’11 Aug: Zambia

In the living room, Mindy, doing the books.

Looking out from the back door.

In the Peace Corps compound there’s the big house with kitchen, living/dining room, tv room, two bathrooms, and four bedrooms with enough beds to sleep maybe 20 people, and more if you put two people in the double beds.

There are also many other separate buildings – a guard house, an administration office, an office for the volunteers, Mindy’s house, and what they call The Bar where volunteers can party on when people are sleeping in the big house.

Meet David and Francis. David is the PPC (Provincial Program Coordinator) and Francis is the PGSA (Provincial General Service Assistant), local Peace Corps employees for Central Province.

A trip to town starts out with a ride in The Cruiser to return cases of empty soda bottles and get new ones. We put the new cases to go back with The Cruiser and we continued to do more shopping.

This is how they do it here.

More of the market part of town.

More.

Imagine about 10 blocks that look like this and about 4 square blocks for the market and that’s Serenje.

That little yellow bundle is a baby too!

When you look for information about Serenje there is one entry in one guidebook. There’s really not any reason to stop here it says unless you need gas. But if you have to stop here there’s really only one place to eat: Mapontela.

The everybody-knows-him Steve, a Peace Corps volunteer from the ’90s who never went home, owned and operated Mapontela for a while. He married a local woman and he has passed the guest house and restaurant to the family to run.

He basically sits out on the patio of the restaurant (the only place to sit out away from the dust along the whole stretch of Serenje) and drinks beer. We had fun chatting.

I got the beef stew and nshima. The beef stew was boiled beef with some gravy and rather unmemorable and the nshima was ok but the rape was SO delicious. When we got back to Serenje three days later I went back just to visit and get another order of the rape.

Nshima is the food that ALL Zambians have with EVERY meal and often IS the meal. It is a very thick, stiff mush made from corn meal and comes with 1-2-3 side dishes. This side dish is rape, a vegetable similar I think to collard greens.

You are supposed to eat the nshima with your hands. You pick it up with your fingers, roll it into your palm to make a ball, indent the ball, and scoop the relish into the ball. You know me, I always do everything the way you are supposed to but not this time. I am dirty to the deepest depths of every pour and just can’t go hand to mouth with this one.

The Beauty Salon.

Mindy needed to get her dreds locked. You might think having dredlocks is easy, just let it grow, but as it turns out, no, you have to take care of those things.

These guys had no idea what to do and Mindy was mighty disappointed and vowed henceforth to get them done only in Lusaka.

Meet the cat and the dogs.

The night before we’re due to leave early in the morning for a site visit (site visit=no electricity, no running water, etc.) the power goes out. No prob. Good practice.

Our first night in I stayed with Mindy and other volunteers at a Peace Corps accommodation and then moved to a guest house for the next three nights while Mindy had to be with the 36 new volunteers coming in the next day.

It’s beer and two-for-one pizza from the Twofer Tuesday place. Welcome to Lusaka!

from left to right:
Major, Ski, Christine, Otter, Britney, Mindy, Lindsey

August 2-6 Lusaka

We took the Mazhandu service from Livingstone to Lusaka and paid extra for the Business Class bus, also called the Bwana Bus, so we could spend the seven hours in relative comfort. It was quite fine.

Scenes along the way.

And arriving at the Peace Corps Zambia headquarters.

For the first time in recent memory I actually lost some pictures – 26 of them all from Lusaka. The pictures of my guest house, some street scenes, some photos from the office, all gone.

I am perfectly sanguine about it though which is the thing that surprises me most. Oh well. I bought a new 8 gig memory card for my camera and it works a little differently and I forgot and boom, pictures erased. It was my own fault…I could feel it about to happen…And I won’t be doing That again!

Everyone was so NICE. Is it like a Peace Corps prerequisite or something?

These guys, Mark and Sydney, are volunteers who met in the Peace Corps, got married, extended for a third year, and are now done, going home, finished the last form, got the last signature, they are Ringing Out.

This is the Ringing Out ceremony where whoever is around gathers to say good-bye to the leavers. Speeches are made, tears are shed, and then the people leaving whack that tire rim with that stick, and Ring Out.

It was really really sentimental. They made me cry!

from the front, left to right:
Shabo, Sydney, Mark, Jonathan, Henry
Joey, Denise, Babs, Barbara, Joy, Lauren
?, Cibo, Eness, Sha, Ivy, Courtney

I mostly hung out here at the Peace Corps Volunteers Office and worked on my safari story.

It took AGES to get all that done since I hadn’t spent any time at all during the 17 days of the safari. Two to four hours for a day’s pictures and story at 17 days is a full time job!

The Peace Corps Zambia headquarters is a US government facility and the security is relatively serious but not such that you’d notice once you got past the guards.

The tent was up for the Welcome ceremonies for the new volunteers. All those pathways connect the various buildings around the compound.

What could make that happen and your tax dollars at work, the prettiest thing on the property, The Internet!

But the coolest thing of all was the kid on the right.

He, his brother on the left, and his teen-aged, provocatively dressed sister are living with their aunt and her white husband in London while their mother stays in Zambia.

I showed the young one this picture and he was so excited. He stood right up next to me with wide eyes so I asked him if he wanted to take some pictures. “Oh yes Please!” So I put the camera around his neck, set him on my lap to help him hold the thing, and he set off about 50 shots of his mom. He couldn’t get enough of taking pictures of his mom and then when it was time to leave he said “will you give me a hug?”. How sweet is That?

…and some giraffes, which are always cool to see.

