Victoria Falls

• The Cape Escape - Cape Town
• My Mountain High in Cape Town - Cape Town
• The Drop Zone - Cape Town
• On the trail to true adventure - Johannesburg
• The great es-Cape - Cape Town
• Come into the Garden - The Garden Route
• My Zulu Extravaganza - Durban
• Up Close and Personal - South African Safari
• Tracking Big Game - Kruger National Park
• Sleeping with the Lions - South African Safari
• A Safari with real pride - South African Safari
• Where the Lion King comes to Life - South African Safari
• Our guide to the top 10 safaris - South African Safari
• A Roaring Success - Victoria Falls
• Come into the Garden - The Garden Route
• The Worlds Most Beautiful Road? - The Garden Route
• Zipping off to Zanzibar - Zanzibar, Kenya
• Africa's catch of the day - Mozambique
• The Cape escape… and it was right up my Street - Garden Route: South Africa
• The nation kissed by a rainbow - South Africa
• Our wild silver wedding! - Kenya

IF YOU SEE A ZAMBIAN driving in a straight line he’s probably drunk, said my driver Lewis as he negotiated a hole in the road large enough to lose a London bus.

They don’t need sleeping policemen to slow down the traffic here because every 50 yards or so there’s a pothole that achieves much the same effect. But Lewis is philosophical about the state of the roads. “If the tourists keep coming we’ll soon be able to afford to repair them,” he said.

We are on our way from the airport at Livingstone, which is on the booming Zambian side of the Victoria Falls, to one of Africa’s newest hotel complexes, the Falls Resort. This development on the banks of the Zambezi River is fast growing in popularity as an alternative to Zimbabwe, from where the Falls have traditionally been viewed and it’s easy to understand why as we pull up in front of the five-star Royal Livingstone.

Wallowing on the banks

A magnificent open marble foyer gives a view through to manicured lawns sweeping down to the Zambezi River, where hippos can be seen wallowing on the banks.

Just 100 yards or so downstream and bordering the hotel grounds are the roaring Falls themselves, marked by a huge mushroom cloud of spray which can be seen from more than 60 kilometres away.

The resort is actually two hotels. The colonial style Royal Livingstone and in adjoining grounds, the family orientated three star Zambezi Sun, the pastel coloured walls of which remind me of New Mexico architecture. Between them they have increased the GDP of the whole nation by a staggering 3 per cent since they opened at the beginning of last year.

Much of the resort’s success is down to its endlessly energetic hotel manager Chris van Dam, with phone clamped permanently to his ear. One moment he’s personally greeting new arrivals in reception and the next he’s going through the last-minute details for a wedding party with more than 100 guests at an open air dinner in the hotel grounds.

Running a hotel in Africa is no easy option. All the staff have had to be trained from scratch in five-star service standards, and on most counts they succeed. The food is excellent, the ambience wonderful and the staff very friendly - the Zambians are better educated than their counterparts in most neighbouring countries.

At sunset we watched the huge African sun disappear over the horizon from the open Sundowners bar on the bank of the river. Nearby, hippos bellowed as they wallowed in the shallow water.

They may look playful but these huge creatures are responsible for more deaths in Africa each year than any other wild animal. Soon after the hotel opened one German tourist ignored the warnings and crossed a protective fence on the river bank to feed buns to the hippos. They promptly ate both her and the buns.

A short stroll through the grounds takes you to the northern side of the Falls with its small craft market and scenic walk interspersed with observation points.

You can just imagine David Livingstone’s disappointment when he arrived here suffering from malaria.

For more than two years he had been following the Zambezi hoping it would be navigable by shipping to open up the continent. And then he found, bang in his way, the biggest waterfall in the world, more than a mile wide and 350ft deep!

The sheer size of this seventh natural wonder of the world, with its permanent rainbow, is awesome. If you are very brave you can actually walk along the lip of the Falls, hopping between the rocks, outside of the March to May flood season.

If that doesn’t appeal to you there are plenty of other adrenaline surging activities on offer nearby as the area has used its natural geography to develop itself into one of the world’s top activity centres.

The whitewater rafting is some of the best in the world, the flying fox is a sort of aerial runway across the gorge, and abseiling, skydiving and horseriding are all available. We chose to go on the jetboat. This was a spine-tingling experience that began with a bumpy ride for several miles along a sandy track that took us through the Mukuni tribal lands and small African villages. For every tourist who goes jetboating or whitewater rafting, one US dollar goes into a trust fund for the Mukuni people to pay for local projects including the building of a new school.

We hadn’t been warned that to reach the boat we had to descend more than 200ft down the gorge by means of a narrow path and we should wear suitable shoes. The French girl with the gold platform disco sandals was the slowest down closely followed by three Saga holidaymakers.

Gavin, the boats kiwi driver, learned his craft back home on the Shotover River in New Zealand where the jetboat was invented. It’s a shallow bottom boat with a huge V8 engine which basically sucks water in through a huge vent and pushes it out again through a small vent giving it phenomenal power and according to Gavin, displacing the equivalent of 60,000 bottles of beer every minute.

Everyone had a great time and got very wet as we bounced up the rapids but it’s not recommended for people with back problems.

Birds eye view

Saga pensioner Dave, who owned a concrete supply business back in Brentford, didn’t have back problems but he did have dodgy knees and didn’t fancy the walk back up the gorge so he organised one of the local sightseeing helicopters to collect him. Feeling lazy, we hitched a lift and were soon swooping along the gorge and high over the Falls, giving a birdseye view which is definitely not to be missed.

On another day we joined a safari through the Chobe national park. The morning game drive was by boat along the delta where we spotted hippos, elephants and myriad birdlife. After lunch we transferred to open-top vehicles and spent the afternoon in search of more game. We didn’t spot all the big Five but there’s plenty to see.

That evening, back in Livingstone, we took a sunset cruise from the Waterfront, a teak built bar and bungalow complex on the water’s edge. Our boat held a dozen or so tourists and almost as many crew, their job being to hand out ample supplies of alcohol and do a song and dance routine around sunset.

There were several such boats, some carrying as many as 100 passengers and while all the boats on the Zambian side seemed to be busy it was clear that most on the Zimbabwe side of the river were tied up.

Tourism to Zimbabwe has slumped massively because of the problems there. Its currency is devaluing daily and the bureaux de change at the border closed down at the end of last year.

The winner in all this is Zambia, which is proving to be friendly, good value, and geographically a better way to view the Falls.

“So what do you reckon?” asked Lewis as he drove me back to the airport. “Will the tourists come?”

“Yes,” I replied, “I think they will and very soon you are going to have to learn to drive in a straight line!”