Hello all!
Just wanted to compare two recent journeys from Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, to Solwezi, our provincial capital. Keep in mind that this is usually only day 1 of my 3-day trek back to my village way in the Northwest corner of Zambia. The first is hitching, which is fairly common here since transportation is scarce and fuel is extremely expensive, so drivers sometimes like to offset the costs of traveling through this large country by picking up riders along the way. Like long distance shared taxis. The second is on good ol’ African transport by bus. Which one is better? Depends on your luck. So far I’m on the fence, so I’ll let you decide.
February 15th Lusaka to Solwezi (coming back from a Peace Corps training)
- I had been at a workshop, but hung around with Scott a few extra days because somehow my work permit was missing in the immigration office. I got my passport back and mistakenly thought immigration was finished, but later found out it was just temporarily extended. So . . . I packed my bags to get to Solwezi.
- I woke up at 4:30am and took a taxi stuffed-to-the brim taxi with four other Peace Corps volunteers also making their way out of Lusaka. I think I was sitting on 3 laps as the driver dropped us off just near the stadium where people were making their outward journeys.
- It was raining fairly hard as the taxi dropped us off, and already I was thinking it would have been better sitting in the sheltered bus than the wet semi darkness hoping for a vehicle to see us. We ducked for shelter at a fueling station, and so some of the volunteers’ luck they caught a ride their direction with a family in an SUV that was traveling toward Northern province. Unfortunately for Erin and myself, we waited another half hour with no luck so decided to go back in the rain and get splattered by semis and other vehicles as we waved them down. It was 6:15 by this time.
- The first vehicle that was going in our direction was a truck carrying large drums of fuel on the back. The other paying passengers were an actor and his “marketing agent” of very low budget (i.e. homemade You Tube quality) Zambian and Tanzania films. They had a whole suitcase of computer generated CD’s they planned to sell on the street in some of the cities up north. I was almost going to buy one to humor him and get some comic relief with Zambian humor, but I decided to save my money for the rest of the journey home, so I refrained.
- At 10:30 Erin kept on with the Zambian actors and I was dropped at a Y junction at Kapiri Mposhi since my provincial capital was in a different direction. Luckily the rain had stopped, but my clothes and backpack were still soaked from the morning. I passed by lots of semi trucks getting weighed, which was what looked like the only transport going my direction. A nice NGO vehicle with well dressed businessmen picked me up, as well as two other passengers. They charged 30,000 ($6) to Kitwe which I gladly paid to be out of the truck stop. I usually feel obligated to talk on hitches, but no one was talking so I pulled out my book and started reading (the Help). The woman next to me got very excited about my book, and I asked her if she could understand all the American southern slang, and she said she could but I doubt it.
She was so excited I let her read it for awhile and would have probably let her keep it except that I wasn’t finished with it.
- I was dropped at Kitwe, found a nice bathroom with a flush toilet and running water that I got to use for free at a power company office, and started walking to the outskirts of Kitwe, buying some fresh roasted corn for lunch. I kept walking and walking, but everyone said I needed to get further and further outside of town. At that very moment, I got a message on my cell phone from Scott saying I needed to be back in Lusaka because the immigration office had finally found my paperwork that was missing for days. I was just about to hop on a bus and head straight to Lusaka that very same day, but the thought of being on transport all day going absolutely NOWHERE made me sick, and the thought of villagers waiting for me to do my programs prompted me to call Peace Corps to let them know I’d have to come for immigration another time. She seemed to think I could just pop in the office any old time, not realizing that it’s a full 3-day journey just getting to Lusaka involving buses, cars, sometimes open bed pickup trucks and bicycles.
- Finally I found a ride to Chingola with a worldly business who had lived in South Africa and Botswana, and was talking lots about Zambia’s untapped potential for development, particularly for agriculture. He kept hinting that he needed investors for some of his business schemes, but only gave vague ideas of what they were. I kept trying to explain that I was a Peace Corps volunteer and not in a financial position to invest in the future of agro-business, and he nicely dropped me at the bus station.
- I caught the bus from Chingola to Solwezi and got dropped off just before 6pm, which means I was traveling for about 13 hours. The entire trip ended costing me 80,000 kwacha (about $15USD), which is about a 30,000 kwacha savings ($6) from if I had taken the bus to begin with. It involved interesting conversations, wet clothes, and a lot of walking. Should I have just taken that very same bus to begin with? Who knows?
April 5th Solwezi to Lusaka (coming back from immigration appointment)
- So the bus ride to Lusaka was smooth and I was able to put very large dent in the book I was reading, The Poisenwood Bible, so hitching back to Solwezi didn’t seem nearly as appealing after my last journey home on 4 different vehicles only to end up on the bus I could have been on from the beginning. Plus, I had a good book to finish!