…a monitor lizard that is also huge. His front legs and his back legs are touching and the rest of his body, the part between the legs which is good sized, is bent into that hole…

We had three nice sightings on our ‘cruise’. This guy who was plenty big but still half the size of the one in the Okavango…

The Booze Cruise

We decided to do a FunTivity on the river. They call it a Zambezi River Wildlife Cruise. Everyone else calls it The Booze Cruise because the main attraction is Free Booze.

When we got on the ‘boat’ for our ‘cruise’ there was one stool we could find and got ourselves a little spot on the rail to sit. We thought, ok, let’s go. But no. About twelve more people got on.

They had food for maybe 28 people, seats for maybe 28 people, and there were at least 40 people onboard. They did not, however, run out of Gin and Tonic.

Mindy met me here and we enjoyed dinner with the safari group, an after dinner beer and Ke Ale Bo Ha with OT, and then a good nights sleep.

This is one corner of the room. There is also the balcony, a desk area, a sitting area, and closets. That’s the door to the bathroom. It took 30 minutes to get 7 inches of hot water into the bathtub but ohhh what luxury after 15 nights in the bush.

You can’t tell but there is no roof on the bathroom and there is a space between the traditionally thatched roof and the wall such that in the morning a monkey came into the room and stole an apple from the top of the coffee table leaving a big monkey mess in the bathtub. Monkeys, it seems, are gifted at finding apples.

July 29-August 2 Livingstone

The view of the Zambezi River from the balcony of my fabulous room at the Zambezi Riverfront Hotel compliments of Bushways Safari although they certainly didn’t mean that I should get such a great room so it must have been all that was available.

Victoria Falls

A pano from one of the many viewing stations we visited which of course does not do it credit. You can’t see its extent, you can’t see the bottom, and you can’t hear it. It is AWESOME.

There is a big difference seasonally. We are now in the middle of the dry season which some have said is perfect. In the wet season the falls are so full you can’t see anything because of the mist. At the end of the dry season they lose some of their thunder.

I wanted to look over the edge but didn’t want to soak my camera so I left it with Mindy and this is what happens when you leave your camera with Mindy.

“Hey, let’s get that guy to take our picture!”

We walked over to behind the falls, behind what you can see in the photo above, and found this winning double rainbow.

And a photo of Mindy at the location where goofing around tourists die.

Just a few months ago a guy was at this very place and waded a little into the water. He then got spooked by a monkey, fell, and went over into oblivion. Be careful Mindy!

From here you can see the walking bridge and further back the bridge that joins Zambia and Zimbabwe.

From the bridge, the one that joins Zambia to Zimbabwe.

Around Town

That’s the Livingstone Museum above, the main street on the left and a side street on the right.

We spent some time on the bridge and then went up to a café made for this view.

Livingstone is well-known around for its FunTivities. That’s what everyone calls it. There are wildlife related FunTivities, river FunTivities, and bridge FunTivities. Bridge FunTivities all involve jumping off the bridge connected to various life saving devices. There’s the zip-line, the swing, and the bungee.

Here’s a bungee jumper, head first, into a deep deep gorge. Right.

The same jumper. That line will eventually stretch out and his hands will barely touch the water.

I have a long sequence from my New Zealand trip of bungee jumpers in Queensland so I knew what to expect but still, I can NOT imagine.

The museum was pretty good. This is the lobby, no other photos allowed.

Mindy thought the cultural displays were right on and the whole effort better than the similar museum in the capital city. The artifacts were well displayed and the stories were interesting and informative.

HURRAY! FINALLY my first street food in Africa. Nothing in South Africa, nothing in Botswana, so Finally.

It was perfect – a fried sweet potato. YUM!

You know how I always like to find the cathedral. Maybe they don’t have a cathedral here as this is the biggest Catholic church I saw.

Mindy said the predominant religions are Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is overall a very Christian country. The stores, taxis, waiting rooms, everywhere you hear the radio they are playing local Christian Rock or a sermon. That seems to be the two stations in Livingstone anyway.

It’s all in English too. There are 72 local languages in Zambia so the lingua franca is English and is spoken everywhere outside the villages where you might find only local language speakers.

Windows from the above church. They also had the traditional scenes but I like these references to African animals.

This day we were going to do a FunTivity like a walk with the lions or an elephant ride but neither one of us wanted to do those things more than we wanted a spa treatment.

So we found a place in town and both got pedicures and Mindy got a facial and I got a massage. Lovely! This woman did rip at my heels with a razor blade absolutely determined that I would not leave her care with a shred of dead skin on my foot.

‘You must be beautiful’ she said. Yikes, my heels are still sore…but clean…

…but one of the best, Jolly Boys, had recently opened a second location and we got space there.

It was perfect and we stayed for three nights.

There’s Mindy sitting on our veranda doing work. We had two single beds with mosquito net (as always here), a little table with a lamp between the beds, a small shelf, and an overhead light…shared bathrooms and showers across the way.

I loved it in there, it was so cozy and just right, including of course the price.

They had a great lounge for socializing, a small bar, and a café that offered tasty and well priced meals, and a pool even and a nightly bonfire.

And like backpackers always do, they had shared kitchen facilities which is so perfect for extended stays when you want to be able to make food.

Jolly Boys Backpackers

Here in Zambia they don’t have hostels, they have backpackers, but it is the same place with just a different name.

The most well regarded backpackers in Livingstone are here on the main street but by the time we got around to booking (and that would be yesterday…) they were all full…

Mindy, you go! She brought me coffee every morning(!) and made breakfast eggs just the way I like them with onions, tomatoes, and cheese. Lucky ME.