Once upon a time in Zimbabwe

When I was a kid in Rhodesia I had a Kodak Instamatic. Film cost one dollar for 12 pics. In fact, if memory serves me right, you paid for the developing at the OK Bazaars (black and white) and received a ‘free’ film. With my pocket money at 25 cents a week, later upped to $3 a month, you can gather I didn’t take to many pictures.

Later, in the police, a couple of months before I left, I bought a second-hand Russian made SLR. But again, tight arse me took next to none and regret it…big time.

Between 1984-94, I returned to Zimbabwe regularly. So often, it bankrupted me! But, this time I had a camera. Quite a few actually. Turns out I shot hundreds of pictures. I have stuff from Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, South Africa, Botswana and most of them…Zimbabwe.

The ‘Jewel of Africa’ before it all went tits up. All on slides. A short time ago I finally realised a dream and purchased a scanner capable of doing quite a good job and have for the last three days scanned non-stop, four slides at a time. I still have another week to go. These I haven’t had time to crop, I just wanted to get them up asap. Double click each pic for super size.

They say every picture tells a story. That means I have a lot of stories. So let me kick-off with these shots of a waterfall. We all know the Victoria Falls. I have so many of them, I am sick of looking at them. But these are of a little known falls that for the life of me I cannot remember their name. Inyanga, the mountain area of Zim, had some lovely falls. This one was a tad out of the way. After parking the car you followed a path that went parallel with the river for about three kilometres.

And then you are there. The river drops off the escarpment down into the Honde Valley. This is near the Mozambique border and the farming community were well slaughtered during the war.