Zimbabwe now is very different from what the media usually served us. It is friendly and safe. The shops and gas stations are well stocked. There is a quite good infrastructure, normal asphalt roads, and plenty of cars on the streets. Somewhat surprising, especially after Mozambique.
In Zimbabwe we our dreams came true – we became trillioners! We got the famous 100 trillion (one with 14 zeros) dollar banknote, the biggest nominal ever issued in the world. Now, these banknotes are only a bad memory from the hyperinflation in 2008. In the last phase the prices were doubling every … 2 minutes! It is not easy to get these banknotes, because back in 2008 it was cheaper to burn them than to buy firewood for heating the houses, we were told.
To stop this chaos the USD was officially introduced. Zimbabwe used to be dirt cheap. Now it remains mainly dirt, but not cheap. You pay European prices for everything. With no coins in use, all prices are rounded up to 1 USD. Basically, this makes prices of small things, like bus rides or bottled water quite expensive. In some supermarkets the change is given in candies or chewing gums.
Moreover, paying with a card is a wishful thinking. Everything is cash-only. And it is not easy to get cash. Most ATMs are out of money, and in front of the working ones you’ll find looooong permanent queues. This means that to get around, we need to carry hundreds of dollars on us.
Internet is much more popular than in Mozambique, but by no means cheap. In one café they asked us 14 USD for 50MB of WiFi! This result ranks second on our “digital-split list”, just after the 50USD for 10 pages of fax in Mozambique.
Despite the warnings in the bible (i.e., the LP guidebook), we decided to take a train to Victoria Falls (instead of a bus). Well designed, solid, but poorly maintained and dirty. First, it wouldn’t start because the locomotive was missing. We took off two hours later than scheduled (fortunately there exists a time-table and the train may leave before full). Not long later, at night, we stopped in the middle of nowhere, because the locomotive broke down. After a few hours we resumed our journey. In the last sections we were crossing the Hwange National Park with one of the highest population of elephants in Africa. We didn’t see any member of the Big 5, except maybe for numerous elephant skeletons lying just next to the rails. Apparently, they didn’t use the park’s zebras to cross the track 
The lack of the Big 5 outside the window was entirely compensated by “Small 5” representatives of fauna in our compartment, cockroaches, bed bugs and other nice creepy crawlies. In total, the train took us 18h instead of scheduled 9h.
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