Grasshoppers are strange. But, they appear alone and, well, they hop. That could be cute.

Locusts, on the other hand, are like suspiciously over-muscled versions of the grasshopper. Regardless of what they look like in pictures, anything that flies in a skittering, clattering way, undoubtedly aiming for your head, is always scary.


I remember the locusts.

They never came in the millions. They didn't even come in the thousands. We might at one time have seen hundreds. Still, these weren't the little dwarf suckers you see on plague documentaries on TV. These were the big AFRICAN locusts. Where one was scary, a dozen seemed like an alien invasion.

Funny thing; I remember the smell of locusts.

I remembered the road by the river bank near Victoria Falls that led to the massive Baobab tree. We always saw that rogue elephant walking about and making a u-turn as soon as we spotted him. He was scary and huge.

I loved the Booze Cruise along the Zambezi River at sunset going past Monkey Island where hundreds of monkeys lived. Also the crocodiles and hippos along the river banks.

We visited the Crocodile Farm and there was some construction work going on.  The worker's were putting up a wire fence and we happened to notice a  lion cub escaping from a gap in the fence. One of us grabbed it and we got the picture of a lifetime. He was just so cute. Pity we couldn't keep him. (At least I think it was a he).