Zimbabwe

Victoria Falls hit me harder than I expected. I had seen the photos before — everyone has — but standing at the viewpoints with mist soaking through my jacket, the roar so loud you have to shout into your friend's ear, that is something the photos never capture. The falls run so wide that you can't take it all in from any single spot; you keep moving, hoping the next gap in the spray will give you the full picture, and it never quite does. That feeling of the place being bigger than your ability to frame it stayed with me.

The rest of the trip had a slower rhythm. Game drives out of the Victoria Falls Private Game Reserve in the early morning, the dirt track still damp, the bush a deep grey-green under overcast skies. Sundowner stops in the middle of nowhere with a folding table set up beside the Land Cruiser — that particular brand of Zimbabwe hospitality where nobody rushes anything. The lodges along the Zambezi have a way of making you feel like the river is your own backyard.

I also came away with a ten-trillion-dollar Zimbabwe banknote, which someone sold me as a souvenir. It is a real note from 2008, a reminder of just how fast a currency can collapse. I held it and looked at the Balancing Rocks printed on it — those same granite formations you see everywhere on Zimbabwean emblems — and it felt like holding a small piece of a very strange chapter of history. Zimbabwe is a place that carries a lot, and yet the mood everywhere I went was easy, even warm.