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Praise God! The government of Zimbabwe lifted the duty tax on most goods coming into the country just yesterday. Which means we don’t have to pay taxes on all the food and household products we bought – only the fuel I think. Wow, Claudio says the people here are happy and I believe him, but I’m not sure that the rap and rock blasting from some of these vehicles are evidence of that. We are waiting for Fanny to clear customs before we can continue on our way.

We actually ended up shopping until 4pm as we scrambled to get last minute items we could not find at earlier locations.

On the Botswana side of the border, there was this huge line of Zimbabweans waiting to get stamped through (on both sides you have to exit your vehicle and walk through the passport control building – filling out whatever forms are required). But as we were Americans, we followed Claudio to the front of the line asking for forms that we needed to fill out, while Fanny stayed in line. Claudio (having visited no less than 34 countries) was quite smooth and friendly as we figured out what we needed to do, as well as picking up an extra form for Fanny. We waved Fanny up and got an extra form for him since he would have to go through with us (he was our driver of course). We filled everything out on a ledge there by ourselves, and when we were finished we came up to the guy passing out the forms and letting groups of people in at a time. As we approached, Claudio begins talking out loud “I’m going to check with our friend here to make sure we have everything filled out properly. Can you look at this? I think we have everything taken care of…” Sure enough, the guy liked what he saw and waves us all through. That saved a couple hours – a second answer to prayer.

Here at the Plumtree border station, there was another line of people and no way to just make another line for Americans up front J. We refrained from giving up our passports to people that promised to move us dumb Americans right into the station up front. And it turned out that this line moved pretty quickly. But once inside the building, it did take a while for us to all buy new visas (another $30 U.S.) to get back in the country since our old visas were single-entry visas only.