Our flight from Nairobi to Lusaka was mostly empty except for the twenty or so families returning from the Haj. These folks were in the full spectrum of traditional Islamic wear at the Nairobi airport, complete with a ceremonial gleaming brass water canister around their necks. (I’ve made a note to myself to look up exactly what those canisters were, they were certainly bright against some of the black robes.) On the plane, the spectrum dwindled to a subset of Islamic families that lived in Southern Africa, so the austere black garb disappeared leaving more colorful robes with wild children underfoot.
Our plane was continuing on to Harare, Zimbabwe, but only two older nuns and two businessmen were left on the flight. One wonders how British Airways was making any money on that leg of the journey.
The Lusaka airport is small and tidy. We had a lift from the airport to Cha Cha Cha Backpacker’s by Victor and his friend. This consisted of Derrell getting the back of a flatbed pickup with the friend and luggage, while I, enjoying being the token female of the moment, got the front seat. Derrell got to meet the friend in back who, surprise surprise, turned out to be a “guide”. How helpful.
Our immediate impression of Lusaka was positive. The weather was balmy, palm trees were scattered about. The guys shuttling us were friendly, relaxed and chatty. The town had cement buildings (no huts in sight) and the tall grasses were trimmed back from the roadways. For one million people, this place was looking really good after Nairobi.
At the Backpacker’s place, we met a guy from Belgium that drove the eight month overland truck trips from Cairo to Cape Town. He had been doing the tours for ten years. On this particular trip, his group had started with 17 people and was already down to 14. He figured most of them would probably last the rest of the trip. He was the sole driver and tour representative, everyone else was a tourist that helped cook and pitch tents. He was headed down to Victoria Falls to pick up a truck in storage, get the cobwebs off of it and get it running again. His tour could not cross into The Sudan due to recent rebel shelling, so the company flew the tour over the conflict region where it then had the group hang out for a few days while he scuttled the truck back up north to get them. (This was with a shake to his head about his tour company making him go to the border just to make sure the news about the bombings was correct.) We had seen a few of the overland truck tours and they looked a bit miserable, although the hardy souls who were on them seemed cheerful enough. Heaven knows why. We asked whether he had to cook or not. The answer was that everyone cooked.. and they always become lazy after the first or second week. Every dinner eventually ended up being pasta or rice with tomato and onion sauce over it. He emphasized the ‘lazy and tomato sauce’ aspect. Derrell shuddered. So to cheer Derrell up, he offered that it was a special day when someone decided to cook pancakes and it usually took an extra hour or two of clean-up time, since the everyone seemed to have found their long lost appetites on those days. Derrell wasn’t convinced that would make the trip any better.
The following day in Lusaka we didn’t get a good reading of the distance legend on our map. This caused us about an eight kilometer meander that we weren’t quite expecting to be so long. I suppose it’s some measure of travel fitness that you don’t think twice about walking this sort of distance when it happens.
Our first stop was the Zambia National Museum. This was a peculiar place with placards written about witchcraft, politics and a few household items. A few were along the lines of… “Item: Stool Use: To Sit Upon Material: Wood”. We rather thought that was getting to the point. The political section was a scathing but warranted overview of items collected from the British colonial oppressive period up through Zambia’s independence in the 1960’s with a few political photographs without captions post that timeframe. If you didn’t know Zambian political history, you sure were not going to learn it from this museum. The political section had a few witchcraft items that were used to gain independence, including the tip of some guys finger complete with fingernail sitting in an old-fashioned case. What a strange place. The banner downstairs was declaring the museum wanted to be ‘internationally known as one of the great museums of the world’. We considered that it may have a few million miles to go to reach its target.
From there we wandered down to the main street of Lusaka and over to the C R Bus station to buy tickets for tomorrow. While we were staring at a map trying to find our way, we got a couple offers of help by passerbys. No sales, no gimmicks, no con-artists. Aaaah. Our bliss was only slightly dented after I was overcharged by double for a small pad of paper that I bought later. It ended up being fourteen cents instead of seven, but hey, I can handle that.
We ran the full gamut of Lusaka’s main street. Derrell stopped by the ATM and soon discovered Zambian bills (Kwacha’s) are small denominations and that getting out the equivalent of $100 US will overflow your wallet to the point you need to start tucking bills in other pockets.
We decided against fast food and opted to head over to an Indian restaurant for lunch. This sounded reasonable when we made the decision at noon, but as we soon discovered an hour later. The sun gets a bit hot, the blocks are way longer than they looked, and the damn restaurant must have been in hiding when we finally reached the shopping center/gas station/market stalls area. Hot, slightly sooty and gritty from traffic and the wind, we hung our heads in shame and ended up at Nando’s again… but we reveled in the air-conditioning.
Our ‘morning’ jaunt took up the full day, so our evening was spent watching Rocky the yellow labrador swim after geckos in the swimming pool. Needless to say, humans weren’t going to be using the pool anytime soon, eh?
My departure day at the backpacker’s place started most unforunately with a weird dream about a metal machine about to roll over my head. What I woke up to was one of the grounds keepers clipping a hedge on the other side of the thin cabin walls about six inches away from my head. Clip, clip… pause, clip-clip, clip… pause, clip. Ugh! At least keep a good rythm if you are going to wake up the entire place. Well, that got me out of my sleep sack, out from under my mosquito netting (which finally seemed to work… no bites for once), and stumbling over to shower with everyone that had a tent set up near the mad clippers vicinity, and, of course, finally over for some proper morning tea. This place has world coffee plantations, but not coffee drinkers. It’s tea or bust, baby. Derrell keeps muttering, “God damn Nescafe again…”. I think Africa’s starting to get to him.
