Victoria Falls on the Zambezi

VICTORIA FALLS, Zimbabwe/Zambia — To the west stretches a vast white plain with a hint of water, Botswana's Makgadikgadi, or Makarikari, salt pans. Below, the land is mostly a mottled mix of buff and green, the colors of southern Africa's bushlands.

And then, just ahead, appears a long column of what, at first glance, seems to be smoke, perhaps a range fire.

But no: From 30,000 feet or so, in a descending passenger jet out of Johannesburg, South Africa, what we are witnessing is a cloud of spray tossed hundreds of feet into the sky as the previously wide and placid Zambezi River — at its wet-season height — plunges over a basalt-plateau cliff and crashes into an elongated rift in the Earth, creating Victoria Falls.

Named for his British queen by explorer-physician-missionary David Livingstone a century-and-a-half ago, this is one of the world's most spectacular and unusual major cascades. To the region's native peoples, Livingstone had come upon Mosi-oa-Tunya: "the smoke that thunders."

"No one can imagine the beauty of the view from anything witnessed in England ... " Livingstone subsequently wrote in "Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa." Scenes "so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight."

On a map of Africa, this is the borderland where Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana and a long finger of Namibia converge. In fact, our touring party and other travelers were about to land at an airport in politically and economically troubled Zimbabwe — a matter of some concern, for presidential voting was under way.

Our group, in two small buses with baggage trailers, had to make its way through the small, depressed tourist town of Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, home of the gleaming 104-year-old Victoria Falls Hotel, which is prominently situated above the town, the falls and the equally venerable Victoria Falls Bridge over the gorge.

We squeezed through a long line of idling and parked tractor-trailers. Many were loaded with copper slabs. One truck, also headed toward Zambia, had slipped off the pavement and was stuck in the mud. We finally negotiated the border posts and crossed the narrow international ridge over the Zambezi gorge, which gave us our quick first glimpse of the falls themselves.

We stopped at a modern resort, the Zambezi Sun, on the Zambian side of the falls, near the town of Livingstone, Zambia's former capital.

We were on an adventure of a lifetime — and our tour organizers were eager to get us started. Before we could even really nestle into our rooms at the Sun, we were loaded into a string of open-top Land Rovers to visit nearby Chief Mukuni Village.