Bulawayo, Zimbabwe

We discovered Zimbabwe at the border and the first impression we had was alredy not good… It took us 2 hours and about 50 EUR per person (not counting the fees for the car) to cross the border. People are already arrassing us, wanting to help us for the paperwok in exchange of financial compensation. The road is not nice at all, there are loads of stupid goats, monkeys and cows crossing and the burned cars all along the road do not make us feel comfortable. Furthermore, we got arrested 3 times and each time for a more irrational reason than the precedent one (Charles passing a truck, Charles not wearing a shirt while driving and non conventional reflectors). We managed to get out of those 3 without paying any fine just by discussing a bit. But policemen were really trying to get money wherever possible. They were arresting us and then, they were inspecting everything just to find something they could reproach us. Luckily, we are not the kind of persons that just let people steal our money without reacting…
After all the road and troubles we faced, we decided we deserved a nice night sleep in a hotel. We go to the holiday inn in Bulawayo but we had to negociate the price because in Zimbabwe they have two ranges of prices, one for the locals and one for the tourists. We are tourists but budget ones, so we convinced them and finally paid half the original price.
We really don’t like Zimbawe, and do not feel comfortable at all. We have no phone network, there is no radio, there is no ATM so no way to withdraw money, no real city, a gaz station every 200 k m only and locals are really not nice to tourists. We are staring to think it was not a good idea to go through all this just to see Victoria Falls.