With the likes of the great Victoria Falls, early hominid history in the Sterkfontein Caves, Table Mountain, the Fish River Canyon, Cape Fynbos and the Richtersveld, Southern Africa’s many natural splendours could have a list longer than the top seven of the World. Join us in exploring these 7 wonders of this beautiful country starting with Victoria falls.

1. Victoria Falls

David Livingstone first set eyes on “the smoke of thunders” in 1855, a heartbeat ago in geological time. With Chief Sekeletu of the Makololo, he approached it by canoe and stood on an island in the Zambezi, gazing at the river as it rolled over the lip and tumbled into the boiling chasm below.

Everybody who has seen the falls has their favourite viewpoint, and you can follow Livingstone’s footsteps exactly to Livingstone’s Island and poke your nose into the gorge. Both the Zambians and Zimbabweans have a good viewpoints, but the falls are at their most exciting when you’re right down there in the gorge just out of reach of the cauldron of churning water, and being drenched by the spray. From there, it’s a curtain of falling water crowned with an eternal rainbow.

You might scowl occasionally at the helicopters drowning out the thundering waterfall, but they do offer another must-see vantage. From a bird’s eye view the falls and its 100 kilometre Batoka Gorge seem a mystical place, where steam magically rises from deep inside the earth.

Looking down, you’d be forgiven for assuming it was all carved out of the basalt and dolerite bedrock by water rushing for eons. As befits the falls, it was far more spectacular than that.

More than 50 million years ago, the Zambezi flowed south into the Limpopo River. Movements in the earth’s crust changed the river’s course, trapping it in on of the southernmost arms of the Rift Valley. With the movements, the crust weakened in places and lava poured out, to the following by faulting of the surface, which created the Batoka Gorge.

Tags: Adventure, Africa, Holiday, Limpopo River, Safari, South Africa, Touring, Victoria Falls, Zambezi

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 14th, 2009 at 10:42 pm and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.