April 2024

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Mostly unremarkable, but still worth a short trip.​​​​​

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"Where are you guys headed?" I asked three local teenage hitchhikers on the roadside.

 

"Just into Nkayi," the boy, next to two girls, responds.

 

"Hop on in," I told them and we drove on. "Where in town?"

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"The hospital." Says the boy. Silence.

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"Are you sick?" my wife, Suhei, asks him.

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"Yes," he replies, and says nothing.

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The hesitation is deafening.

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"With what?" I ask.

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"Tuberculosis."

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Silence.

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We drove on with the windows down, trying to hold our breath.

 

*****​

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Zimbabwe gets a fair amount of tourists, but the vast majority spend only a few days at Victoria Falls and then leave. Victoria Falls is well worth visiting. The rest of the country, in our experience, is not as worth visiting.

 

Compared to the safety and beauty of nearby Botswana and Namibia, we found Zimbabwe to be mostly unremarkable, fairly sketchy, and the people more distant. The road system is quite bad, and national parks are outrageously expensive. Harare is a large and fairly chaotic city, with a tiny slice of American-style suburbs in the northern end. There are a few spots in the south that we didn't see, but over two weeks here in April 2024 during our Coast2Coast2Coast Africa Overland Expedition, we felt like we saw enough - or everything we wanted to see, at least.

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Victoria Falls was absolutely spectacular. $50 USD for entrance is a theft in a country where most people earn a few dollars a day, but we were floored. From here, we traveled a horribly potholed road southeast, past vast environmental wastes ravaged by the Chinese, police roadblocks and checkpoints, and locals pretending to be fixing the road and asking us for money for their faked work.

 

After a few days in Harare, we drove north through Chinhoyi to see a cave and baboons, before dropping down into the Zambezi River valley and undergoing an extremely bureaucratic crossing into Zambia. 

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None of the towns that we visited in Zimbabwe were particularly memorable. Locals were sometimes friendly, and sometimes staring at us with hostile expressions. Shockingly, in rural places, many people don't speak a world of English. Despite once being a fairly prosperous nation, appalling poverty abounds in the countryside.

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The mountains in the southeast of the country look to be one of the prettiest regions of the country, and possibly southern Africa. But with crazy amounts of police roadblocks, corruption, and crime, there are many parts of this country that we were ok with not seeing.