Zambia

Zambia is a country that has been touched by civilization and yet it has a personality and a character that is so unique. Piglets, lambs and chubby babies hide behind their mums as you drive through the many villages with smoking huts and millie crops that dot the countryside. Village woman balance improbable loads on their heads, landscapes are lush and green right to the horizon and the thin ribbon road meanders through the mountains to meet the lacey mists at the mountains base. Families proudly display the fruits of a hard day’s labor on fashioned tables and props for passersby to purchase, although you should know what you are buying as few villagers speak English.

Campbell and I pulled over to buy what we thought were potatoes and melons but we came unstuck. No-one in the village could tell us what these porcupine-looking green things were nor the mangled root-like-potato-looking things which we later discovered was Cassava. I am yet to find the name of the green vegetable but apparently it is like butternut except you boil it and eat only the inside. Now that we know how to cook it, we will try it tonight.
We agreed that quite a few Zambians could enter the Tour de France and put Lance Armstrong to shame. As Zambia is not the wealthiest of countries the transport system is unreliable and terrifying at best, instead everywhere you look there are bicycles laden with precarious weights of produce of all sorts. You can barely see man nor bike for produce and they cycle extremely far distances and crazily steep mountain passes. The common cargo are large sacks of local charcoal which has an unusual smell that is very different to western charcoal but you grow accustomed to it.

The major towns are all hustle and bustle in a chaotic manner that would shake any Londoner or New Yorker. Bright colors almost leak into the streets as hawkers come at you with their wares of electric colored clothing, foreign exchange, brilliantly carved African art, guavas, tomatoes, Nyaminnyami’s (necklaces carved in the shape of Zambia’s Valley River God) and bracelets.

Before leaving Livingstone we stopped in at the first of our Seven Wonders of the World sites, the glorious and breathtaking Victoria Falls. I will let the pictures speak for themselves. After wringing out all our clothes from the falls, our adventures then took us from lovely Livingstone to the appropriately named Eureka campsite in Lusaka. All I can say is that we were begging for a decent shower and a good nights rest by the time we got there. Bad roads, torrential rains, no street lights and manic drivers had both of us on edge by the time we got there – Eureka!! We met a seasoned traveler, crazy Craig who had done West Africa and is now doing East Africa by himself, as well as some unfortunate Belgians who had flipped their Land Rover Discovery days before and were now stranded at camp Eureka with a car literally held together by tape.

After stocking up in manic and rather disheveled Lusaka Town we tried and failed to make it to Chipata in one day. Our only other option at the time was to stay in a kraal campsite in Petauke village which is so small that you can drive through it in 5minutes. The kraal made my skin crawl and we were gauked at like animals in a zoo, which we probably looked like it at the time. Torrential rains soaked our boerie rolls, turned our tomato sauce to soup and to make matters worse the butternut we had bought from Spar to braai that night had already been eaten from the inside out by maggots. I think it’s important to mention, for our mothers, that the butternut was eaten in-store and that we haven’t stooped that low in the hygiene department, not yet anyway. It was bleak times! We figured our health would be better served to not shower at all than to use the kraal ablutions. A particularly rude cock (easy Chunky!) crowed us awake at the early hours of the morning but we were grateful for the excuse to pack up and leave for Malawi.