Zambia

Visited in April 2002. I arrived at Mpulungu after sailing down Lake Tanganyika from Kigoma. I travelled south to Lusaka and visited Livingstone and Victoria Falls before hitching a ride along the Great East Road to Malawi.

Northern Zambia
Kasama to Lusaka
Livingstone & Victoria Falls
South Luangwa NP
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Lusaka
Chipata

Mbala, Lusaka & Petauke
Livingstone & Victoria Falls
Mosi-oa-Tunya & S Luangwa

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Travel notes from Chipata

Hi Everyone,

I spent a few days in Lusaka rejoicing at being back in civilization after my adventurous ten-day journey from Dar es Salaam. Lusaka is a fairly small place as cities go and will never win any prizes for cultural heritage. There is only one main commercial street, Cairo Road where all the amenities are based; to the south of this street is wasteland, to the east the railway sidings, to the west a few blocks of shop s and markets and the north, nothing much of interest. The novelty of being back in a city, especially one with nothing to do, soon wore off and I booked myself on an overnight train south to Livingstone.

I walked down to the station in the evening, as always there is never a taxi about when you need one, and everything was going to plan, the train was there and I found my sleeping berth and settled in for the night's journey. The train never left that evening and after an hour or so we heard an announcement telling us that a goods train had derailed south of Lusaka and all services were suspended indefinitely. It was then a mad rush as everyone on the train dashed for the one ticket office window to get a refund; luckily Africans aren't the quickest people in the world and I was only about number 40 in the refund queue.

I resorted to the express bus the next morning that left downtown Lusaka at 06.00 and for the first time in Zambia we arrived at our destination without any unforeseen incidents about six hours later. Livingstone is a far more interesting place than Lusaka and used to be the capital until 1935. There are still some interesting old buildings from when the town was founded in the early 20th century, including some original buildings. I hired a bicycle for a day and cycled down to Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River. The Zambezi is the fourth longest river in Africa at 2,700km and Victoria Falls is the biggest waterfall in the world, measuring 1.7km wide by 100m high. In the height of the rainy season approximately 9 million litres a second flow over the falls.

It is just the end of the rainy season now and the flow of water was high, this created a huge cloud of spray that gives the falls it's local name, Mosi-O-Tunya - the smoke that thunders. I walked out to knife-edge point and got completely soaked, it was like standing under a shower, the water was just thrown down on you by the bucket load. I left my passport at the Zambian immigration office and cycled off into no-mans land and onto the bridge over the gorge with stunning views of both the falls and the gorge. I cycled into Zimbabwe, well not officially, but to the 'Welcome to Zimbabwe' sign where I stopped to take a photo before returning back to Zambia.

I visited the Mosi-O-Tunya National Park to do a walking safari, just upstream from the Victoria Falls. The park has the only five white rhino in Zambia, a gift from South Africa in 1994, after the 6,000 rhinos in the country during the 1960's were all poached. I had heard that there was a good chance of getting up close to a rhino; the rumours were true and after tracking footprints for a couple of hours we finally found four of the rhinos and got within 8 meters of them. Luckily, rhinos have very poor eyesight so if we kept still they would have trouble seeing us. It was amazing to get so close to these threatened wild animals and to see them in their natural habitat.

I took a bus back up to Lusaka, the trains had begun running again but the night before I left I met someone who had travelled by train from Lusaka and the engine broke down and they were stuck in the middle of nowhere for over five hours. While I stayed in Lusaka I met Graeme, from New Zealand, who was driving to Malawi along the Great East Road. I hitched a ride, stopping for a night at Patuke before reaching Chipata, on the Malawi border. I left Graeme there and took a local bus to Mfuwe, to visit South Luangwe National Park and agreed to meet up again in a few days in Lilongwe, Malawi.

I stayed at a lodge called Flatdogs that has a reputation amongst travellers that stretches across this continent; it was great to be here at last and to enjoy the hospitality. I slept in a sausage tree for the night on a wooden platform up in the tree with just a mosquito net as protection from the elements; it was a peaceful place to stay. The lodge is outside the national park but receives its fare share of wild visitors; as I sat at the bar during the evening three lions were spotted just outside reception. We all rushed down to see them lying in the grass just off the road leading to the lodge. I went on two wildlife drives in the park but found the wildlife not quiet as abundant as the parks in Tanzania. It was one of my last chances of seeing a Leopard, but they failed to make an appearance; we did see nine lions though to make up for it.

The transport from Mfuwe leaves at 01.00 in the morning. I arranged a pick up at Flatdogs and in the middle of the night a truck turned up. I rode for three and a half hours through the night standing in the back of the truck; it was the most comfortable way to travel, as the dirt road was still a bad condition after the rainy season. I arrived back in Chipata at 04.30 and at 05.00 found a share taxi going to the Malawi border. I walked across the border with a local women from Lusaka at 05.15, as we walked we found out that the Malawian immigration post is 12km down the road; we turned around and waited for a share taxi to take us through no-mans land. Once we went through the Malawian immigration formalities we caught a minibus the approximately 115km to Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi, where I met up with Graeme again as planned.

Regards

Geoff