My epic cross-Africa train ride to the Victoria Falls

Times

14 hours ago

So there's me and all these rich folks sitting in fancy dining cars — drinking coffee and smoking big cigars — and yet the landscapes we're crossing are among the poorest on the planet.
Today we're lunching on springbok loin with wilted spinach and plum jus, accompanied by a nagging awareness of social imbalance.
'Everybody waves,' my American dining companion notes. 'These people, who have so little, seem so joyful.' That starts a debate on the false relationship between wealth and happiness, and it passes the time until the liqueurs arrive.
We're in Botswana now, after a mildly dramatic border crossing in which a young official, whose demand for a 'special payment' had been refused, forced all 53 guests to carry their luggage to a disinfection station and wash their shoes before being allowed into the country.
'Like refugees,' a prickly British guest mutters, but Botswana, it seems, is a thorny nation. The route north from Gaborone, across the Tropic of Capricorn, is basically a 490-mile journey through a hedge. The thickets of mopane and wait-a-while thorn are so dense that they scratch the train as it passes, and the only hints of human habitation are the dusty footpaths crossing the line.
• Read part one of Chris Haslam's Rovos rail trip here
The absence of wildlife surprises many guests, but that's a recent development. When David Livingstone came this way in 1849, he saw lions, buffaloes, hyenas, rhinoceroses and herds of elephants so great that the Batswana people fenced cattle pens with tusks.
In his Victorian bestseller Missionary Travels he also mentions how this was 'a region of terror' due to 'the numbers of serpents which infested it'.
The snakes are still there, but there's room no more for other beasts. Africa's human population has grown from about 140 million in 1925 to 1.4 billion in 2025 — and all those people need room to live.
Consequently habitat has shrunk and the vast majority of Africa's so-called wildlife is restricted to about 7,800 protected areas (PAs), covering roughly 17 per cent of Africa's land surface.
Many of these are badly managed, underfunded and of little conservation value; a recent report by the African Parks Network identified just 162 playing an 'outsized role' in biodiversity protection. But for better or for worse, the African species tourists expect to see roaming wild are now confined to PAs, like zoo animals.
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The line we're following north is a rusting legacy of the scramble for Africa. A single track takes the shortest route across Botswana to Zimbabwe — the African equivalent to the Somerset section of the M5, taking travellers across a place where no one wants to stop to destinations where they do.
The 400-mile line between Francistown and Plumtree opened in November 1897. It was built in just 400 days, and you can tell. The train rocks and rolls like a trawler in an Atlantic storm, and from up in the cab you can see why.
The railway stretches to the horizon like a straight line drawn by a drunk, with more kinks than a Conservative Party conference. 'I'm authorised to do 30km/h [18mph] but I don't go much above 25km/h,' says the driver Wikus Meingies. 'Otherwise the guests spill their wine.'
Or fall out of bed. At times the dream of being rocked to sleep is only true if you imagine it's Motörhead doing the rocking. Hence the need for the 3,848 bottles of wine on board.
Plumtree is the Zimbabwean border, so we stop to get our passports stamped. Kids in smart green uniforms wave as they walk to school, then wave again as they head home for lunch. Zimbabwean immigration is taking its own sweet time, but no one's bothered.
As I sit writing in the observation car, I can see guests jogging, shopping, trainspotting and chewing the fat with Plumtree's residents.
Most visitors to Africa come on safari. They fly into the bush and stay in luxury lodges where the only Africans they meet are driving the vehicles, mixing the drinks or cleaning the rooms.
Here, guests see the continent at its poorest, ugliest, friendliest and most beautiful, and all at 15mph. This is slow travel at its finest.
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The next day we roll into Victoria Falls. We've seen the Mosi-oa-Tunya — or 'the smoke that thunders' — from ten miles southeast, rising in great rolling plumes towards the tourist helicopters that buzz like wasps above the cataract.
The winter rains have left the Zambezi high, and the falls are as magnificently terrifying as I've ever seen them.
'Imagine a river a mile broad, suddenly tumbling over a precipice 400 feet deep,' the British hunter Frederick Selous wrote in 1874, 'and perhaps from these naked facts [one] may picture how grand a sight must be the Victoria Falls.'
As tourists watch from the 16 viewpoints on the cliffs opposite in the Victoria Falls National Park (No 5 is the best), they're chilled as much by a sense of mortality as the spray.
We're staying the night at the Victoria Falls Hotel, which has offered Edwardian elegance, pith-helmeted porters and unbeatable views of the Victoria Falls Bridge since 1904.
• Explore our guide to Africa
Stanley's Bar in the hotel is one of the world's greats, and the following day, when I find myself in a climbing harness and a safety line on a catwalk beneath that bridge, the roar, the spray, the rainbows and the miracle of engineering to which I cling prove a swift and effective hangover cure.
Cecil Rhodes's unfulfilled dream of a railway running from Cairo to the Cape was detailed enough that he specified the Zambezi bridge should be close enough to the Falls that carriages would be soaked by the spray as they crossed.
The design job fell to the Leeds-born George Hobson. His measurements — made with chains, tapes and theodolites — and his hand-drawn plans were sent to the Cleveland Bridge & Engineering Company in Darlington, where the components were fabricated, shipped to Beira in Mozambique and then brought by rail to Victoria Falls like a full-scale Meccano set.
It was perhaps not surprising, then, that when the builders tried to join the north and south sections, they overlapped by 1¼ inches.
But as the construction crew — described by one diarist as 'the most extraordinary collection of cosmopolitan toughs I have encountered anywhere' — drowned their disappointment in the bar at the Vic Falls Hotel, the steel cooled and contracted, and the next morning the bolt holes aligned.
As I emerge from the dark side, the train is waiting on the bridge, dripping from the spray. There's time for a final glimpse of the smoke that thunders, then the diesels rev and we enter Zambia.Chris Haslam was a guest of Distant Journeys, which has 20 nights on the Grand African Rail Journey— with 13 all-inclusive onboard, three all-inclusive in a hotel or lodge and two B&B in hotels — from £12,995pp, including flights (distantjourneys.co.uk)