Impressions of Zambia

We are in the North of Zambia, heading for the source of the Zambezi which borders the DRC. Drom there we will turn back, meandering across Zambia's kidney shape until we cross over to Tanzania in the North East, if all goes well.

Travelling the past week has been more strenuous than what we have encountered so far. Roads are badly potholed and allows for slow and jarring driving (we do a little victory dance every time we're able to switch to fifth gear, which isn't often.) It is also more common to stop for fuel only to be told there is no diesel, or to have your picnic lunch accompanied by inquisitive kids standing 10m off, watching you. Whereas in Botswana and Nam you usually had a choice of accommodation options, we've encountered very few camp sites; the little tourism that exists caters mostly for fly-in guests.

But driving off the beaten track is great and the kind of traveling we love. We're listening to an audio book about one man's motorcycle journey across the world, an inexperience brit who left London in 1973 and traveled for four years. Even just the first chapter resonates so deeply with me, with a little rueful laughing at how he describes his misadventures of course, but especially when he says "I was alive to every nuance". Maybe that's why traveling makes us feel alive.

A wagon drawn by two oxen, flashing past you as you drive; a kid with a bottle-wheeled 'draadkar' with little election flag on top; a man in a black suit facing another, holding arms, praying; huge white bags of maize pushed on bicycles; a figure pounding mud into a mould at a brickmaking yard. Our fleeting impression of the landscape so swift and superficial, so easily entitled to speculation, so fast to judge and analyse. So I try to just be 'awake' and to let the journey change me in that intangible way taveling so often does.

I think we saw more people in the town of Solwezi than in the whole of Namibia and Botswana combined. People everywhere, markets, phone booths, spazas, taxis, children, buying, selling, walking, music, megaphones and rally music, carpenters and bike mechanics. Today is Sunday and the first of August (!). Today we plan to go camp at the source of the Zambezi, which will probably not be anything glamorous, but they say there are beautiful trees. The rainforests are waiting!

Wish us luck with the potholes, and go check out the happy photographs I was able to take of a leopard in Kafue National Park.

Regards from East Africa

Y&A

PS Victoria falls is really special, especially being able to experience it first at sunset, and then with ful moon and a 'lunar rainbow'. We also had a bit of a mud incident at Busanga plains, lol. But Zambia is great so far