Bus ride to Lusaka, Zambia’s capital took a full 15 hours – the longest we’ve had to endure for quite some time.
Back in Lilongwe, got to the bus station at 5:30am (by bus station I mean, random, sketchy, dirt road with a restaurant that sells bus tickets); arrived to driver under bus doing “preventative maintenance” on the bus we were about to board. Bag loader wanted $10 for loading bags onto bus; poor Jen out in the cold having to deal with all this while I was inside relaxing, “holding our seats” (yeah, yeah… I’ve had more than my share of having to deal with the shit).
Right around sunset, it was the most beautiful, classic looking African scenery we’ve seen in a while – rugged, mountainous landscape, big full moon, bright red horizon… just needed a pair of giraffe off in the distance.
The change wasn’t so apparent for most of the drive to Lusaka; upon pulling into Lusaka… MAN did it feel strange: paved, divided highway, street lights that function, big, new SUV’s everywhere, hi-rises, fast food (even Subway!! No McDonalds though…), shopping malls, movie theatres, no goats, no cattle, few people staring or pestering… I dare say it will be the biggest shock to the system of the trip. Everyone is now dressed better than us (feels like we’re back in Italy again), the women are BEAUTIFUL, the buses are big, new and leave (relatively) on time. In a way it’s too bad the gradual change we’ll experience as we move closer to home; I almost wish we were flying straight out of Malawi, back to the centre of the vortex.
Zambia is very big with only under 10 million people, but if you hear the stats, people are still amazingly poor despite the huge amount of resources (in particular, the Copper Belt is a region in the north where they mine many things (obviously mainly copper)… I’m thinking Zambia will do well in the next decade or 2 because of this). I’d say if I was a black African, Zambia would be one of the best places to live on the continent (at least from what we’ve seen so far… but we’ll see).
True to Lusaka’s big-American-city feel, there’s remarkably little to see and do, besides walk around and bask in the fact that no one’s bugging you (and eat Subway and go to movies). First day we just wandered around downtown a little; unfortunately like the old days at home (or maybe it’s a good thing) everything closes early on Saturday and all day Sunday, so we really didn’t have much to do (plus I left my camera memcards at a photoshop by accident, so we were stuck waiting for Monday). Hit the National Museum on Sunday which was… weak, to put it lightly. Monday went out to “Munda Wanga” (“My Garden”) which is a conservation park that rescues orphaned wildlife… better than the museum, but I had hoped for a little more.
There’s little to see and do in Lusaka, and it’s looking like there’s not much to do in Zambia as a whole, besides Victoria Falls (which we’re heading to next), and a few game parks (supposedly some of the best in Africa, but unfortunately we’re not planning on that for Zambia). So despite our $55USD entry fee, we’ll likely be heading out of Zambia after perhaps around 10 days or so.
Religion in Africa. Now we’ve seen it all. It’s EVERYWHERE… not a minibus drives by without a reference to God or Allah (something never sits right getting on a minibus with the words “Trust God” written on the back); every little shithole town’s best buildings are always an array of churches, in the bank they might have a tv with a Christian rock band performing on screen. Well here we sit waiting to leave (ironically) for Livingstone in the back of a bus, and some dude in a suite has just come on board and for the last 15 minutes now has been shouting at the passengers about God. No one is paying much attention so it seems to be a normal thing here in Zambia. They say Livingstone came to “save” Africa from the Arabic slave trade, but it looks to me like all that was accomplished was a new type of slavery.
Amen 🙂
Independence statue
Painter on pop bottles
Munda Wanga stream
Munda Wanga kitty
Bus caption