Filed under: Zambia
Days 165 – 166, Friday 30th & Saturday 31st January 2009 (Cath)
Before leaving camp at 7am, we had cereal for breakfast! It was only the second time we’d had cereal camping (it depends on where we can get UHT milk – so far we’ve usually only had powdered milk, which is fine for tea and coffee but not cornflakes), so it was worth the celebration, especially as I was ‘cooking’.
We made a late morning stop in a town with a Shoprite, where I saw a margarine called simply ‘Medium Fat Spread’, and a creaming-soda flavoured drinking yoghurt. Yummo. I didn’t linger in the fridge section.
It was about 5pm before we arrived at the Houseboat Company campsite, where Al and I struck it lucky in the room allocation lottery, with our names pulled out of the hat for one of the only two rooms on the boat with a double bed AND air-conditioning AND an ensuite bathroom. The lower classes had to sleep on the deck above us, in tiny rooms with bunk beds and no mod cons.
Welcome drinks on a sunset cruise…
… on a little boat, while the houseboat stayed moored to the bank.
Other people were passing their time more productively, fishing on the lake.
As night fell, Jenga came out, while people who weren’t playing kept busy doing wobbly faces and pulling pig faces for the camera. I discovered my nose cartilage isn’t very flexible.
The next morning we headed out on the little boat again, across to visit the Tonga village where the people who work on the houseboat live.
On the twenty minute walk from the lake to the village, Sinazongwe, we passed some very huggable baobab trees.
They dwarfed even Al.
Because we were being hippies, we got a bit behind and sort of lost most of the group.
We eventually found them here, in this church, listening to a lesson and then a wonderful choir singing. The people here were genuinely welcoming – there was a clear difference between the warmth we felt towards us here, where not too many people like us turn up, and the slightly less open (but still amazingly generous, all things considered) way we sometimes feel we’re treated in places where we’re almost on an overland tourist conveyor belt.
A well, with a row of shops in the background on the left (where you could buy mobile phone credit), and a house on the right
House with pot-plants, and a roof held down by bricks
On the way back to the boat, these kids crossed paths with Al and I. They said very politely ‘hello, how are you?’, so we replied the same way, and I asked if I could take their photo and show them – in other places, it was usually the kids asking for photos, and doing crazy poses. So this is the only picture I have of kids smiling naturally! There was a lovely family scene further along the path when one of the girls in our group asked the mother of two small girls if she could take a photo of them. She agreed, and after the photo was taken, not only the little girls but their mum and dad, who’d been standing and watching, rushed forward (politely) to have a look, and grinned. It’s times like these that you really need a Polaroid!
Treading heavily through the long grass to scare off the mambas, on the edge of the lake.
In the afternoon, the houseboat actually set sail (for a couple of hours)! We cruised out into the middle of the lake, where the crew assured us they’d ‘never seen’ a crocodile. Some people took the chance to jump off the roof of the boat, but it was one of those rare times when it wasn’t the height that scared me, but the water. I couldn’t even bring myself to get in from the lowest level – the water was way too dark and mysterious by then. It did look like fun, though, and everyone came out in one piece.
Mel had arranged the evening’s entertainment – popcorn and a trivia quiz, with us competing in our cook group teams. Emma, Jez and I won. Disappointingly, after all the excitement of tallying up the scores, there was no announcement of places, so we’re not sure how Al’s team went. And for the very deserving winners, there was no trophy, sash, medal, certificate, giant cheque, or even any kind of congratulatory words!
But the houseboat is named Aholisha, which is Tonga for ‘be joyful’, so we were anyway. Al’s group were especially joyful as this was their cooking night, which meant they bought the ingredients and gave them to the onboard cooks, who had an oven at their disposal (we had shepherds pie the night before). Things didn’t go entirely to plan, with three pizzas’ worth of toppings and dough being creatively condensed into one super-thick-based, mushy-toppinged pizza, so there was only one slice each. Luckily, Mel was able to do some magic with canned food and the leftover flour. And so Al’s group became, serendipitously, the first to give us the holy grail of Oasis cookgroups – dessert. Mmmm, apricot crumble.
