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Published: December 16th 2006
Se Bra
A Zebra at the Munda Wanga park.GENTLEMEN
The sign on the door announced.
Not that there was sign of any gentlemanly behaviour hitherto in the small toilet. On the contrary - the urine sprayed walls indicated of a squalid border police force.
A squalid border police force that - led by their smirky police chief - had done a descent job delaying our entry by three hours.
Accompanying us in our frustration was a Namibian truck driver, though delayed for a full 24 hours he was too seasoned to show any sign of frustration. In fact, he was so seasoned that he didn’t show any facial expressions at all. The elements of the Namibian desert had shaped his face like a limestone statue to resemble a furrowed, tawny hawk.
He was the first white African we’d met.
His truck cabin’s panoramic windshield was like a big movie screen as he drove through the vast terra firma of the
Copperbelt province. The setting sun caressed the opencast mines and the mesa-like mountains with a coppery hue as we were gently rocketed asleep to the tunes of some Afrikaaner
Johnny Cash.
Induced by liquefied diet-pills the truck driver drove through the night
Copper
The road leading through the big cities Ndola and Kitwe in the Copperbelt Province , then all the way down to Lusaka. and as he eventually stopped some 60 kilometres north of
Lusaka it was 4 a.m. and we had since long been fast asleep.
The next morning he bought us breakfast in the shop-cum-café where we had parked, and as we sat down to eat the young owner of the place joined us with a sullen look. Eventually the coffee started to work and his manners softened so much that he invited us to stay with him.
His family had a house half a kilometre away from where they controlled their huge tobacco farms in the area, but for the moment his parents were on vacation in
South Africa and the house was empty, so he asked us to join him for the independence day celebrations and to stay for a couple of nights.
We were in no hurry to reach Lusaka so it suited us fine to stay with the farmer - eat some good food, access modern amenities (It was so long ago since we had access to a TV that we watched nine movies in two days) and get an insight into running a large scale African farm.
The truck driver said goodbye with
Stay in focus
A colour changing friend from the animal kingdom. Livingstone. the same stone-face that he’d kept during the last 24 hours, but I swear I got a quick glimpse of a smile in his eyes.
The days passed fast at the farmer’s house, he was extremely kind to us, but had an appalling opinion about the black population, which made our discussions uncomfortable so we left a bit earlier than we’d expected.
Well in Lusaka we were shocked by the city’s appearance.
Neat and sanitized.
On the clean and efficient street network surrounding the high walled compounds, methodically planted rows of Jacaranda and Bougainvillea gave a relieving shade to the well-dressed inhabitants.
A few modern and expensive malls dotted the cityscape and on the main avenue, some soviet era high-rises stood spreading greyness over the already bland city that I can’t describe better than the most soulless African capital I’ve visited so far.
Still it worked like a class-A drug on us and we spent eleven nights hobnobbing with other travellers.
The disastrous land reform in neighbouring
Zimbabwe that sent the country’s economy into a freefall and scared off all the tourists, benefited no country better than the neglected little
Legal Alien
No problems at the immigration office for this foreign Mama. Munda Wanga park. brother
Zambia where all the tourists now went instead. We hadn’t seen so many tourists since
Morocco nine months earlier and we had to add some new expressions to our vocabulary:
"
The big five". Five different species of mammals roaming the African savannah that apparently is a “
must-see”.
"
The big trip". A phrase invented by a famous guidebook company for travelling in the Southern African region for a couple of months.
"
Overlanders". Large groups of people that pay a fortune to escape independent travelling.
"
Backpackers’" A place specially aimed for the “
Overlanders” and the other tourists that do the so-called “Big trip”. Often in connection to a park where the so-called “
Big five” can be ticked of the “
must-see-list”.
Got it?
I’ve figured out two things:
1: In the Southern African region people primarily come to look at animals.
2: For any activity imaginable, there’s someone to charge for it, most probably the “
Backpackers’” in which you stay.
Probably it won’t take that long before we also give in and join the safari.
Time will tell.
We visited the Lusaka playhouse twice for two totally different
Into the sun
Sunset outside our guesthouse in Lusaka. but equally unforgettable (and puzzling) performances and were lucky to attend the “
First Ever Lusaka International Film Festival” - a free event that sadly didn’t get many visitors. Spent a day at the
Munda Wanga zoo and botanical garden, visited the
German embassy (!?), went to a R&B club (where we were so misplaced) and spent a whole night looking for a Halloween party, but first and foremost we spent our time in the Backpackers’ communal kitchen with the other campers.
Sharing information and beliefs, worries and laughter.
