Wednesday, April 11 (Day 26): A morning in the local market, then flying home!
Our final day in Africa! We were glad to be heading home, but… It seemed as if we had been gone for months, since we had packed so much into just three and a half weeks.
Our flight from Victoria Falls to Johannesburg, South Africa was scheduled to depart at 2:45 PM, so we were to leave the hotel for the airport at about 1:00. That gave us plenty of time for shopping in the open air market. After breakfast in the hotel dining area, we went back to our rooms and collected some items for barter – things we didn't want to take back to the U.S. with us, but that might be considered valuable in exchange for carvings or other items. Examples were our cheap K-mart shoes, my last ball cap, one folding umbrella, and Carol's visor.
We decided to walk to the market as this was a weekday morning and lots of people were walking up and down the main road. We figured that if we needed to ride back with our purchases we could get a taxi. Strolling along, we mingled with the local pedestrians. No one approached us or seemed to pay much attention to us. This was, after all, a tourist town, and I'm sure the people were used to seeing folks of other races and cultures routinely.
The market was a few blocks off the main road, but easily accessible. As we approached it, we discovered an additional area of market stalls we hadn't seen the day before, slightly away from the area with "stall number three." We decided to look there first. I'll try to describe it.
There were stalls – usually consisting of four poles in the ground with a tarp or other cover for sun and rain protection, merchandise arrayed on the ground in rows for easy viewing and access – arranged in a square roughly 100 feet on each side. The stalls themselves were each about fifteen feet wide, allowing 25-30 stalls around the square. Each stall had at least one man acting as proprietor. Although there was fierce competition, there was also cooperation to a point. For example, if we approached one stall and seemed interested, that stall's proprietor would do his best to convince us to buy something. Usually they would assure us that their carvings were the best, and that they had the cheapest prices. (Frankly, all the carvings looked pretty much the same to me. My guess is they all came from a factory in Taiwan and cost about 50 cents apiece!)
If we seemed about to move on, that proprietor would beg and plead, offering "Best prices! Make any offer!" while holding up anything we might have looked at for longer than two seconds. He would even resort to begging us to buy something, telling us about his hungry children at home. Meanwhile, the other proprietors left us alone. Each one respected the others' right to a captive audience so long as we were looking at his stuff. Once we moved on, we were the next proprietor's exclusive targets! Also, when we were looking for a particular item and the merchant in front of us had exhausted his store's resources, he would call out in his native language to others nearby and they would rush to bring us their version of what he described. Thus, if we just milled about we were approached by many and urged to come to their shop, or offered examples of their items and told emphatically, "Best price! Make offer!" But once we stopped to engage anyone in conversation or to barter, the others immediately left us alone. But they were waiting nearby if we didn't strike a deal, and would pounce as soon as we moved.
As we walked over to the first stall, Carol announced loudly that she first wanted to just walk slowly and look at each stall, and would NOT buy anything until she had seen what each shop had to offer. She repeated this often, and was fairly successful. Each stall proprietor would urge us to come back to his stall first when we were ready to buy. We told them that we had promised yesterday to go first to stall number three in the nearby market, then we would go to the stalls where we saw something we liked.
Most of the shop proprietors were not simply standing and waiting for shoppers, they were rearranging their items and polishing them. I noticed that they were all using shoe polish to shine up the carvings! It was standard (usually Kiwi brand) shoe polish. I noticed on the ground in the center of the square hundreds of empty shoe polish tins. Maybe that's where the REAL money is, in selling shoe polish!
We were carrying plastic shopping bags with our shoes, cap, visor and umbrella in them. These were noticed by several of the vendors, who would approach and ask quietly if we would consider trading these items. When we said yes, each assured us he would give us the best deal for them.
After a complete tour around the square, we told the vendors we would come back in a few minutes after a visit to the other market area. As promised the night before, we went straight to stall number three, and told the young proprietor we had seen a panel carving of elephants that was attractive and asked if he had any. (This was an item designed to be hung on a wall. It was carved from wood, and showed three or four elephants walking in a line. The one we finally bought is about 5 to 6 inches tall and nearly 18 inches long.) He had something similar to what Carol had in mind, but not close enough. After we had exhausted his resources, he called out to others around him, and panels began appearing from all directions. We must have looked at twenty panels, but none was as pretty as the one she had seen at the other market.
