travelling

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Over the last few days we've been doing a lot of driving through zambia to get into malawi. One of the big shames of overlanding like this is sometimes you just steam through the country with quite limited interaction with the local people.One of the most enjoyable things as we head further on is the reaction of the kids as they see us zooming past in our huge yellow lorry. Huge smiles, screams as they madly wave at us- and we never tire of waving back. We also get the occasional finger from disaffected teenagers and Eric has to be restrained from reciprocating...
When we've stopped for lunch along the way we've often been joined by kids ranging from one solitary boy who was just happy to silently watch us and eat the food we gave him to big gangs of kids that want to play football.
In Botswana four very drunk guys pulled up in their car, reggae music blaring and enlivened our meal by dancing, slurring and trying to bump and grind with some of the female members of the group (this was at about 1:30 Sunday afternoon).
One of our strangest encounters was in Zambia where within minutes of us arriving and setting up our picnic lunch we'd gathered an audience of about 20 children ranging from the tiny to the teenage who just stood and watched us with no expression. We tried smiling and greeting them but in the end had to eat our food under their unblinking unsmiling gaze. Our great leader Andrew prefers us not to share food with the kids -he's seen fights break out as older larger children try to take of larger-plus we simply didn't have enough food for this lot. However it turned out that this was not what they were there for. The moment the last one of us reboarded the bus to leave the first smile broke out.Then a few cheers and waves, which rose to screams of excitement and shouts of “hello hello”, as the bus started up and pulled away. As we drove off all the kids were running alongside us as fast as they could, waving, shouting and smiling., some of them bowling along tyres or bike wheels. As the last shout died away and we drove on we could only wonder whether they were just happy to see us leave or whether truck chasing was their favourite entertainment. We think/hope the latter.
In Zambia and Malawi we've also been loving the shop names. We were too slow with the camera to get any shots of the 'Slow but sure shop' and 'The truth shall prevail tuck shop' however we did manage to snap a couple of others (see pics).
We've also stopped at some local markets - in one Andrew decided to pick up a couple of stinky dried fish for our lunch. The unfortunate person who was charged with shredding them was soon behind a tree retching - one of them was maggoty and the stench was appauling. Andrew was the only one who ate any of the other and he proclaimed it delicious..well he had to didn't he. Andrew was also the one who proclaimed one week out of date chicken to be 'fine' (we threw it away behind his back) and was also happy with the iffy chicken which led to an outbreak of vomiting and diahorrea in most people (except us - we credit the Zimabwean vodka which kills anything).

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