Filed under: Zambia
Days 162 – 164, Tuesday 27th – Thursday 29th January 2009 (Cath)
It was a relatively short drive today (250km), to somewhere along the northern part of Lake Kariba, along the shores of which we’ll be spending the next week (just in case we didn’t quite get the whole lake thing out of our systems in Malawi). The truck had to be dug out of the mud before we could leave camp this morning – unfortunately there was only room for about six of the guys to physically help, so the rest of us sat eating fried eggs and tomatoes and watching encouragingly.
Most of the roads today were sealed, luckily – this was our lunch stop
Our official ‘Plan B’ itinerary is now in action, and will consist of three nights at a campsite on the north part of the lake, then two nights on a houseboat moored at a campsite on the southern part of the lake. Mel did try to sound enthusiastic about it, saying it was ‘one of the largest man-made lakes in the world’, but given that it is home to hippos and crocodiles, putting swimming out of the question, I think we were all wondering how we would entertain ourselves for the next five days.
Luckily, Eagles campsite had a volleyball net (retrieving wayward balls from the water was extra thrilling with the ‘Beware – Crocodiles’ sign nearby)
Those who had the energy and competitive streak to play volleyball in the heat (like Al) could cool off afterwards in the lovely, partly shaded, clean SWIMMING POOL! And those who couldn’t stand the heat, or didn’t want to risk facing the wrath of the serious volleyballers if their inconsistent serving let the team down (like me), could read on the beach instead, and then cool off in the lovely SWIMMING POOL! So, somehow the first afternoon passed quickly.
Dusk brought with it the possibility I’d been dreading since we first planned to camp in Africa – that we might bump into a hippopotamus who was not pleased to see us. Our tent was less than fifty metres from the water, and our only lights were our headtorches. I walked with my light beam constantly scanning, left and right, making sure I never found myself between the water and anywhere a hippo might be lurking in the shadows (if a hippo feels threatened, it will make a beeline for the safety of the water, and you really don’t want to get in its way). To make things worse, there was a baby hippo living with its mother in this part of the lake, and Mel told us the story of a passenger (with another company, at another campsite, not that it made me feel much safer) who somehow missed the talk about not going past the little fence near the water. She did – to take photos of a baby hippo, not realising its mother was behind her – and she never did anything else again.
For some reason I didn’t sleep very soundly that night – I think it was the heat.
The next day passed in much the same way as the afternoon before had done, except that just after lunch my cookgroup buddies and I started preparing things for dinner that night. We wanted to have dinner finished and packed away in time to get prettied up for a party we’d been invited to! Keryn, from New Zealand, had decided it was time to get some use out of the hair straightener she’d brought along, so we were having a ‘dress nicely’ function that night.
Me and Emma, cooking a very delicious and well received lemongrass, garlic & chili beef stirfry
We were the first group to be allowed to use the gas cookers! Since the gas is cleaner, faster, more consistent, less smelly, less hot and doesn’t require stopping every couple of days to buy wood (and therefore also doesn’t encourage local people to chop down trees to sell to passing overland trucks), we can only assume it is more expensive than firewood, because Mel denied all requests to use it, saying ‘we normally get through entire trips without using the gas’. We were only allowed to use it this once because Franco overruled Mel, saying the firewood we had was too damp. Anyway, cooking at Eagles was a pleasure.
After the sun set, it was party time! A fashion parade instigated by the camp manager, Pete, got the good times started. The party was almost as successful as the dinner, I’d say.
We were a hot, tired and sorry-looking bunch the next morning. Al and I had a quick, refreshing dip in the pool before jumping voluntarily on the truck to visit the Kariba Dam itself.
Lots of impressive facts and figures: opened by the Queen Mother in 1960, to provide electricity to parts of Zambia and Zimbabwe. The dam wall is 128m tall, creating a reservoir 280km long and up to 32km wide, which led to the forced resettlement of about 57,000 Tonga people from the area. (That last one was not on the sign -the question was in my mind, and I found the answer on Wikipedia, so it must be true).
