SWIMMING IN SADC LAND

IN REHANA'S WORDS

16 January

We’ve been driving through thick green forests since we left Tabora in Tanzania the week before Christmas. In soft, moist air. Enjoying well-spaced, drenching and cooling rainstorms (except for one that misbehaved). 
Puffy white clouds shield us from the harsh summer sun on most of our driving days. When the sun pours through the windscreen it burns our knees to a near crisp.

On the drive to Lusaka farms occasionally broke through the woodland. Not the hardscrabble subsistence plots we’ve been passing for months, but huge enterprises with large-scale irrigation, fences and gated entrances with the name of the farm on a board. 
Stalls on the side of the road sold butternut and potatoes by the sack; no more groups of women trying to flag their small piles of tomatoes and miniature onions. The mushrooms people sold in buckets and tubs at the side of the road were ginormous – it be very wet under those trees.

South African seed companies must be making a pretty penny in Zambia; their placards dominate the tilled fields and advertising billboards. They’re all here, from Pannaar to AgriSA to Karoo Landbou.

Bakkies with South African plates whizz along the highway, two-tone shirts are everywhere, Landbou Weekblad is on sale at Pick n Pay and there’s a secure supply of biltong and boerewors.

We met a couple in Livingstone, Maryna and Flip from Brits, who were being financed by HSBC to grow mielies in Zambia – for the South African market, nogal!

Land is cheap in Zambia. You can get a 99-year leasehold and financing from an English bank if you want a piece of virgin forest. Please don’t clear it to plant mielies. If you develop a campsite we’ll come visit often, I promise.

We drove to Lusaka without stopping, passing through towns with familiar names like Kabwe and Kitwe. Comrades in exile in the 1970s and 1980s often passed through there, stayed a while or forever. There wasn’t much to see as we whizzed through the towns, except the names of their businesses. Where else but Zambia will you get a Melodious Melody Supermarket?

All the way to Lusaka a procession of pylons poked out of the woods like metal giraffes. Electricity seems to be endemic in Zambia, unlike in Tanzania where it is endangered.

There was traffic on the way into the city, trucks and cars slowed down by interminable police roadblocks. Other travellers warned of “road taxes” but the police officers who stopped us were only polite and professional. The most they asked of us was proof of third-party insurance. Still haven’t met one corrupt person at a roadblock - and we've been through hundreds, perhaps thousands.

Been a while since we've been in a city with dual carriageways, traffic and billboards

We spent only two days in Lusaka, arriving on a Friday afternoon and leaving Sunday morning. As usual with our city sojourns, first stop was a mechanic. Fortunately, BRC’s latest niggle, an airconditioner unit that shakes and rattles, can wait till Joburg for repairs. We seldom use the aircon but we’re nervous of tackling summer in Namibia and Botswana without it.

We had a fantastic host at the Apogo Guesthouse. Oumo is a Ugandan exile and a political scientist with a doctorate who kept us up way past our bedtime. But like everyone else we spoke politics to on our trip, he maintains that our African neighbours can’t rise up against their wealth-amassing and heartless leaders because brutality will be the result.

I argued that our police are pretty brutal too, both before the end of apartheid and now. That doesn’t stop South Africans from taking to the streets, especially when demanding better service delivery from politicians. Oumo had heard about Marikana but not our other shootings. Two days later Maryna told me police had shot and killed four people in her hometown, Brits.

What really gets me is that people will take to the streets at the behest of politicians to commit the most appalling violence against their neighbours and friends, but they refuse to participate in a peaceful protest because they fear violence. 
They bury babies and children because there’s no doctors or medicines but they won’t risk teargas or batons to demand decent health care. People have to be held responsible for their own oppression sometimes; doesn’t matter how many millions of pounds or kroner NGOs spend.

There wasn’t much to do in Lusaka, we wiled away a few pleasant hours in the Botanical Gardens. The entrance fee was steep but it offered pleasant shaded gardens and no less than two swimming pools. There were braai areas and lapas and only one party setting up loud music, just as we left.

Kirstenbosch could do with one of these?

