I'm feeling the peculiar combination of insulin shock and caffeine overdose that inevitably results from high english tea. The angle of the sunlight is casting a rainbow beneath the Victoria Falls bridge connecting Zimbabwe to Zambia. Tourists are straggling back onto the grounds with bazooka length digital cameras. The near constant drone of helicopters overflying the falls has abated, or perhaps drowned out by the slightly mis-tuned tinklings from the piano in Stanley's Room here at the Victoria Falls hotel. A bastion of English civility replete with animal heads and horns lining the corridors and hands-down the most polite and proper wait staff I have ever experienced. At night hearing the steam whistle of the locomotives you could forget which century this is.

The rooms have perfectly organized mosquito nets draped over the four-poster beds. It's winter, such as it is, so they are not really needed. But then, one of my drinking buddies in Cape Town had said 'don't bother with the antimalarials, they will just interfere with your enjoyment of the drinking'. So I slept under the netting. And yes I'm probably going to spend the NY summer drinking gin & tonic, having rediscovered just how perfect that combination can be, while watching the sun descend over the huge cloud of mist boiling up out of the falls.

The hotel is a 10 minute walk from the waterfall park but it involves running a gauntlet of vendors offering carvings, sculpture, 100 trillion Zim dollar notes and, in at least one case. oral sex. That last from a guy who rapidly realized I wasn't buying his carving of the Big 5 animals; I was as surprised at the clinical terminology as at the actual offer, but then I've also been asked if I have any old clothes I want to trade, or perhaps the shirt off my back in exchange for this carved hippo bone?

There are impressively large piles of fresh elephant dung by the gas station downtown, women carrying giant baskets balanced on their heads, marimba bands playing outside the trinket shops. The frogs in the courtyard make the most uncannily metallic croaking at night, you can't believe it comes from living creatures. Flatbed trucks crawl up the hill into town laden with ton-sized ingots of raw copper from the mines in Zambia.

I played a round of golf at Elephant Hills on the banks of the Zambesi river. My caddy was named Becky, he walks 7 km each way to join 70 other caddies waiting for a gig. It can be 2 or 3 weeks between rounds for him, and he gets $10 for 18 holes. His English is good, but I don't need any help to see the impala, wart hogs, monkeys and crocodiles along the course. And one huge baobab tree by the 17th tee box. He mentions the children starving almost in passing, and I have to wonder if he's in the third of the population infected with HIV. I can't decide if I should feel bad for golfing while this country implodes, or happy to have helped to provide his subsistance. I paid him triple the official rate.

I've probably been away too long. I eat with my fork upside town and I've begun to pronounce the first syllable in 'stupid' the same as that in 'putrid'. The flight here from Johannesburg had a dismaying proportion of retired midwestern americans in brand new safari gear but they seem to be staying elsewhere. I'm skipping the booze cruise down the Zambesi, I've seeen plenty of hippos already. I'll give a miss to the bungie jumping into the canyon, the ultralight rides over the falls, the copter ride...