Leaving Zambia

Zambia is very beautiful and complex. Most of it looks a bit like Botswana with rolling hills and enormous amounts of beautiful greenery only occasionally interrupted by thatched roof villages or small towns. Most of the big game wildlife is gone. Zambians are hunters and they’ve pretty much eaten everything over 40 kg. In Botswana, elephants and giraffe would regularly cross the main highways – in Zambia, nothing except in the wildlife reserves. Ironically, in a country with so much water and clearly fertile land, they just don’t farm – unlike in Namibia and Botswana where the land is less fertile and there’s a lot less water. Zambians just seem pretty happy, in general, with micro-farms built around small villages giving them just about enough food survive but no more.

There are a lot of aid workers in Zambia. The Chinese are here in a big way, buying everything they can from mineral and mining rights to starting businesses. The Chinese, commercially visible almost everywhere we’ve been, are really very visible here. The Western countries are here doing what Western countries do best: doling out aid via NGOs whose staff live in luxurious homes in Lusaka that command ridiculously high rents, pushing the entire Lusaka property market up to the point that locals can’t afford to live in the decent neighbourhoods. There are missionaries everywhere.

Zambians appear to have learned to play the aid game and the Chinese have learned how to play the corruption game. The Chinese are building hydro dams, power plants, roads – and more – and everyone complains they win tenders because they use cheap indentured (prisoners) Chinese workers and they bribe the hell out of the Zambian officials. The Zambians blame the Chinese for offering the bribes and fail to recognise their role in the fiasco. Zambians are furious with the Chinese for using essentially slave labour instead of hiring locals – and even more furious with the Chinese immigrants who are setting up highly-productive business the outcompete the local Zambian ones… all pretty ugly.

We spent last night in a wonderfully off-the-wall lodge next to the Kapishya Hot Springs run by an eccentric Zambian/Englishman.
We arrived late, it was dark, and we waited for Mark, the owner, while he celebrated his nightly bath in the hot springs. Mark, clad in only his towel, appeared in the reception, told us we shouldn’t camp (too late, too dark etc.) and that we should just take a cabin instead and join him for dinner – which we gratefully did. Mark is the grandson of an even more eccentric Englishman, Stewart Gore-Brown, who decided to recreate an English country estate (Shiwa House) in 1914, and in order to ensure its authenticity built accompanying villages and farms in the middle of nowhere in Northern Zambia. It’s pretty dilapidated now but still very beautiful and charming – and really odd. Mark’s place, the Kapishya Safari Lodge, is madly eclectic – with the most beautiful gardens filled with exotic plants and fruits. It’s about 40 kms from the main road so there’s only solar electricity and a generator that he runs during the evenings. The boys spent hours in the 40c hot springs…

We’re off to Tanzania tomorrow and are now staying in a camp/commune thing just 60 kms from the Tanzanian border. It’s a “disciple training mission” with lots of South Africans here with their families, training the locals to be disciples, I guess.

The driving has been hectic. There are often potholes 4 feet deep and 8 feet wide in the middle of the road which have no markings or signs – and there’s barely enough room for two passing trucks – things are stressfully tight. Trucks are regularly disabled in ditches or jack-knifed across the road. The speed limit is supposed to be 100kmh but there’s no way to sustain that as there are potholes every 1/2 km and if you hit one, axle gone. Come to think of it, the Zambians might be on to something getting this all fixed up by the Chinese.