I did not grow up surrounded by the wild places people travel across the world to see.
I grew up in Wedza, in rural Rhodesia, in a place where life was shaped more by survival than scenery. Nature was present, but it was not something we admired from a distance or photographed. It was something you worked within. Something you respected quietly, often without fully recognising its beauty.
As a young boy in Wedza, I knew the land through farming rhythms, weather patterns, and the way seasons dictated daily life. The soil, the rain, and the sun were part of survival. There was no idea of tourism. No thought that people would travel thousands of kilometres simply to stand and look at landscapes or animals. Nature was simply there, like the sky or the ground beneath your feet.
It was only after I finished school, when I began moving around Zimbabwe looking for work and opportunity, that my understanding of nature began to change.
That change began the day I first arrived in Victoria Falls.
I remember the journey before I remember the waterfall itself. The air felt different long before you could see the water. There was a coolness that moved through the heat. A faint smell of moisture carried by the wind. Birds sounded louder, or perhaps I was listening more carefully without realising it.
Then there was the sound.
It did not begin as a roar. It began as a presence. A deep, steady vibration that you feel before you hear. The closer I moved toward the Falls, the more it felt like the ground itself was speaking through the water.
When I first stood before Mosi-oa-Tunya, the Smoke That Thunders, I was not prepared for how small it would make me feel.
It was not only the size. It was the movement. The endless collapse of water over ancient rock. The mist rising and drifting like breath from the earth itself. The way sunlight disappeared into the spray and returned as rainbows that appeared and vanished without warning.
I remember standing there longer than I planned to. Not because I was trying to study it. Because I did not know how to leave.
That was the first lesson the bush ever gave me, though I did not recognise it as a lesson at the time.
Some places do not ask for your attention. They command your humility.
Victoria Falls was the first place that showed me that nature was not simply something people live within. It is something people belong to, whether they realise it or not.
As I spent more time around the Falls and the surrounding bush, I began to notice things I had never paid attention to before. The way the Zambezi River changes its voice depending on the season. The way animals move cautiously toward water but never carelessly. The way silence in the bush is never empty. It is always filled with information waiting to be understood.
I began to realise that the wilderness is not dramatic all the time. In fact, its greatest power is often found in quiet moments between obvious events.
That understanding shaped the path I eventually followed as a guide.
Many visitors arrive at Victoria Falls expecting spectacle, and they are not wrong. The Falls are spectacular. But what stays with most people long after they leave is not the size of the water. It is the feeling of standing in a place that existed long before us and will exist long after us.
The bush teaches this lesson repeatedly.
You do not conquer it.
You do not own it.
You learn to move through it respectfully, and if you are patient, it begins to reveal itself slowly.
Looking back now, I realise that my journey into guiding did not begin with training or employment. It began with that first moment standing in the mist of the Falls, listening to water speak a language I did not yet understand but somehow recognised.
The bush has been teaching me how to listen ever since.
