HOW WRONG CAN YOU BE

Lusaka, 23 December 2001

"Uh oh! Here comes trouble," I thought as I sat up in bed and looked around, checking where Lisa and the other couple we were travelling with were. It was shortly before 7 am, we had slept the night beside a diabolical road 20 km north of the Itezhi-Tezhi Dam in Kafue National Park, and a truck full of men had stopped just out of sight up the road.
Being good Seffricans, Lisa and I were both thinking the same thing - robberies an' stuff! As I pulled on my shorts and got ready to leap out the tent and plead with the baddies for our lives and possessions, one of the men from the truck wandered down the road and stopped in the middle, looking at us in the tiny clearing we had pulled the trucks into at the side of the road.
"Is everything okay? Do you need any help?" the guy asked Lisa. When she replied that everything was fine, he smiled broadly, wished her a good day and wandered back up the street. We heard the truck he had arrived on start up and drive off.
The man - and the other 15 or so men on the back of the vehicle - had very little. Their clothes were threadbare, few of them had shoes and I doubt if any of them had as much money to their names as we would consider small change. So it wouldn't have been surprising if they had decided to lighten our loads be robbing us of our goods - after all, we were in the middle of nowhere and nobody knew we were there.
But the incident illustrated the primary reason for visiting Zambia - the friendliness of the people and their willingness to help. Yes, we've heard the stories about people being robbed in Lusaka and Livingstone but for the most part, Zambians are really friendly and helpful.
Even the police we got stopped by at the numerous roadblocks along the way were friendly and helpful. Some were sullen but once you start talking to them as people, rather than as irritations to be got out of the way, they became real (nice) people.

Insurance policy
There are roadblocks or police checkpoints at most of the significant - in African terms - towns along the major roads and the things most of the police want to see, in Zambia, are third party insurance documents, temporary import permits (or the Carnet) and to make sure you have the reflective stickers front and back.
After talking to a couple of the policemen - or soldiers, depending on where you are - it's easy to understand why they often appear sullen and full of the proverbial: one guy we talked to on Christmas day said he had started at 6 am and would only get off duty at midnight!
In Zambia you are now required to have, in addition to the normal white and red reflectors, reflective stickers on the vehicle. Most Zambians use stickers about 20 cm long but we had small, 5 cm by 5 cm, reflectors and the police were happy with that.
At none of the roadblocks were we asked for cigarettes (although we generally moved them out of sight when approaching a stop point) or anything else, unlike in Namibia where the soldiers were far more in love with the idea of their own power and regularly tried to bum cigarettes.

A hole day's driving
Zambia's roads are a rude (and crude) introduction to the state of roads in many African countries. While the potholes may only be a foot deep in most cases, they are often more numerous than the patches of tar. We decided to take a detour off the main road from Livingstone to Lusaka and headed west towards the southern section of Kafue National Park.
The first section of tar road from Livingstone north, about 80 km worth, was in good condition, but finding the turnoff to Kafue required a stop at the local general dealer and then confirmation with the policemen at checkpoint at the turnoff. Signposting in Zambia is still in its infancy - unless it has regressed into dotage and Old Timers disease.
The policeman at the checkpoint got really excited when we told him we were heading off to see the better parts of Zambia and enjoy its rural atmosphere and waved us on with exhortations to enjoy seeing the "lions and chimpanzees".
Getting to the park entrance, a distance of about 90 km, took most of the afternoon as we stopped at every split in the road, consulted odometers, GPS systems, maps and local residents. There was no indication of which was the correct way to go and the roads deteriorated the closer we got to the park.
When we got there, we decided to camp about a kilometer back from the gate (rather than paying the $15 daily fee (per car and two people) just to be able to camp inside. The park official on the gate quite happily told us we were welcome to camp anywhere we could find space.
While setting up camp a woman came past carrying a six-inch diameter, 2 m long log on her head. We asked her if we could use some of the dead wood lying around (it's a rural area and the villagers in the area all have plots of land cleared and under cultivation). She offered to collect wood for us, an offer we declined when she went on to say that she was collecting wood for her family ahead of the main rains, which only start in February!
We subsequently found out she is the police officer for that area of the park, enforcing anti-poaching regulations - and having to supplement her meagre income by farming and living off the land.
When we entered the park early the following morning, the gate guy said it was going to be a problem because he had heard we had a "small dog, a puppy" with us - Tigger is middle-aged and weighs about 30 kg but we decided not improve his perception. He said he could lose his job, so we wouldn't be able to camp in the park, where other officials might see the dog but we could go in for the day (this is still against park rules but he didn't see much chance of Tigger being spotted so he wasn't going to get into trouble for it!).
The main road through the park isn't bad, if you consider what Zambia calls a "secondary road" in terms of the average forestry road. We only had to use 4-wheel drive once, when we took the wrong line through a mud puddle, but driving was taxing. There wasn't much game to see - birding was good, with a kori bustard, wattled crane and ground hornbill (perched up a tree) - and what there was was very skittish, disappearing as soon as we stopped. Lisa saw a sable antelope but it had gone by the time I stopped to look.
At one point I was nervous about Wag 'n Bietjie falling over as the road turned into a rainwater runoff channel and the wheeltracks were at significantly different levels. From Itezhi-Tezhi, a small town just outside the park and on the banks of the dam of the same name (holding back the waters of the Kafue River for a while), it was another 90 km along a road which had once been tarred but had long since reverted to something less than half and half.

Drawing a line
It was along this road that we camped the night and had the early morning good Samaritans visit us to see if they could help. We passed them further along the road the next morning and they were very happy to see that we were okay, giving us big waves and enormous, flashing white smiles as we drove past them.
While negotiating the slalom course along this road, dodging the biggest of the potholes and avoiding the chunks of tar that hadn't been ripped up when they reverse engineered it back to a dirt road, we drove past sections where the white lines of the original road were still visible. It's a very incongruous, and rather disorienting, sight seeing white lines on bad gravel road!
Just beyond Itezhi-Tezhi, which provides spectacular views over the dam from both the town and from resorts just south of the dam wall (although the resorts charge exhorbitant camping fees - $15 per person a night!), we realised things verged on the ridiculous when we found ourselves driving on the verge - negotiating the dongas in the dirt rather than face the potholes in the tarmac - while the pedestrians were marching straight down the middle of the road in droves, something I haven't seen anywhere else in the world so far.

Botany experiment
Once we hit the - main - Mongu to Lusaka road, we figured conditions would improve but they deteriorated even further - I can't help feeling Zambia's roads would be much better if they were all dirt because tarred roads are only as good as the maintenance level and it costs a lot more to maintain tar than gravel.
It took us four hours to cover the 200 km to Lusaka although I suspect we added at least another 20 km due to our swerving from one side of the road to the other in search of the least jarring sections of road.
The crowning glory of the road was skirting a pothole - right in the middle of the road - which had turned into a pond, complete with a large patch of grasses growing out the middle of it. We regularly startled birds which were using the potholes as birdbaths.
The pits ('scuse the pun) about travelling these roads is that they are generally very straight and in the heat, a mirage forms further down the road and you are continually driving towards what appears to be a perfect stretch of tarmac. Why is it that mirages don't reflect potholes?