The smoke that thunders — adventure capital at Victoria Falls
Livingstone sits minutes from Mosi-oa-Tunya — the Kololo name for Victoria Falls, translating as 'the smoke that thunders' — one of the Seven Wonders of the Natural World and the largest waterfall on earth by total water volume. The town itself is a laid-back colonial-era settlement where safari operators, white-water rafting companies, and sunset cruise boats all depart from the same muddy Zambezi bank, and the sound of the falls carries on the wind at night.
The settlement took its name from David Livingstone, the Scottish explorer and missionary who became the first European to see the falls on 16 November 1855 and named them after Queen Victoria. A British colonial town grew around a railway crossing built in 1905 — famously, Cecil Rhodes wanted the spray from the falls to wet the train windows — and Livingstone served as the capital of Northern Rhodesia until 1935, when the capital moved to Lusaka. The town retains its Edwardian bungalow streetscape and an unusually well-preserved colonial museum.