Standing in Zambia, looking across to Zimbabwe
The lower Zambezi. That’s a lot of Zs in one day.
The other side
Back at camp, the sky put on another good show for us over the lake/reservoir
And so did this guy, distracting us from the storm!
Lots of yawning and spashing
The atmosphere was literally electric – everyone’s hair was standing on end
Once he could see his physical display wasn’t driving us and our cameras away, he resorted to a stare-off
The sun set on another day of doing nothing much. But Eagles had turned out to be a great place for doing exactly that, and rather than bored, we felt relaxed.
And I swear I heard a hippo chomping grass not far from our tent on the last night. I sat up for a while, trying to peer out the only window we had open, and when that proved useless in the almost pitch darkness, trying to listen for retreating footsteps so I knew it was safe. I didn’t hear a thing (hippos can move almost silently, you see), but eventually fell asleep. I looked in vain for footprints while I brushed my teeth in the morning, although some of the grass definitely looked a bit trodden. I know what I heard, anyway.
Filed under: Zambia
Days 160 – 161, Sunday 25th & Monday 26th January 2009 (Cath)
We left camp at 6:30 on Sunday morning for a drive across most of the Eastern Province of Zambia. For the first time, it actually felt cold and damp with the windows open on the truck. On smoother roads than in Malawi, we played some Scrabble, and did a lot of waving to both kids and adults beside the road. It might have just been my mindset, but in general the kids here seemed less used to overland trucks going past, and the adults less cynical about them, than in previous countries.
Crossing a huge suspension bridge over the very swollen and brown Luangwa river, we could see why less major roads in the area might be a bit wet and challenging at the moment. Even crossing this well engineered bridge proved to be a challenge. Our truck was pulled over by police just after we crossed it, and Franco was asked to pay a fine under threat of custody, for following another truck across – ‘only one vehicle on the bridge at a time’. When Franco pointed out that there was no sign saying this, the policeman told him ‘all Zambians know this rule’. Franco somehow managed to talk his way out of it, without paying anything or handing over his licence, saying ‘I’m not Zambian – in any other country in the world there would be a big sign saying this rule. I’ll know for next time.’ We saw him smile, shake hands with a smiling policeman, and walk back to the cab – a little bit of Franco magic in action.
Lunch was eaten between the road and some thick, lush, jungle-like vegetation. From the bridge there was still 250km to cover until Lusaka, and we arrived there at about 4:30pm, where we stopped briefly at a very modern shopping centre (just like Central Square!) and indulged in some baked goods on the way to camp. And what a lovely camp it was. We passed some zebras grazing on the way in, so headed off on foot to find them as soon as we’d set up the tent. The campsite was protected by big electric fences, but herbivores were allowed to wander in and out. We couldn’t find the zebras straight away, but did spot some other creatures through the trees:
(Those ones in the foreground are just me and Ebanie, who’s sketching)
All the antelopes kept a good buffer distance between themselves and us as we crept closer, but they kept eating and put up with us for a surprisingly long time before eventually all leaping away. When they left, we left too, headed for the gate because we’d also seen some zebras just outside it earlier. Al, Ebanie and I walked out into the paddock across the track from the gate, where a little grassy mound was a great place to partially hide ourselves and watch the group munching grass. Again, they didn’t seem to mind us too much.
It was only as I took this photo that I realised there was another small group of animals beyond the zebras – buffalo! It seemed like a good time to get back inside the fence, so we walked rather quickly back, which meant that poor Ebanie didn’t see a big, wet, smelly present a zebra had left in the grass until her foot was in it. Back at camp, heavy rain drove us into the bar for some games of pool, and early bed after an unpleasant conversation with a drunk English man teaching science at a private high school here, who felt the need to point out to us all that we shouldn’t be travelling on an overland truck because we weren’t seeing the ‘real Africa’ – says he who chooses to spend his evenings in a campsite compound playing pool with other expats.
