Tag 1+2: Frankfurt - Johannesburg - Livingstone

June 28, 2019

Last day of school - start of summer vacation!

Our African adventure can begin!

Tonight at 20:45 our night flight with South African Airways from Frankfurt to Johannesburg starts. The flight is on time, we can even sleep for a few hours before we reach O.R. Tambo Airport in Johannesburg at half past seven in the morning.

June 29, 2019

After a 3-hour layover, we continue with South African Airways to Livingstone, Zambia.

The sky is cloudless, from the air we recognize the mountain ranges on the border with Botswana and even fly over the Zambezi River and the Victoria Falls (unfortunately I am sitting on the wrong side, so I cannot see the Victoria Falls).

Our booked hotel 'The Victoria Falls Waterfront' has several 'houses', each with 2 double rooms on the ground floor and a family room on the first floor.

The rooms are simple and functional.

All beds are equipped with a huge mosquito net (and that's a good thing!), but the sisal carpet that has been laid everywhere, even in the bathroom, takes some getting used to.

When it gets wet, which can happen while showering or at the sink, it smells very unpleasant.

In addition, the houses are 'open' everywhere - so we enjoy many creepy crawlies.

Fortunately, there are no spiders, but small geckos that we can watch in the bathroom in the evening while hunting mosquitoes.

The balcony of our room is our personal highlight. Very spacious, furnished with 4 chairs, we can watch the monkeys in the tree in front of us. However, upon arrival, we were instructed to always keep the doors and windows closed, as the harmless-looking monkeys are up to no good and would love to raid the kitchenette and refrigerator.

A short walk through the garden takes us to the Zambezi.

The hotel has a small sun terrace with a view of the river, a small pool in the middle of the terrace, and attached to it a restaurant, a bar, and a huge pizza oven!

We sit here by the river until the evening, enjoy the view, play cards with the kids, and plan tomorrow's day.

The pizza from the pizza oven, by the way, is extremely delicious!

Once the sun has set, it gets very chilly.

While the daytime temperature was still a pleasant +25 degrees, it cools down rapidly to only +3 degrees at night.

How lucky that we have long pajamas and thick fleece jackets with us.

In our room, we are greeted by mosquitoes - many mosquitoes!

They look like horseflies, but we are not sure. As a precaution, we use our supply of insect repellent and try to climb into bed under the mosquito net without letting a mosquito find its way under the net.

Of course, this doesn't work on the first try and we all sit under our net armed with a flashlight on our phone, trying to hunt down the individual mosquitoes.

At some point, we succeed and we can sleep.

At least we don't have to worry about malaria, as we have decided to take 'Malarone'.

That works great too - none of us has problems with the medication and safety comes first.

However, we are probably the only ones taking malaria medication.

The waiters find it amusing when they see our malaria meds on the table - there is no malaria in Livingstone.

Well, we still take it (who knows!!?)