It’s All About the Adventure

Our last full day in Vic Falls started out checking in with our tour agency to see if it was possible to do our activities. He said weather looked good for the helicopter ride so we quickly grabbed breakfast before getting picked up by our driver to head to Flight of Angels helicopter pad. Neither one of us had been in a helicopter previously so I at least wasn’t sure how it would go.

When it was our turn to go, they weighed us all and gave us a short safety briefing before we put on our headphones to board the helicopter. Lucky me got to sit in the copilot seat (wasn’t too excited about it, and Grant was jealous, but did turn out to be a pretty cool view). The ride was about 13 minutes long and did a couple loops around Victoria Falls before heading back to the pad. Surprisingly, I enjoyed the flight way more than I thought I would. They of course did the tourist thing of showing us our video in hopes that we would buy it. We liked the pictures they took, but the video was mostly information about Victoria falls rather than our actual ride. Grant practiced his negotiating lessons from our friends in Kenya and offered a different price for just the photos (offered to omit the videos) – try negotiating a tourist video in the US! When the guy realized we wouldn’t buy the video, he offered both pictures and video for a discounted price. We ended up getting it for another $5 off as they didn’t have any change to give us in return (per last post’s note about people not having any change in US currency).

We thankfully were one of the lasts flights up before they shut operations down due to the weather. We thought we weren’t going to be able to do our adventure activities but they surprisingly allowed people to do them in the rain. We headed up to the Lookout Cafe where we signed in for our HighWire Pass which included the Flying Fox, Zipline, and the Gorge Swing. Thankfully we were able to do the Gorge Swing tandem or else I probably would not have taken that leap. As you can tell in the video, I probably bursted Grant’s eardrum during that free fall before we finally started the swing. The worker told us afterwards that he had to shorten the ropes for us or else we would have dipped into the river with our combined weight.

We had to get the video they made of the Gorge Swing!

Afterwards, we grabbed lunch at the Lookout Cafe and enjoyed the views of the Batoka Gorge. We headed back for a quick stopover in the hotel before it was time to head to our Sunset cruise upstream of the falls. The weather starting the drive to the dock was chilly and rainy and we didn’t think we would get to enjoy a sunset view. Even if we didn’t, it would still be a relaxing cruise on the Zambezi river. We saw plenty of hippos hanging out in the water (one of the animals we didn’t think we’d see this much of) and lots of birds. Some of the guests on the boat claim they saw a crocodile though we think it was just a log floating in the water – none of the guides could spot it either. Our sunset cruise ended on a highlight with a beautiful sunset!