The young proprietor at stall number three was getting desperate. He had successfully gotten us back to his stall this morning, but now it looked as if we weren't going to give him any business! He held up piece after piece, polishing them and asking us to make an offer. Unfortunately we just didn't see anything we wanted. We felt like we needed to do something for him since he had been so nice, so we ended up just giving him one of the items we had brought for barter and thanking him for trying so hard. He was disappointed, but at least he had come away with something for all his efforts.
We walked back around the corner to the other market area where the vendors were overjoyed to see us return with no purchases from the competition! We had to ignore many pleas to come to this or that stall first as we made our way to the one where Carol had seen the panel carving she liked. After pointing it out to the proprietor (who was thrilled that we came to his stall first!), the bargaining began. I don't remember (and it's not in our notes) what the starting and final prices were, but we made what we considered a fair deal and I'm sure the seller ended up with twice as much as he would have settled for. By the way, all prices were in U.S. dollars, not Zimbabwe dollars!
We went to two other stalls where we had seen things we liked, and made our deals. Along the way we disposed of the barter items. Interestingly, when we offered some money and a pair of shoes for one item, the proprietor called over another man who examined the shoes and apparently gave him an idea of their "street market" value. All this was done in local language and incomprehensible to us.
By the time we were done it was getting hot and we were tired. It had only been perhaps ninety minutes of shopping, but that kind of shopping is pressure-packed if you're not used to being approached by many people each urging you to come, look, buy! We decided to take a taxi back to the hotel rather than walk.
Now it was time to pack for the looooong flights home. We first showered and put on the clothes we would travel in. It would be our last chance to shower for two days, until we were back in Texas at our own house! Then came the final packing, including carefully wrapping our souvenirs in lots of clothing to pad them during multiple airline handlings. We put some toiletries in a carry-on bag so I could shave the next morning at the airport in Amsterdam. Almost everything else went into our luggage that was to be checked at Victoria Falls, and we would next see in Houston.
Rather than call for a porter, we carried all of our bags over to the hotel lobby and checked out at the front desk. Then we walked around to the patio by the pool and ordered cokes while we waited for Les and Linda. They had gone to the market after us and had still been shopping when we took the taxi back to the hotel. We realized that we had no pictures of the Sprayview Hotel, so Carol grabbed the camera and took the shots below.
Our Zimbabwe residence. More like what we would call a Motel – you could
drive to your ground-level room and park in front of it if desired.
Carol felt
the palm
trees and croton's
leaves reminded her of a Florida Motel. This is the patio by the pool.
John with his Coke sits in front of the pool. Yes, the water
really was that color! Needed a little chlorine, I'd say!
This was a tree in the parking lot with a bougainvillea growing
up through the middle of it.
While we relaxed with our cokes, we talked about the various money exchange rates advertised around town. Tourists were advised to only exchange money in foreign exchange offices, not on the streets, as street exchanges were illegal and we could be arrested! I wondered how some of the offices were able to legally offer widely varying exchange rates without running afoul of the law. Since we had plenty of time, I walked over to the hotel concierge desk and asked. What I was told made perfect sense. It is illegal to exchange currency without a license, which must be purchased from the government. Once a dealer pays for his license, he can exchange currency for any rate he chooses and the government doesn't care if it is the "official" rate or not. So exchanging at 100 to 1 is OK if you do so at a licensed location, but exchanging at an unlicensed location is illegal at any rate. Since several places were willing to exchange at 100 to 1, and THEY had to be making a profit, we wondered what the real value of the Zimbabwe dollar was.
Les and Linda arrived, and since we didn't know if we would get any food on the flight to Johannesburg, we ordered lunch at the hotel. The food was good, and since we were paying in Zim dollars it was also cheap.
Our small bus to the airport arrived on time. It was not air conditioned, but we loaded in our bags and were ready to set out. However, one of the tires was slowly going flat; we could hear it hissing as air escaped. So another bus had to be called. In a surprisingly short time, the replacement arrived, and this one WAS air conditioned! How nice!
