Three Days Alone in a Place That Made Loneliness Feel Almost Worth It

The scheduling situation at the delta was this: the rest of the group took traditional mokoros — dugout canoes, essentially — deep into the bush for two nights with no facilities. I, due to some booking snafu I never fully understood, got a small plane into Gunn’s Camp, a full-service lodge in the interior of the delta. I was not thrilled about being split from the group. I booked a tour specifically to be around people, not to be alone in luxury.

Then I landed, walked up the path, and the entire cleaning staff was standing under a thatched roof singing and dancing. For me. Just me. One guest arriving on a Tuesday morning, and these people had organized a full welcome performance. I didn’t know whether to clap or cry a little, so I did something in between.

Jinxy, who turned out to be an OU graduate from his years in Oklahoma (his words: “Go Sooners” — I respected it without agreeing), walked me through the camp schedule: activity at 7am, full brunch at 11, siesta, tea and cake at 3, another activity at 3:30, dinner at 7:30, then the Thirsty Elephant Bar until further notice. My tent — and I use the word loosely for what was essentially a canvas-walled suite with its own screened porch — sat at the edge of the waterway. Hippos grunted in the dark outside. I drank tea and felt mildly guilty about how comfortable I was.

The second morning, my guide Petros announced we were heading way upstream for a full day of fishing — places he said even he hadn’t been, which is why he brought a local guide named T along for navigation. We counted 38 fish eagles in one day. Thirty-eight. About 1.5 per kilometer of river. We saw crocs sunning on banks, elephants drinking at the edge of the water, herons, cranes, egrets, copper-tailed cocos. And then Petros announced we were having a fishing competition.

He caught the first one. I felt set up. But then three spots in a row produced nothing for either of us, and I applied what I believe to be a universal truth: fishing is better with beer. I pulled one from the cooler, cracked it, and on the very next cast — fish on. From that point it was a war. Final score: Petros 5, Bill 5, poor T a distant 1 and catching considerable grief about it. Petros hooked number six near the end and lost him at the boat, then lost his lure in the weeds on the next cast. A tie. I’ll take it.

“We are having a fishing competition,” Petros announced, already holding his rod. He was the first one to catch a fish.

That night I was the only person at dinner. Jinxy, Petros, and I sat at the bar afterward telling jokes until we couldn’t anymore. Those two are the reason Gunn’s Camp gets five stars from me — not the tent, not the food, not the birds. Them.

The Falls, the Raft, and the Hike That Was Described as “Moderate”

Victoria Falls announced itself before we saw it. The mist rising above the treeline first, then the sound — not a roar exactly, more like a hundred heavy trucks rolling slowly down a highway, constant and deep. Walking toward it through dry heat, you feel the air change. The dryness drops away and suddenly you’re in humidity, and then you turn a corner and there it is.

What hits you first is the length. Not one dramatic single drop but a long, gently curving arc of multiple falls, each one feeding into the gorge below. We were there in dry season, which means lower water but also no mist obscuring the view — you could see clean to the bottom of the gorge, which is something you can’t always do. And because this is Zimbabwe and not the United States, there are no guard rails, no warning signs, no fences between you and the rim. You walk directly to the edge and look down. The depth becomes real in your body in a way it never does through a railing.

We timed it for late afternoon, and that decision paid off more than most decisions I’ve made on this trip. As the sun dropped toward the horizon, the falls shifted from white froth to something golden and warm, the light moving through the spray in a way I don’t have the right words for. I stood there longer than I intended.

The next morning: the Zambezi. Same cliff, but now at river level after a hike down that the materials described as moderate. It was not moderate going back up — 25 minutes straight up the canyon wall in 95-degree heat wearing a wet helmet, with the promise of free beer at the top as the only structural motivation. I made it in 22 minutes and 18 seconds. Those beers tasted like nothing I’ve ever tasted before or since.

The day itself was everything. Victor — from Victoria, he made sure we knew — ran us through safety procedures that visibly elevated the heart rates of several people in our group. I was the only one who’d rafted before. Colm, to his credit and our collective entertainment, exited the boat three separate times before lunch. The third time nobody even asked what happened. The full boat flip came courtesy of hitting a wall sideways — one second upright, next second completely inverted, six people distributed across the river, safety crew picking us up like it was a practiced drill (because it was). Everyone came up laughing. That’s the only way that sentence ends on a river like this.

The Three Sisters rapids followed by what the guides called their Angry Mother — that sequence is the best stretch of whitewater I’ve been on. Walls and waves and constant paddle commands, soaked through, arms burning, completely present in the way that only genuine physical danger makes you present.

That last night, Luke used some connection from London to get us into the Victoria Falls Hotel — proper colonial-era institution, immaculate gardens, dinner under trees lit from below with a canyon breeze carrying the sound of the falls. After a week on a dump-truck-turned-touring-vehicle, eating camp food and sharing showers, it felt slightly unreal. We had wine and cocktails and something close to a full-course meal, eight days of shared discomfort turning into the kind of ease that only happens between people who’ve been through something together.

Here’s what I keep coming back to: I almost didn’t book this leg of the trip. I almost skipped Botswana because it seemed expensive for what it was, and I nearly did a half-day raft instead of the full day because the full day cost more. Both of those would have been bad calls. You can’t know in advance which version of a decision is going to matter, which is exactly why you don’t cut the thing short to save fifty bucks. Book the full day. Go into the delta even if they split you from the group. Drink the beer before you cast. Some places require a little more commitment than you planned to give them, and they pay it back in ways that are genuinely hard to explain to someone who wasn’t there.

The Okavango Delta is the largest inland delta on earth. Victoria Falls is one of the widest waterfalls on earth. The Zambezi below those falls runs Class 5 whitewater through a gorge with walls you can touch on both sides. These are not gentle places. They don’t ask for your comfort level in advance. But if you show up with enough flexibility to let the schedule shift — to get split from the group and land alone at a camp in the middle of nowhere with a fishing guide who wants to beat you — you end up with stories that hold up years later. That’s the only thing I can promise.

Got questions about the Nomad truck route, Gunn’s Camp logistics, timing the delta, or which Zambezi rapids to watch for? Ask WildWilliam AI — it’s got the full picture from this trip and forty-plus countries of decisions, good and otherwise, to pull from.