The Southern African region seemed far less safe than we’d expected. Most other travellers had a story about themselves being robbed. A young
German had been robbed at knifepoint in
Mozambique, two
American girls had had their daypacks (with Cameras, Laptops I-pods and so on) snatched at a train station in
Zimbabwe. An
Israeli couple had had passports and money stolen from their car outside a shopping centre in
Namibia, a
Japanese guy was mugged in
Soweto (that one’s a classic)
South Africa and one
Dutch guy was mugged at gunpoint outside his tent at a campground in
Botswana.
So it wasn’t more than fair that we also got
Friendly
Our friendly gatekeeper at the guesthouse, Lusaka. mugged, at the sleepy streets of Lusaka one early Tuesday evening on the last of October.
We were walking back from the main street,
Cairo Road, to our guesthouse, but instead of taking the normal short way back via the police station we decided to take a small detour via a bottle store connected to a filling station on the
Great East Road. From the huge roundabout at the northern end of Cairo Road to the first streetlights on the Great East Road one had to walk 150 metres in the dark. The potholed pavement then joined the illuminated car road on top of a bridge crossing the city’s train tracks.
It all happened very quickly.
As we were walking we started talking about the time that
Aili was stalked in
Togo, like if we subconsciously knew that something would happen. I looked over my shoulder and saw four guys come running towards us.
Damn.
This is actually happening to us, I thought.
I kicked off my flip-flops and started running. At the illuminated top of the bridge I looked back and saw that they’d caught Aili. I jumped out into the
Looking back
A mongoose probably thinking I'm a little bit too close. Munda Wanga. traffic trying to stop the cars, but the either accelerated so I had to jump to the side, or steered away to the other side of the road - avoiding me. After some thirty seconds (that felt like an eternity) Aili came running to me. We hurried further up the road to the bottle store where we slowly calmed down.
Two men had held her while the other two had body-searched her, stolen her wallet and bolted.
We left for
Livingstone.
A small town next to the famous
Victoria Falls, which probably is the biggest tourist attraction - along with the
Pyramids and
Kilimanjaro - on the continent.
The town had the word tourist trap smeared all over the place, and we didn’t really like it but yet again we got stuck for a long time.
We staid at the “
Jollyboys” - an archetypal Backpackers’ institution - that was overcrowded with travellers. Some people had staid there for more than three months and the hobby anthropologist within me tried to figure out the hierarchy between the kayakers, rafters and their groupies - the blond girls volunteering at the Livingstone hospital.
Aili (who
Alien Plant
I think I saw it move, but I'm not sure. It does look weird though. Munda Wanga park. I think should write a book about her bargaining skills) mysteriously arranged white-water rafting for us at a third of the price, and the trip has definitively been one of the highlights for us in Africa.
Eagles (and helicopter) in the sky, monkeys climbing the gorge sides and far too many crocodiles in the water.
The lower the water - the rougher the ride, and this was the low water season.
It was easy to be cocky when the others fell out of the raft, and we all had a companionable laugh at their panicky faces as we pulled them back into the raft.
But it was a totally different thing to be caught in the angry rapids oneself - gasping for air - as the basic survival instincts triggered the mind to be anything but calm and rational. It’s the wildest commercial rafting in the world and the
Zambezi River annually claims the life of two rafters.
The accompanying raft flipped over at the aptly named “
Devil’s Toilet Bowl”, our rescue raft at “
Gnawing Jaws of Death” and we flipped over at the feared and esteemed “
Mother” - the final of the big
Are you talking to me?
Taxi driver on the move. Lusaka. rapids.
After lunch the remaining rapids were a bit calmer and for long stretches we gently floated down the Zambezi, watching the initially steep and narrow gorge, broaden and flatten out.
Some stretches were considered “croc-safe” and we all jumped into the warm water and drifted in our life jackets. After some time the guide started screaming to us to hurry back up into the raft and judging by his voice and eyes, we realised that he was genuinely worried. Only some 20 seconds after the last one of us had got back up into the raft, we floated past a croc laying sunbathing on the flat black stones next to the river.
The following day we changed our last kwacha into greenbacks and crossed what arguably is the most beautiful border crossing in the world:
The magnificent Victoria Falls Bridge.
Spanning over the deep gorge, offering great views over the surrounding area and connecting Zambia with the dream that slowly faded into a nightmare -
Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
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kolla upp!, jag ser dig på google earth.
sitter bakfull och nyvaknad i min fuktiga 35grader varma lägenhet och funderar på om jag inte skall ringa och beställa en halv liter glass till dörren. Alltid en glad överaskning att se ditt bloggmail i inboxen. Du säger att ni firade halloween? Hur stor lagg är det på inläggen? du kan ju va var som helst nu juh. Jag fortsätter leta rätt på dig på google earth.