10/40-1 I Have to Go

All right, settle down people. Settle. Settle, people. People settle.

Thank you.

I’ve been closely reading your comments and your feedbacks and your suggestions and your minds and it’s now all very clear to me that my posts on this trip are seriously lacking in the type of content YOU’ve come to expect (or daren’t I say, demand) from diehardthree.com.

Well, not wanting to disappoint an even greater number of people than I do normally external to my writing, today I am going to deliver. Right next to where we are staying is one of the best world attractions. It’s been in the top twenty or the top ten of some online listicles, but right now it’s in the top three water features of my heart.

That’s right! We are staying at the beautiful Victoria Falls Waterfront Hotel and the natural wonder right close by is the Zambezi River!

Ha ha ha! Jk, jk, it’s the falls, the Victoria Falls.

Sorry about that here’s a picture.

The main problem with waterfalls is that everyone thinks theirs is the best. Take the Canadian one for example. We think it’s the best, but in reality, it isn’t. I know this because there’s a simple way to measure the quality of a waterfall.

For a waterfall to be considered great, it needs to have high scores in each of the three traditional waterfall metrics: water volume, falls height, and falls length. While volume and length are relatively easy to quantify, measuring height is actually quite challenging. Do you measure from the base of the falls proper? Or do you have to account for the angle to calculate an adjusted height? What about yaw?

Anyway, these minor discrepancies are not important. But what is important is that for a waterfall to be truly spectacular it has to have an element of danger.

I call it: the survivability factor.

So while Niagara Falls might seem impressive with it’s highest rate-of-flow in the world, all that extra water has the unintended consequence of softening the landing of anyone who happens to find themselves floating too close to the edge.

Now on the other hand, here is another picture of The Victoria Falls.

As you can see from the verticality and the high-quality exposed rocks at the base there, it has a survivability factor of zero*. So when you combine this with length, height, and water flow, and then you consider the complete absence of casinos and wax museums within walking distance of the falls, good olde Victoria Falls comes out on top!

*The waterfall survivability factor is an inverted scale so a score of zero is the highest, like in golf.