ADVENTURE » ZAMBEZI
t’ s pitch dark when Jared picks up the pace. No streetlights, no houses, no headlamps. Those are at home. Who plans to ride through the African bush at night? Not us, anyway. Jared wants us to stay close together and be as quiet as possible. Because of the elephants. They use this stretch a lot, he says, especially at night, when they move down to the river.
For days I have wished for nothing more than to finally see elephants. Tonight I am glad about every one that stays away. Priorities can change fast. Two kilometres to go. We pedal, we breathe, we say nothing. Somewhere to our left, invisible, flows the Zambezi River.
The next morning, the road serves up the punchline: fresh footprints, big as frying pans, elephant dung in between. What should we have done if we had run into one, I ask Jared over coffee. Don’ t stop, he says. Just keep riding. In the dark. Past an elephant. At night.
Five days earlier, we had been standing at the start of this story, still thinking it would be a perfectly normal gravel trip.
Spray on the horizon
“ Look ahead,” says the taxi driver who delivers us from the airport, pointing through the windshield.“ Those aren’ t clouds. That’ s the spray of Victoria Falls.” We are still kilometres away, and the waterfall is already waving at us. The locals call the falls“ Mosi-oa-Tunya”: the smoke that thunders. That’ s not poetry, that’ s simply a description. The spray stands over the land like smoke, greeting you long before you even sense the river.
That same evening we walk over. The closer we get, the cooler and damper the air becomes, and, suddenly, we’ re standing in a belt of lush green: the spray has grown a small rainforest around the falls, in the middle of a bone-dry African winter. Then the view into the gorge. Across more than one-and-a-half kilometres, the Zambezi drops a good hundred metres. In 1855, David Livingstone was the first European to stand at its edge. No idea what he said back then. We say nothing at all at first. We just stand there and feel wonderfully small.
I have known Gerhard Czerner for more than 15 years. We go on an expedition together almost every year, usually on mountain bikes. Tina Hochstrasser is a friend from my village in Switzerland; she decided to join our trip on short notice. Since 2014, when I photographed the Cape Epic for the first time, Africa has pulled me back every year, mostly to South Africa. But Zimbabwe and Zambia are new territory for me. On the bike, I carry two cameras on a hip belt, a small drone hangs
30 | GRAVEL BIKE