We stopped at Pick n Pay to buy ludicrously expensive groceries and bumped into Canadians we had met and liked at Lake Shore Lodge – Steve, Carolynn and their daughters Madeline and Gabrielle. They were driving through southern Africa for three months.
We went to their campsite for a long visit. Parked next to them was the Swiss couple we had met at Kapishya, with the bright orange Volkswagen combi much older than BRC.

I don’t think I have made lifelong friends among the locals we met on this journey. It’s because of the way we’re travelling. We’re not volunteering with an NGO. We’re firmly rooted in the tourism economy – most of the locals we’ve met have been lodge owners, managers, waiters, barmen, drivers, cooks or guides. Some remain in contact. Chacha in Dessie, Ethiopia sends regular, sweet emails.

Our relationships with our fellow travellers are short-lived but intense. They’re very affirming; you’re not alone in your insanity – setting off from a comfortable home to make life difficult. I’ve only met one fellow black traveller so far. In the campsite at Dar es Salaam there was a Kenyan driving from Nairobi to Cape Town. Most long-term travellers are elderly Europeans stretching pensions made meagre by their failed economies and banking systems.

The cyclists we meet make me feel especially good. Compared to their miserable existence, our journey is positively bourgeoisie personified. Steve, the cyclist we met in Malawi, again in Nairobi and planned to catch up with in Ethiopia, contracted typhus at the same time I was in hospital and flew back to the UK for treatment. 
I’ve just heard that he is back on the road, currently in Saudi Arabia. He plans to work there for a few months then he’ll cycle across the Middle East and Asia before crossing into Canada and travelling south to …?

Dave, a cyclist we met at Katima Mulilo in Namibia, told us Steve’s latest news. Can you imagine cycling through Namibia in January? We met Dave again at Ngepi camp after he had cycled across the Caprivi, sleeping at night at the side of a road in a game park where he spotted a leopard. His skin is baked and his brain is fried. 
We make at most, especially here in SADCland, 120km an hour. For a cyclist, that’s a day’s lonely toil. Can you imagine the endorphin rush before the day’s pain hits? Eckhardt, a greyhaired neighbour in a huge Mercedes camper in the Katima Mulilo campsite told us he’d love to cycle across Africa but he’s scared because he’s heard it’s addictive.

But I’m getting way ahead of my tale. I’m in Namibia already and I haven’t told you the last of my Zambia story. Our last stop was Livingstone. We camped at a rather swish place, the Zambezi Waterfront. Other than a plague of monkeys that got away with a head of broccoli (yay! Back in the land of Pick n Pay); safari vehicles that revved needlessly at dawn and helicopters and microlights that took off constantly, we were pretty comfortable.

We’re still managing to catch 11 hours most nights, and I almost always wake up drenched. I’ve googled “artists with TB” and the list is pretty impressive. I’m considering a relapse so I can do something with those kaleidoscopic dreams that come with my nightly sweats.

Like Forest Inn and Kapishya, the Zambezi Waterfront campsite met our stringent SADC standards. Plenty of soft green grass, an abundant supply of hot water in the clean showers, internet (not free, though), DSTV and two (icy cold because they are shaded by trees) swimming pools. And it didn't cost a fortune. 
Despite the coldness of water I managed to while away many hours on loungers next to the pools.  And when I got tired of that I whiled away hours on the deck next to the mighty Zambezi river – that we first met months ago in Tete, Mozambique.

Back on the mighty Zambezi again

My first selfie, taken on the deck at Zambezi Waterfront

Jules doing a Dolly Rathebe photobomb in my second selfie

Jules and I walked into the game park next door to get a photo of the sun setting on the Zambezi and spotted a fat crocodile on its surface.

Tony and Marley, a Dutch couple who crisscrossed Africa for three years on motorbikes, were camped next to us. They warned that the Victoria Falls was a wet walk. We decided to strip down to our cossies when we visited it and stash our clothes in a plastic bag. I couldn’t think of anything better than being slightly damp while we walked in the heat that had surrounded us for days.

