The border crossing from Botswana into Zimbabwe cost Christian LeBlanc $327 in a single morning, including a undocumented $100 charge per bike that came with no receipt and no explanation. But that chaotic entry point turned out to be the least surprising thing about the days ahead. What unfolded in the country beyond the tourist strip around Victoria Falls was a crash course in how most of the world actually lives, and how far removed from that reality most travelers stay.
LeBlanc and his best friend Cam had been riding 450cc motorbikes across the continent, six countries and 10,000 kilometers in total, roughly a quarter of the planet’s circumference. For this stretch, his girlfriend Ruby and her sister Bridget joined the convoy. The plan for their first full day in Zimbabwe was not a zip line or a bungee jump. It was to ride 40 minutes outside the tourist town and find the side of the country that rarely makes it into anyone’s travel content.
The rescue farm hidden in a rural village
Lisa, the founder of Wild Biza, met the group in an old Land Rover and drove them into Sisuma village. Wild Biza operates as a rescue farm in the most literal sense. During the previous season’s drought, Lisa found livestock on the brink of death scattered across the surrounding land. The animals that survived did so because she brought them back to her ranch, fed them, and kept them alive. Every animal on the property, from the cows to the goats to the ducks, was a rescue.
From the farm, the group set off on horseback, with LeBlanc aboard a horse named Banksy who had strong opinions about crossing water and an almost professional commitment to finding grass. The trail wound through the village, past mud-and-straw homes built entirely from local materials, and into a community garden where residents can plant vegetables at no cost using water pumped in from a nearby reservoir.
A local guide named Tani walked them through his family’s homestead and explained the daily reality of life in the village without softening it. School costs $25 per term, or $75 a year, and that figure is out of reach for many families. The primary diet is sadza, a dense, starchy staple similar to mashed potato but firmer and blander, eaten with okra or bean leaves foraged from the surrounding bush. Meat is a rarity. The clinic nearby runs low on supplies and often sends patients away with a card to buy medicine themselves. Malaria comes every season, almost without fail. Tani said he contracts it roughly once a year.
Lisa had told the group earlier that the average person in the area earns between $3 and $10 a day, for those who have any income at all. Tani was direct about the other end of that spectrum: ‘You can spend even a week without any dollar in your pocket.’
The conversation turned to Zimbabwe’s hyperinflation. Tani recalled that the currency collapsed starting around 2000, reducing it to something close to worthless. Today the country runs almost entirely on US dollars. ‘This year is a better year,’ he said, pointing to the rainfall. The rains matter because the roofing grass dried out in the drought, and rain is what grows it back. One problem feeds the next in a cycle that moves at the pace of seasons, not policy.
A coding student who speaks fluently and builds websites
Near the end of the homestead visit, the group met a young woman named Immaculate, whose fluency in English stopped LeBlanc mid-sentence. She studies technology and coding at a vocational training center called Jafuta Foundation, and she told him she hopes to use those skills in tourism, building websites for tour groups. LeBlanc let several of the young people in the village try on an anti-gravity headset he had brought, and the hunting dogs stationed nearby made their feelings about the technology unmistakably clear.
Before leaving, the Wild Biza team signed the motorbike, adding their mark to a growing record of everyone the trip had touched across the continent.
A canyon earned by getting genuinely lost
Lisa had mentioned a gorge hidden somewhere in the surrounding trails, reachable from the farm. With no signage and a set of directions that produced more wrong turns than right ones, the bikes plunged into mud tracks for the better part of an hour. Ruby, who was navigating, noted that every time the road split, staying left had been the instruction. There were at least ten splits. Eventually, past the mud and the confusion, the trail opened onto a ledge above a canyon where the water from Victoria Falls drains after its famous drop. The gorge was churning and green and completely unannounced on any map the group had seen. They also found a baby praying mantis on the ledge.
LeBlanc put it plainly before riding back: ‘Victoria Falls is famous for zip lines, bungee, helicopter rides. But if you come here and only do that, you’re missing out on seeing something really deep and something really beautiful.’
The mosquito net inside a mud room
In the sleeping quarters of the homestead Tani showed them, a small boy was already asleep on a mat, a mosquito net draped carefully around him against the season’s mosquitoes.
The net was there because programs including UNICEF have distributed them to households across communities like this one. Without it, the season and its malaria would simply be worse. The room itself was cool and dark, built from mud, called utaga in the local language, with walls thick enough to keep the heat out and a grass roof that depends on a good rainy season to stay intact.
