Upper Zambezi

People come to Victoria Falls for the drop. What they often miss is the river itself, upstream — the long, island-threaded stretch of the Zambezi that rolls through Zambia and Zimbabwe above the falls before it all disappears over the edge. Here the river is wide and unhurried, its surface so flat in the early mornings it looks like hammered pewter, and the wildlife uses it the way a highway runs through a town: constantly, purposefully, without particular concern for boats.

The upper Zambezi is where you remember that the falls are only one thing the river does.

Sunset Cruises

The double-decker cruise boats leave the jetties on both sides around 4pm and run for two hours into the evening. I want to be precise about what this means: you’re on a boat, there are cold drinks, and you watch one of the most theatrical sunsets I’ve encountered anywhere on earth, timed by the river’s east-west alignment so the light comes straight down the water at you.

It sounds like a tourist trap. It’s not. The hyperbolic language that surrounds African sunsets is usually just the hyperbolic language of tourist brochures, but the upper Zambezi at dusk on a clear day in June is genuinely something else — the sky goes through six or seven distinct color phases in forty minutes and the river mirrors each one, and meanwhile hippos are surfacing and submerging and the Egyptian geese are flying low across the water and somewhere near an island a fish eagle does the sound that fish eagles do, which is the sound of southern Africa distilled into four notes.

On the Water, Smaller

The cruises are fine but the canoe trips are better. Half-day guided paddles above the falls put you at water level — close enough to the islands to watch monitor lizards sunning themselves on logs, close enough to the banks to hear the knock and creak of a small herd of elephants moving through riverine forest. The guides paddle you around the hippo pods rather than through them, which requires more navigation skill than it looks.

I went out early one morning, the kind of cold that burns off fast once the sun clears the trees. The river at that hour smells of mud and vegetation and something faintly mineral. We stopped on a sandbar for coffee from a thermos while a saddle-billed stork stood in the shallows eight meters away and ignored us with complete dignity.

Between Islands

The Zambezi above the falls is wide enough that from the center you can’t always see both banks clearly — there’s just the water and the islands and the sky. This creates an odd sensation of being offshore when you’re a thousand miles from any coast. Some of the islands are national park territory; others are private concession. Elephants cross between them, which looks impossible given the current until you see how high they carry their trunks.

Lia came on the sunset cruise and spent the last twenty minutes of it not speaking, which with her means she was completely happy.

Fishing

The upper Zambezi is prime tigerfish territory — the most aggressive freshwater fish I’ve ever seen pulled out of water, with teeth that make the boat guides laugh at your reaction. Tiger fishing trips run full-day from both Livingstone and Victoria Falls Town, and whether or not you catch anything, you spend a day on a river that earns your full attention.

When to go: May through October for dry season clarity and the best wildlife concentrations along the banks. Sunset cruises run year-round but the October–November pre-rain season gives spectacularly dramatic skies. Canoe trips are best July to September when water levels are stable and manageable.