The heat disappeared the day we went to the falls. It was grey and wet and cold in places. Julia stripped just before I did. My T-shirt was drenched in a minute and never recovered. Both of us had seen the falls from the Zimbabwean side but Zambia offered a very different proposition.

The walkway alongside took us very close to the falls, where the rainy season deluge was in full throttle. I thought it was raining but it wasn’t. The fat drops beating down on our heads had first been smashed on the rocks below the falls; then they soared high into the sky and came down seeking a soaking.

It was an enormous show of strength. The hydropower turbines must have been whirring at capacity. We only stopped our marveling when we blinked blindly in the water cascading down our foreheads into our eyes.

Then we walked down into a rain forest, edging nervously past vicious-looking baboons.
I had started to warm up nicely when we reached the bottom of the forest and stopped to admire the swirling water emerging out of the chasm.

Then the rain came down. It rained for hours and eventually I had to admit I was chilled, although not cold.

We walked across the gorgeous Livingstone bridge to visit Zimbabwe for the second time on this journey. All that was required was a small piece of paper with a date stamp on the Zambian side on which an immigration official handwrote the number 2. 
No-one was interested in the damp paper when we returned. We took our best photo of the falls at the bridge:

Our four-day stay in Livingstone was mostly about lolling in a posh resort that also catered for cheapskate campers. When we left we travelled west along the Zambezi, crossed it, entered Namibia and parked on the southern banks of the river.

We spent two nights at the … wait for it … Protea Hotel in Katima Mulilo, the biggest town on the Caprivi strip. They had a warm, crystal blue swimming pool – wet and warm is far better than not wet when it’s verging on 40 degrees in the shade. 
The ablution blocks in their campsite, on the banks of the Zambezi, were what you’d expect from an en-suite room in the hotel, gleaming white tiles in the shower with not a trace of grey mould. For the first time in what seemed like forever we had hot water and a proper stainless steel sink for our dishes. Their internet was on the blink, alas.

We went shopping when we arrived in Katima Mulilo. Pick n Pay and Shoprite (we went to both) had everything we needed, except meat, chicken or fish that looked fit for human consumption. Going to have to be vegetarian for a while longer. 
We found fantastic creamy yoghurt and we’re back on fresh milk since Lusaka – yay! No more longlife yechiness with the excellent coffee we've been drinking since Mozambique.

The town was quite scary. It was broiling and the sour smell of unwashed bodies was more pungent than usual in the queue at the supermarket tills. White sand crept onto the road from the edges and the centre line has disappeared under the fine silt in place. In the enervating heat it was easy to imagine that a nearby desert was encroaching.

We did nothing else at Katima’s Protea Hotel except walk to the pool – a huge distance of about 300m – loll next to the pool and dip in occasionally. It was hard, hard work. But we managed. Finally, we are on holiday, and we’re loving it.

Now we’re at Divundu our last stop in Namibia. We're at Ngepi campsite along the banks of the Okavango River, which has a much faster flow than the Zambezi. The crocs and the hippos are much more visible, it's much shallower than the Zambezi. 
Saw our first hippo ever on this trip on our walk at dusk yesterday. It was waking up on an island in the middle of the river. I saw its pink gums when it yawned, but it didn’t come out of the water before it got dark.

Ngepi camp is as well appointed as the other SADC places we’ve tasted. We’re now getting used to clean, hot showers (now that we’re in boiling heat), fancy toilets (haven’t seen an eastern one for a while) and campsites with green grass and swimming pools. 
Ngepi’s pool is in the river and some of its toilets are in the bush.

Kak in die bos

Loved the sign coming in

And the one when we left. We didn't see a wild dog, we were whizzing on SADC's tarred roads

The road on the three-hour drive from Katima Mulilo was lined with trees, but it does seem to be thinning, finally. We’re following the Okavango to Maun so I expect a green curtain all the way. But then we’ll have to bid farewell to the thick green belt that’s accompanied us all the way from Uganda. Africa’s lungs seem far more healthier than mine.

We could drive to Joburg in four days from here. It’s only 1 500km away. But I’ve never been to Botswana and it’s only a few minutes from here. Heaven (a lamb chop or two) can wait.