Skift Take
For tourism operators surrounding Victoria Falls, the fabled Zambezi river god Nyami Nyami appears to be smiling on them at last. After years in the tourism wilderness, the tide has turned and business is booming in the northern reaches of Zimbabwe.
Editor's Note: Skift launched a new series, Gateway, to broaden our news coverage geographically with first-hand, original stories from correspondents embedded in cities around the world.
We are featuring regular reports from Beijing, Singapore and Cape Town. Gateway Cape Town, for example, signifies that the reporter is writing from that city although his coverage of the business of travel will meander to other locales in the region. Read about the series here, and check out all the stories in the series here.
“Scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight,” wrote missionary and explorer David Livingstone in 1855, after "discovering" the Victoria Falls and naming them for his dowager Queen.
It’s hard not to be impressed by Mosi-oa-Tunya — "the smoke that thunders" — as the Zambezi River tumbles down into the Batoka Gorge in a 1.7 kilometer-wide curtain of water. It is, undoubtedly, one of the great natural wonders of the world.
But even the force of the Falls isn’t immune to politics and nervous tourists. For years arrivals have faltered, a victim of Zimbabwe’s disastrous economic and political policies.
That situation is changing though. Relative political stability in Zimbabwe has eased safety fears, and the 2009 "dollarization" of the country “put an end to hyperinflation and stabilised the econom
