Japanese snack food and Victoria Falls.

Victoria Falls from the air

Our next stop was Victoria Falls, staying at a camp called Sussi and Chuma. Funny thing – because of people’s bad pronunciation (or perhaps my hearing!), I thought people were saying “Sushi n’Chuma”. I thought it was a Japanese snack food with some kind of local drink. But in fact Sussi and Chumas were the two loyal blacks who were with Dr Livingstone during his explorations. Nothing to do with Japanese snack food.
Anyway, at Livingstone we saw the Vic Falls, of course.

Sussi & Chuma (S&C from now on) was fascinating.
The lodge is on the Zambesi River and that was very romantic by itself.

My wife Karen outside our "lodge"

Staff were wonderful, nothing was too much trouble, it was spotlessly clean and evening drinks around the firepits were something else. Watching the sun go down over the Zambesi when the barman handed you a gin and tonic was straight out of an old "white hunter" movie. There were monkeys and elephants right outside our lodge.

He was five metres away

"You better come away from him"

The best part was the rhinos in an area a few kilometres up the road. We had one closeup encounter with a big male. I couldn’t get a good pic of him through the grass, so I circled to my right, to this kind of flattened path he was using. He started to come towards me. “Bloody good,” I thought and kept shooting. What I didn’t know, looking through the eyepiece, was he was five metres away “and closing”. The ranger, armed with an AK47 hauled me out of the way and told me later that the rhino was heading for the flattened grass under “his tree”, behind me.  He’d have seen me soon and then things could have gotten ugly.
The rangers stay with the five rhinos in the park on four-hour shifts. I asked him what would happen if he found a poacher. “We arrest them,” he said. “What if they resist, start to shoot?” I said. “Then we shoot back,” with a little smile.

Monkey duty with catapult.Dining area is behind the camera

One morning at breakfast, there was this man with a catapult in his hand. The manager’s partner, Isobel, told us the monkeys had been “naughty” and stealing food off the breakfast tables. The guard’s job was to scare them away.
We went to a local village and Karen gave the head lady the pencils and things we’d brought from Australia. (see the post called "The village") We also decided to fund repairs on a pump that was broken. We saw it, and it was. The S&m manager, Simon, will supervise the repairs and make sure everything is on the up and up. But that’s another story....