Our train plodded on through the evening and into the early hours before stopping in a siding at Thompson Junction a couple of hours or so (as it would turn out!) to the south of our destination.

The Ravos Rail journey has been excellent. Travelling through a dry sun burnt countryside towards the end of the dry. During the wet it transforms into greenery and we are told views from the train are hampered by thick trackside vegetation.

The local kids are keen train watchers, appear from no where, wave enthusiastically and follow us down the line. The photo above shows a wavy track line. Zimbabwe is not great on maintenance and tends to fix problems rather than try to prevent them through maintenance!

In Hwange NP the wet also means that the animals roam further from the waterholes, the grasses are higher and it is harder to get close to them. In East Africa from mid August it seems is a good time to be here.

The meals on board have been as promised, locally inspired dishes, with some English trad thrown in, complemented by South African wines greet us each day for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Eggs on onion parmesan scones and stuffed chicken breasts were rather good examples.

In between a lot of looking out windows and seemingly endless chatter. Some are louder than others! Our cabin is big enough for us not to want to be in there all day, the sofa converts to a double in the evening.

During the early hours there is some shunting around a ‘triangle’, or is it a ‘bubble’ track (?), to allow the locos to swap train ends as the carriages ‘turn’ around. There is no facility at Victoria Falls to facilitate a carriage turn around.

So, we complete the journey into Victoria Falls with the locos pulling the carriages ‘backwards’ into the Victoria Falls station. Allthego needed a bit of paper and pen to see how this all worked, and even with the help of Homealone, still can’t work it out. Not an engineer.

The train station at Victoria Falls is a bit of a throw back to colonial times. An abandoned water tank symbolic of steam train days.

We alight here, to a welcome party of locals in traditional garb, and stroll the short distance down to the Victoria Falls Hotel for a four night stay in this ‘relic’ of bygone days.

The locos still point north but will again swap ends and leave at 5pm for the journey back to Pretoria with the observation car at the end, as it should be!