials would have told us about any paperwork that needed to complete before entering the country. It turned out that this was a very serious offence!

Furthermore, we had to wait by the side of the road for hours for an important receipt book to be delivered from Bulawayo later that day, so that we could be properly fined and be on our way. Why the receipt book had to be delivered from Bulawayo remains a mystery. We soon realised that this whole, intricate inconvenience could be avoided if we could somehow find a way to make the police officers ‘happy’. Needless to say, I came up with a solution that made the officers very happy and with that, the receipt book was quickly forgotten and we were finally on our way.

We realised that if we were to complete our journey in good time, we would have to continue to make the police officers ‘happy’, and this solution ensured that our journey became an uneventful one in that respect.
We slept over at a friend’s house in Bulawayo and left at dawn the next morning for ‘the smoke that thunders’. We drove the 440 km to Victoria Falls in relative peace, and the fact that we did not have a carbon certificate did not seem to bother anyone anymore.

We arrived in Victoria Falls at approximately 3 p.m. in the afternoon, and not wanting to waste any time, we drove straight to the falls. The entrance is about 100 m from the Zambian border post. We paid the entry fee and started walking down to the falls. Immediately, we noticed the higher humidity in the air. The mist. Oh yes, the mist that we had come to see. We walked to the Livingstone monument and just a short distance from the monument we had our first side view of the falls. Intimate. From the side. Like a secret.
Standing there and watching the water cascade down is special. In days gone by, the local Tonga people spoke of a Nyami-Nyami God who used to live at the falls. This might not be a literal entity. Other people say there is an ancient time gateway for alien craft under the main falls. One can forgive people for assigning a mystical, other-worldly status to the falls. It is just such a spiritual place. And to cap it all is that rainbow, hanging in the air on nothing, made up of nothing but mist. An alien craft in plain sight … .

We looked across to the Zambian side and saw some daredevil young tourists sitting right where the water approaches the point of falling into nothingness. I think that sight summarises the journey that the falls has taken over time. The mystery is, in a way, being uncovered. From the ancient times, where the local people revered the falls and approached them with fear and respect to the modern age where people dangle over the falls, with ropes, hove above with helicopters, unveiling the mystery. A necessary genesis.