Like any work of fine art, Victoria Falls — a masterpiece of tectonic creation and one of the Seven Wonders of the Natural World — is a spectacle best viewed from several angles. This is how I found myself in the most precarious of positions, buckled up in what appeared for all intents and purposes to be a scooter wearing a kite, powered by a lawnmower motor.
How microlights even make it off the ground still baffles me. These machines look more like an early prototype of an eccentric engineering project than a chariot capable of flight. But sure enough, as I gripped the seat, my pilot steered our wobbly aerodyne along the runway and lifted it into the sky. The feeble-sounding engine stuttered at the back, the canvas above our heads fluttered in the wind, and the bellowing boom of the Victoria Falls reverberated below.
"I wonder if death would be instant," I pondered, peering down as the ferocious cascades below us veered into sight. I also wondered who might write my obituary, which friend would take ownership of my cats, and whether my mother would read my teenage diaries when she cleared out my belongings.
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Mortality feels more imminent in a ceiling-less, windowless microlight than it would in the capsule of a helicopter or plane, which only adds a thrill to the experience. "Scenes so lovely must have been gazed upon by angels in their flight," wrote David Livingstone wistfully when he became the first European to witness Victoria Falls in 1855. The Scottish explorer named the site after the then-monarch of his homeland, but its original Lozi moniker, Mosi-oa-Tunya, is more evocative: "the smoke that thunders".