Thundering Smoke - The Victoria Falls (21/34)

Thundering Smoke - The Victoria Falls (21/34)

Even from the distance something extraordinary can be sensed: despite of a clear blue sky there is a bank of clouds just a little bit above the grounds - the drizzle of the Victoria Falls which go up to an altitude of up to 300 metres and which can be seen for miles: Mosi oa Tunya - "thundering smoke" as the Victoria Falls are referred to here. They are Africa's largest waterfalls which form the world's widest water curtain during the rainy season.

This film is about the nature and the fauna around the Victoria Falls: it shows hippopotami which have their constant areas in the Sambesi River and are anxiously avoided by everybody who travels the river by boat; it tells of ospreys for which the Sambesi river with its large fish stock offers enough food to raise their offspring. It shows the "Big Tree" - an eight-hundred-year-old Baobab tree in the immediate vicinity of the canyon; the rain forest which develops a very unique mikrofauna in the rain of the drizzle and it tells about the river's elephants which find a land of plenty on the islands above the waterfalls which they, however, have to leave in time before the flood waters obstruct their passage back.