‘The weather on the ground is hot. Hot, sunny, dry and dusty. I hope you remembered your sunscreen.’ These were not the words I expected at 30 000-odd feet.
Victoria Falls, as I understood it, was a lot of water - about 625 million litres per minute - falling over a cliff 885m into the abyss, the rainforest around it constantly wet. A rainforest, you hear, constantly wet from the spray.
But the captain was right. Stepping off the plane onto the melting tarmac was just that - relentlessly hot and dry, the sun frying everything under it. It was, I admit, a little disappointing.
The drive into town with Alek Zulu, Sian Simba's head guide, did not lift my spirits. On each side of the road stretched acres of dull brown, dried out trees, as far as the eye could see and not a leaf of green among them. The town, when we got there, was sun-bleached and dusty.
I imagined a tumbleweed rolling down the road and the creak of the saloon door as a tall, rangy stranger walked in and asked for a whisky. It seemed that kind of place.