Monday was a rare free day for us. I never like to spend huge chunks of time in shopping centres, especially not when I have to prove a drunken Englishman wrong about my style of travel, but we took the chance to go back to Manda Hill (where we’d been yesterday) to get in touch with people at home, using the internet (uploading photos from the Dead Sea) until we were too hungry to continue. While sitting outside at a cafe eating lunch, I smiled at a local guy who walked past wearing a Kevin 07 t-shirt – very appropriate for Australia Day! As I sat there hoping for him to smile at my recognition, I realised that he was probably going to continue to ignore or look strangely at me if his shirt had been donated, or traded by a visitor.
Clothes market in Lusaka
Part of the fresh food market, beside the road in Lusaka
While we shopped for the next day’s lunch, I called home and spoke to Mum, Dad, and Rob, who happened to be at home – very exciting as I hadn’t phoned home since New Years Day. Then when I found salt and vinegar chips (Simba brand) for sale, it was hard to see how the day could get any better. On the truck back to camp, the soundtrack was a strictly Aussie mix. It was amazing what some people had on their iPods – from the classics like Daryl Braithwaite, Johnny Farnham and Hunters & Collectors, to stuff for the kids of today like the Presets. Even Delta Goodrem managed to sneak in while nobody was looking. And I’ve sneakily stolen the following photos from other people’s Facebook pages, as our photos from the day are gone:
Australia Day on the truck – me, Anne (Norwegian-Australian for the day – well, she already knew John Farnham, that has to count for something!), Sheila (Irish) in the background, Carly & Jez (true blue Aussies), and Tom (Essex-Australian for the day – at least he vaguely knew the rules of cricket)
‘Cricket’ on the truck – basically boys bowling a ball at the bin on the back door, and somehow managing not to let it go out the window or hit anybody in the face
Backyard cricket (thanks to Jono for buying the bat that day) with a Swiss-Italian/Ecuadorian (Franco) batting – later that night, we saw zebras grazing under those very same trees
Days 158 – 159, Friday 23rd & Saturday 24th January 2009 (Cath)
There are no photos from this section, so I’ll make it brief. Brief-ish.
At breakfast on our last day at Kande, Anne was not allowed to throw away some mouldy bread – Mel stopped her, saying ‘mould doesn’t hurt you’. Especially since Anne is actually a biologist whose work focuses on infectious diseases (albeit of fish), that seemed a big call! Not that it was out of character – Mel has also been heard telling geologists about how mountains are formed, teachers about how to maintain professional relationships with children, and of course pharmacists about which antibiotics are the ‘best’.
Believe it or not, we’ve actually been eating really healthily on the truck. The problem is that most of our food is bought at supermarkets, rather than local fresh food markets, and most (well, all) of our meals are things that people on the truck eat at home (there has been great variety, considering it’s all cooked over a fire – stir-fries, Thai curry, pasta, bangers & mash, lots of salads and fruit, even some eggs and pancakes for breakfast). It is only when we have free time in towns that we have the chance to try African food. So when we arrived in Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, we had the best intentions – but ended up eating Nando’s for lunch, trying to salve our consciences with the fact that peri-peri is African! It had been a long, rough morning (we ended up without water to drink on the truck) and we just felt like some comfort food. I also bought some strawberry drinking yoghurt, because dairy is an extremely rare luxury, and it was yum.
Lilongwe was a strange capital city. It was very small as national capitals go, and its supermarkets were so big and Western and shiny, mainly frequented by the privileged few and the expat community, that as we walked through the carpark of Shoprite I felt we could be in an Australian country town, just with a lot of street touts thrown in. The further we ventured from the shopping centre, the more real and African it all felt again, but it was very hard to get our heads around. This is Malawi – just down the road, everybody is living in mud huts and subsisting mainly on cassava, struggling to buy paraffin for their lamps!
Camp was a twenty minute walk up the hill, past houses surrounded by big fences topped with broken glass for security. Al’s group cooked us some delicious burritos, we had an early night, I did bush gym in the morning, and we headed back into town – it was so nice to be able to walk somewhere from camp for a change.