- Another volunteer Kim was also leaving the city and decided to bus it with me. I woke up at 4:30 and called a taxi. I was lucky to have a homestay with an AMAZING embassy family for 3 days, and he found that place easily. Unfortunately he went to the wrong backpacker’s place to pick my friend up, so we made it a little late (or so we thought) for the 6am bus.
- We were confronted by swarms of wheelin’ dealing ticket sellers, each saying their bus company was the best (one wearing pink sunglasses and a zuit suit sticks out in my mind), trying to herd us toward their bus. Each charges a 10,000 k ($2) mark-up to sell us a ticket, so they were using all their loud obnoxious sales skills. We decided on one that was almost full, figuring it would actually LEAVE at the 6am departure time since usually buses don’t leave until they’re full. Once we got our backpacks situated and sat down, about half the passengers on the bus promptly got off. Did they get on the other bus? We’ll never know exactly. Kim thought maybe they got paid something just to make the bus look full.
- As we watched the other dueling bus leave about 6:15, we got to sit in the bus station for another hour and a half.
- Finally we got going and Kim fell asleep while I became enthralled with my book. All of a sudden I noticed a piece of luggage in the aisle next to me, which is my pet peeve on African buses since no one can move through the aisles, but it happens frequently as people come back from Lusaka with virtual warehouses full of goods to sell upcountry. I looked over though, and noticed it was Kim’s backpack, which had fallen from the upper shelf and we hadn’t even noticed. I turned around to put it back and a poor little old lady who spoke no English grimaced at me and kept pointing to her head, implying that it had fallen on her head. I said “sorry” the best I could, but she kept giving me the evil eye. I didn’t want to risk more falls on innocent old ladies, so Kim squished her big backpack between her legs for the rest of the journey so her legs fell asleep.
- We stopped at the weigh station in Kapiri Mposhi, and I kept reading, not realizing that almost everyone got off the bus. It was only about half an hour of being stopped that we realized the bus was overweight and the driver was trying to make deals with passengers and get some of them off. It finally got started again and we felt bad for the passengers who did get off, until we realized that they all got on a mini bus and met up with us just 2 kilometers down the road, far enough out of sight of the weigh station officials to get back on the bus. So much for weight limits!
- We ate our snack of boiled peanuts and ice cream which we bought out the window, and at the next town I ran to find a pay toilet while Kim watched my bags and made sure that the bus didn’t leave without me. The first one I saw had a 1 inch puddle on the floor, probably hadn’t been flushed in a day, and didn’t have any toilet paper, which is what you pay for in the first place. I left and the guy wanted 1,000k (20 cents), but I only wanted to pay him 500 due to the toilet situation. He handed me the roll, like it would do good after the fact, so I grabbed a big wad on my way out and ran back to the bus.
- The music alternated between Zambian gospel pop and 1 cheezy American 80’s song but stopped two times on our journey to let on two traveling preachers who jumped on the bus to buy our souls. One was shaking from the wrath of God and the other very carefully trying to read an English Bible without mistakes into various Bantu languages before they both went down the aisles asking for money for their cause.
- I think that inspired some of our fellow passengers to argue whether or not the Bible endorses the practice of polygamy (still common among several of Zambia’s tribes) or not in mixed English, Kaonde, and Bemba.
-Kim went back to sleep and I started reading a magazine since my book was finished, and the last leg of our journey from Chingola to Solwezi seemed to drag on forever and stop at every tiny little village to drop people off. It was no more than 5 minutes after she said “does this thing have to stop at EVERY single village along the way?” that I looked over her sleeping head out the window at yet another stop to see a poor little 3 year old girl passenger squatting outside with clearly no success. While her mother tried to help and the entire left side of the bus was able to see, we realized why the bus stopped at THAT stop.
- After all of the days trials and tribulations on the bus, we couldn’t help but start laughing hysterically and then couldn’t stop. We laughed so hard we cried, and then arrived in Solwezi just in time to hit 6pm traffic and watch as people walked on the street faster the bus. We asked to get off in the gridlock, but apparently we weren’t allowed to since it was an “official” stop.
- So we sat in 30 minutes of city gridlock before finally being allowed to get off. As we ran down the street to get to the grocery store before its 7pm closing time, a taxi swerved left onto the dirt walking path (no sidewalks around here) and almost hit us. As we gingerly walked past trying to avoid a pedestrian collision, the backseat passenger projectile vomited not one foot in front of us.
- Total transport time: 14 hours. Total cost: 120,000 kwatcha including the kickback for the pink-sunglassed ticket seller. Was it worth it? You tell me.
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