Kino Yves has finally made it to Zimbabwe. The French YouTuber, four years on the road since leaving France on an electric tricycle he calls Khotso, crossed the border at Mount Selinda, and his first three Zimbabwe episodes went up between 28 October and 4 November on a channel with more than 350,000 subscribers.[1][2]
It is his 83rd country and his 22nd in Africa. For a channel that has spent months in Mozambique, the switch is obvious from the first minutes, and he spends a lot of those minutes comparing the two.[1]
Over the Chimanimani and through the border
His last full day in Mozambique took him from Dombe to Dacata, climbing into the Chimanimani Mountains on a quiet road with little food on it. Near the end he noticed people answering him in English rather than Portuguese, and said the villages already felt Zimbabwean to him, even though he had never been to the country.[3]
The crossing itself came after a 1,000 metre climb from Dacata, at a small, remote post where, he points out, there is barely any no man's land between the two countries. He had already bought his visa online, and says one immigration officer was not pleased that there was nothing left to pay. Customs had nothing to collect either, since the trike is pedalled, with only battery assistance. He paid nothing extra and was through quickly, but on camera afterwards he is blunt that some of the officers he met were, in his words, looking for trouble.[1]
He also talks about the currency declaration form. Travellers have to say how much cash they are carrying, and he passes on stories he says he heard from other travellers who declared large sums and were robbed later on the road. He did not see this happen, and we have not been able to verify it. The US State Department's advice is simply to fill in the declaration and list what you carry.[1][4] It was enough for him to change plans, though: he told people he was heading to Mutare and Harare, then took a different road.[1][5]
The road to Chipinge
Zimbabwe greeted him with a thunderstorm, giant trees on Mount Selinda and what he calls a festival of potholes. The 75 km day from Dacata to Chipinge took almost eight hours, much of it spent picking a line through mud, rivers across the road and a strip of asphalt that was barely there. One stretch was so flooded he stopped to watch a car go through a puddle first to see how deep it was.[6]
It was also where Zimbabwean hospitality first caught up with him. A car from Harare on its way to Mount Selinda stopped, the passengers asked him all about the trip, and they sent him off with bread and polony. He had not planned on a proper lunch, and ate the lot by the roadside. "I have the feeling that Zimbabwe is going to be awesome," he says not long after.[6]
What he liked most was the talking. In Mozambique, he says, people stopped him for selfies and little else. Here they asked where he had come from, how he charges the trike and why on earth he was doing it. He did pass on one warning he says he got from other cyclists who crossed the country, which is to watch out for drunk drivers.[6]
Prices, power cuts and Birchenough Bridge
Chipinge's Palm Cresta Lodge charged him $30 a night with Wi-Fi and breakfast, and his verdict on the country so far is that everything is expensive. He had booked three nights but left early, in the rain, after the lodge lost power for two days. The lodge still got its money's worth: staff gave him a Palm Cresta Lodge T-shirt, and he wore it on camera the next morning, putting the name in front of more than 90,000 viewers so far. That is the kind of marketing instinct more of our tourism businesses could use.[6][5]
He greets nearly everyone he passes with a cheerful "hello, hello", and by the second day Zimbabwe was greeting him back. One man on the road asked where he was from. "France," he said. Yes, the man knew that, but where was he from here? "Chipinge," Yves answered, which went down very well. By evening, he said, everyone just wanted to say hello.[5]
The ride down to Birchenough Bridge took him through what he calls a baobab wonderland. He kept stopping to film them, and fair enough: watching the episode, those giant old trees lining the road down to the Save are a sight even for those of us who live here. The same ride gave him a taste of our road manners. A truck driver overtaking him was so busy staring at the trike that he nearly drove into another truck, and later a car trailed him so closely that he made a U-turn just to shake it off. When he doubled back to the turn-off for a pineapple, one of the sellers broke into a dance at the sight of a customer. They charged him $1 for a small pineapple (he says a big one cost about 20 cents in Mozambique) and taught him a few words of Shona, sending him on with "mufambe zvakanaka". He explains to viewers that the minimum price for almost anything is a dollar, because there are no coins to give change in.[5][7]
He calls the bridge a beautiful piece of engineering. His hotel by the Save River had no council water, because the power was out, and ran a generator from seven in the evening. "That's what you get for $25 in a remote part of Zimbabwe," he tells the camera. Dinner was a $5 three-piece chicken and chips, his first meal in a Zimbabwean restaurant. He also found the town far more relaxed about being filmed than Mozambique had been.[5][8]
What it means, and where he goes next
Travel vloggers with big followings are now one of the ways people abroad first see Zimbabwe, and the border episode alone has passed 230,000 views since it went up on 28 October. So far, viewers are seeing the same picture we see ourselves: friendly people, beautiful countryside, a destroyed road between Mount Selinda and Chipinge, prices that sting, and power cuts that send a visitor back out into the rain.[1]
He has said he plans to spend two to three months in the country. At Birchenough Bridge he turned left rather than right, towards Masvingo and Great Zimbabwe, and from here he is heading for Namibia, Angola and West Africa on the long way home to France. His videos go up some time after they are filmed, which he says is for safety, so the trip on screen is a few days behind the real one.[6][5]
Sources
I Made a HUGE Mistake at the Zimbabwe Border (vA94-S2), Kino Yves, YouTube ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
He Had NEVER Seen a White Man Before (vA93-S2), Kino Yves, YouTube ↩︎
I Paid $25 For THIS in Zimbabwe (vA96-S2), Kino Yves, YouTube ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
I Cycled The WORST Road in Southern Africa (vA95-S2), Kino Yves, YouTube ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Is Zimbabwe zigzagging into further currency chaos?, BBC News ↩︎
Researched and drafted with the help of AI tools, then fact-checked and edited by our team. How we work.