Our time in Lilongwe was rounded out by some time on the internet (two cafes were closed due to power outages, but one was open, and I was happy to find a lovely email from Mere), meeting two new passengers joining us on the trip (Loren & Tanaz), purchasing some wooden carvings from a market (and getting a man there to polish bits of our elephant that Mr Smooth had missed), and buying some pretty patterned cotton from a street vendor with our last Malawian Kwacha.
Into Zambia we headed, stopped quickly in Chipata to withdraw a few million Zambian Kwacha from the ATM, and soon found ourselves at an established campsite again, in the middle of nowhere. Mike (originally from Vic, but lately of London) set up his media player so we could all sit around and watch a movie, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, in the bar. Most people seemed to have a touch of grumpiness about them, since we’d just found out that due to heavy rains, we wouldn’t be able to go to South Luangwa National Park or the Flat Dogs campsite Mel had raved about at the start of the trip – apparently a previous group woke up to find an elephant amongst their tents. Visiting both of those places had been billed as Zambia’s highlights, and as compensation for us not being able to go through Zimbabwe (which was off-limits to us because Oasis had to stick to a declaration it had made on its website, saying it would not travel there for six months, ending just two days after we were there). So, while we all understood the wet season would make our itinerary unpredictable, and we really wouldn’t choose to get stuck with a bogged truck for days on end, it was hard not to be disappointed. ‘Can’t we try?! It’ll be an adventure’!
Instead, we had to wait until tomorrow to hear what Mel and Franco had come up with instead – I found it quite hard going to bed with no knowledge of, and more importantly, no chance of having control over where I’d be for the next week.
Filed under: Malawi
Days 155 – 157, Tuesday 20th – Thursday 22nd January 2009 (Cath)
Sidetracks aside, we arrived at Kande Beach with plenty of time to enjoy a double celebration – Anne’s birthday and Obama Day!
Proud Team America watching the inauguration ceremony
Birthday cake overland style – pancakes, marshmallows, bananas, and lots of sticky sweet chocolatey goo
The next day was not called Wednesday. It was called Pig Day. Someone other than us was up early, digging a pit for charcoal, sticking steel poles in the ground on either side of it, and accepting delivery of a (humanely slaughtered) pig to be rotated slowly above it all day.
We, for once, weren’t awake as soon as the sun rose, because we had taken the upgrade option and were sleeping under a solid roof, in a little bungalow on the beach. I dragged myself out in time to join a mid-morning Bush Gym session.
Lots of good people working out (spurred on by Jez and Carly, both physios), plus lots of lazy people sitting in the middle watching them, not to mention the sneaky ones taking photos…
At least some of us were in top form, looking toned and ready to model our gorgeous Pig Day outfits.
The challenge wasn’t just to wear these things all day – we also had to compete against each other in some wacky team sports on the beach, in what Mel dubbed the ‘Truck Olympics’. Al and I were on different teams, which respectably (well, apart from the all-animal-print-attire and men in dresses) finished in the rear of the field of four. Let’s not restart the debate about who was third and who was fourth, after a controversial tie-breaking wheelbarrow race. The field we did excel in was sadly not scheduled in the day’s ‘organised fun’, so we arranged with our fellow, more spontaneous athletes to add it on to the end of proceedings – the human pyramid. I’ve chased down a photo of it – click on ‘April’ on the calendar to find it posted under ‘home, catching up’.
The rest of the day was a bit of a blur, punctuated by a huge dinner of gristly pork, delicious stuffed capsicums, baked potatoes, and way too much food in general. There was definitely some punch, some dance aerobics, and some hammocks.
The Thursday at Kande didn’t have an official name of its own, but let’s call it Bilharzia Day. Al and I ventured out in the morning, into the real world outside camp, where we walked through the village, browsed through wood carving shops, saw market day in action on the main road, and ended up shopping at David Jones. David was lovely, and had heard from previous visitors that he had a namesake store in Melbourne. He had a stall (with a black and white painted sign) under a stand of gum trees (they’re everywhere!) on the verge of the road, and in the time we were there, not a single vehicle went past. We could see why our big yellow truck usually drew so many people out to wave. The only people we saw were other locals, mainly schoolkids on their way home. So we spent a bit more money than we’d planned to.
