Home » Zambia » Day 2. Sun 18th - April Kariba Dam.

Today is a fairly easy day, and we get to lie in until 6:30. The day dawns bright and sunny and I decide to have an early morning swim. However it would seem that crocodiles are not the only danger in the lake - a party of three hippos have beaten me to it and are wallowing in the shallows. Keeping a keen eye on my escape route I venture cautiously down the beach to photograph them, much to the consternation of the others who are watching from the safety of the wall. There are two things to remember with hippos, arguably the most dangerous of all African mammals. 1. although they have an impressive turn of speed they have very short legs and can't jump, so anything higher than about 6 inches between you and the charging hippo affords protection. 2. the one sure way to provoke a hippo is to get between it and the water. As these were already in the water and looking very relaxed

Day 2. Sun 18th - April Kariba Dam.

DaveMidgley
2005-10-22 09:59:38

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Today is a fairly easy day, and we get to lie in until 6:30. The day dawns bright and sunny and I decide to have an early morning swim. However it would seem that crocodiles are not the only danger in the lake - a party of three hippos have beaten me to it and are wallowing in the shallows. Keeping a keen eye on my escape route I venture cautiously down the beach to photograph them, much to the consternation of the others who are watching from the safety of the wall. There are two things to remember with hippos, arguably the most dangerous of all African mammals. 1. although they have an impressive turn of speed they have very short legs and can't jump, so anything higher than about 6 inches between you and the charging hippo affords protection. 2. the one sure way to provoke a hippo is to get between it and the water. As these were already in the water and looking very relaxed I figured I was probably OK for a couple of snaps, but I decided against the swim!

After an excellent full English breakfast we set off for the Kariba dam.
There are two dams on the Zambesi, one at Kariba and one at Cahora Bassa, the rapids which David Livingstone famously failed to notice before declaring the Zambesi fully navigable and organising the ill-fated expedition into the interior. A third dam was planned at Mana Pools, but this was stopped by environmentalists.
Although we are not going to enter Zimbabwe, we still have to go through a border control to exit Zambia. It would seem that the dam itself is a sort of no-man's land, neither in Zambia or Zimbabwe. Ken has somehow failed to get an entry visa into Zambia, probably because his passport is so full of stamps that there is nowhere to put it, a constant problem for him. After a short altercation he agrees to surrender it for the duration of our walk.

The dam is impressive. The original power generators were on the Zimbabwian side, but in 1972 Kenneth Kaunda decided that it would ...