Ngonye Falls

Getting to Ngonye Falls takes actual effort, which is exactly why almost nobody bothers, and exactly why I’d send anyone who’s already made it out to western Zambia. The road from Livingstone runs for hours through flat mopane scrub and sand-track villages before it even reaches Sioma, and by the time we pulled up to the falls’ viewpoint on the eastern bank, my back ached from the truck’s suspension doing its best against a road that mostly wasn’t one. Then the trees opened up and there it was: the entire width of the upper Zambezi splitting into a dozen braided channels and dropping maybe ten meters over a jagged rock shelf that stretches nearly the full breadth of the river.

David Livingstone himself apparently thought Ngonye rivaled Victoria Falls in beauty, if not in scale, and standing at the edge of that basalt ledge with spray drifting sideways in the wind, I understood the comparison even if I wouldn’t go quite that far myself. What Ngonye has that Victoria Falls has completely lost is silence — no helicopters overhead, no queue of tour buses, no bungee operators shouting into megaphones. Just the roar of water finding a hundred different paths through rock, and a couple of local fishermen working the calmer pools downstream with hand lines, seemingly unbothered by the tourists.

We hired a mokoro-style canoe from a guide in Sioma village who paddled us out to a small island practically in the middle of the falls, threading between channels with a confidence that made me nervous and impressed in roughly equal measure. From there the falls open up in every direction, and you get a sense of just how much water is moving even in dry season — the Zambezi here is already a serious river, months before it reaches the drop at Victoria Falls further downstream. Lia spent most of the crossing gripping the canoe’s edge and telling me, not for the first time, that my idea of a relaxing afternoon needs some recalibration.

Sioma itself is barely a town — a scatter of thatched houses, a small market, and the entrance gate to what’s technically Sioma Ngwezi National Park territory — but the people we met were some of the warmest of the whole Zambia trip, genuinely curious why two people had driven that far out of their way for a waterfall most Zambians I mentioned it to in Lusaka had never heard of. I don’t have a tidy explanation either, beyond the fact that some places reward the effort of getting there precisely because so few people make it.

When to go: Visit during or just after the rainy season, roughly March through May, when water volume is highest and the falls are at their most dramatic; the road is far easier in the dry months from June to October if driving comfort matters more to you than flow.