On the walk back to camp, we passed extremely friendly people (mainly women carrying baskets on their heads, but also a man in a suit with a briefcase) who smiled and said hello, kids who asked for bottles (they get money for recycling them), one little girl who said ‘good morning, madam – give me money’ then collapsed into fits of giggles with her friends, fields and fields of cassava, and two little girls fetching water from a well and carrying it in buckets on their heads, who posed for a beautiful photograph that I have sadly lost.
Closer to camp, we went back to a shop (made of wooden posts and a bark roof) where we’d seen a carved wooden elephant we wanted to buy. There was nobody there, but we hoped by walking in we’d attract the shopkeeper if they were nearby. Instead, a young guy riding a bike along the path pulled over and said ‘this is my cousin’s shop, I can help you’. We said ‘ok, how much is this elephant?’, and since his starting price was lower than what we’d decided we’d pay, we only bargained enough to be polite and bought it. There were a few patches of untreated wood on its feet, so we asked if they could be polished for us. He agreed to that, so we gave him a small deposit, and he said he’d bring the elephant to the house in the village where we’d be eating dinner that night and collect the rest of the money.
As he rode off on his bike, one hand on the handlebar, one holding the elephant, we realised: he has our money, he has the elephant, we don’t know his name (well, he told us he was ‘Julius Caesar – or you can call me Mr Smooth’) or where he lives, and we are trusting that he will bring our purchase to dinner, when we don’t know ourselves where we will be eating.
There were not many places in the world where we would have felt comfortable with that situation, we reflected, as we watched him disappear into the cassava. Then we thought: what if the real shopkeeper turns up and finds us standing here, his elephant missing?! So we walked back to camp.
And now for the Bilharzia part of the day: we went for a swim in Lake Malawi. The lake looks innocent enough, but it is the home of lots of little snails which excrete lots of Schistosoma parasite larvae into the water, where they can penetrate any human skin they come across, causing a nasty disease called bilharzia (or schistosomiasis) while they reproduce. So, we had planned not to swim.
But the sun was stinking hot, so were we, there were canoes for hire, and a few other people wanted to try and get out to the island. We’d also been showering in lake water since we arrived in Malawi, so our risk was already above zero – we might as well get some enjoyment out of it.
How could we resist?
Al took control of one of the canoes, while I alternated between swimming and hitching a ride by hanging onto the back of the canoe. It took us nearly an hour, we think, to cover about 800 metres! There was a lot of wind, and therefore a lot of waves (the photo above was taken later once things had calmed down) and sideways drift, and the canoes were really unstable – only one of the three made it across without capsizing (and that wasn’t Al’s). The island was worth the trip. As we sat and caught our breath there on the tall rocks jutting out of the water, a canoe went past with two local men paddling and a foreign-looking woman sitting calmly in between them. She might have been completely dry but at least we felt we’d accomplished something! Al joined the other people who felt up for it and jumped off a four metre cliff, while I took the more technically difficult route and climbed back down the rocks into the water. I decided to save my energy and go in a canoe this time, but was defeated by my lack of balance – we couldn’t stop the canoe tipping dangerously while I was in it, so I found myself relegated to swimming again! The wind had died down so the return journey only took about twenty minutes, and when we were nearly home Al picked me up in his canoe, so I rode in luxury back to shore.
Dinner in the village was interrupted by a rain storm, but not before we’d sat on the floor and eaten our fill of spinach, pumpkin, rice, nshima (a paste made from cassava), and beans. The rain also meant most locals went home, and it turned into another night spent hanging out with the truck people, who are great but not the main reason we were in the village.
But Mr Smooth and our elephant did turn up! We protected it from the rain under t-shirts as we returned to camp, carrying our plates back, with kids flocking out of the darkness to eat our leftovers.