Along the road to the airport we passed several tourist markets with hundreds of carvings. Usually they would have several really large giraffes (six feet or more tall) out in front to attract attention. Few of them seemed to have any business. However, at the airport we saw an American couple checking, along with their baggage, two large carvings of a hippo and a baby. The adult hippo was probably two and a half feet long and fifteen inches high, with the baby sized proportionately. They were really attractive and cute, and would look really great in a living room or den. We asked the people where they had found them, and they said in one of the markets along the road to the airport! They had paid $20 for the two carvings. That sounded like a deal! Unfortunately there was no way for us to go back and shop, nor did we really want to.
We had been warned about this, and sure enough there was a departure tax that had to be paid in order to leave Zimbabwe. It was (very specifically) $20 U.S. It was not payable in Zimbabwe currency, only U.S dollars. We guessed that this was a means of obtaining valuable U.S. currency by the Zimbabwe government.
Our plane was on time – a British Airways 737. We left Victoria Falls at 2:45 pm and arrived at Johannesburg at 4:20. Here we were to split, with Les and Linda flying home on Sabena Airways, while Carol and I were on KLM. We had over two hours before boarding our 747 for Amsterdam, so the four of us browsed the airport shops before saying our goodbyes and going to our separate gates. Linda had been hoping to find a one-hour photo processing store to develop the pictures of Mookie so she could send them off to the little girl immediately upon arriving in the States, but there was no store like that to be found. We hugged, shook hands, promised to stay in touch by email and telephone back home, and went to our separate airlines.
Our "thank-yous" to Les and Linda sounded almost hollow when we considered all of the planning and preparations they had made, and the extent to which we had depended on their experience. We would never have conceived of a trip like this one, let alone attempted it, without their invitation, urging, knowledge and advice. This had truly been a "trip of a lifetime," made possible by them.
The flight to Amsterdam was long. We took off after dark and could see nothing on the ground the entire flight. Carol was able to sleep a little with her eye mask and ear plugs. I didn't realize how useful they would be until I kept jolting awake at noises or because of the flickering lights of the in-flight movies on the TV screens above. We dozed off and on, but got very little actual rest.
Once in Amsterdam (at 5:15 AM) there was plenty of time to find our next departure gate, clean up, eat some breakfast, and read a book if we wanted to. We weren't scheduled to leave until 10:30. Speaking of breakfast, we thought it would be nice (since we were in Europe, after all) to get some croissants and cappuccino. We wandered the concourses for a while in search of restaurants that were open, and found several, but none offered what we had in mind. We needed to find a French sidewalk café, but those are scarce in major airports. Finally, believe it or not, we found a McDonalds (yes, golden arches and all) that had croissants and cappuccino! The croissants were fresh and delicious, and the coffee was strong and good. Exactly what we had wanted.
In Installment One of this journal, our first photograph is a picture of the KLM 747 that took us from Houston to Amsterdam on the first leg of our trip. It seemed only fitting to take our last picture of the KLM 747 that would take us from Amsterdam back to Houston for the last leg. So, here it is.
Our ride to Houston. Note the reflections from the terminal
windows.
It was now Thursday morning, April 12. We boarded our plane and flew to Houston without incident, trying to nap on the plane with not much success. As on the first leg nearly four weeks ago (as promised by the KLM agent) we had exit-row seating with all the leg room in the world! Once again, the food and service was world-class. We wouldn’t hesitate to fly KLM in the future any chance we might have.
At Houston's Intercontinental, clearing passport control was routine. I had dutifully listed on a customs declaration form every item I could think of that we had purchased, along with its value. At the baggage claim area, all of our items eventually slid down the ramp to the carousel, including my Masai spear in its cardboard and duct tape wrapper! By now, one end of the spear had poked through the cardboard and was exposed, but it was undamaged. We later found that the horn had broken off of the front end of some rhino bookends we had purchased in Victoria Falls, but we were able to glue it back on without problems.
All that remained was picking up our rental car, driving to Victoria (hadn't we just come from there? Oh, that was Victoria Falls!), unloading the car, calling family members to let them know we were home safely, showering and going to bed! So that's exactly what we did.
The End
Thanks for reading our "John and Carol's African Adventures" journal!