January 26th - February 24th: Lusaka, Zambia

The plan was to stay in Lusaka for one night only and then to move on. It was supposed to be strictly a 'stop-over' kind of a place. That was the plan at least.  But as you will no doubt be realising, plans have a tendency of un-planning themselves. And on this occasion, quite dramatically, as one night in Lusaka turned into one month! 

Lusaka is a big, sprawling, noisy and traffic-filled African capital city.  It has a rapidly growing population of people and cars, which turns it into one huge traffic jam several times a day.  

It seemed a world away from some of the incredibly beautiful natural places I had visited and loved on my trip already and was therefore a strange place for me to choose to hang around for a while. But hang around I did!

So, why? 

The main reason was that soon after I arrived I found out about some interesting community projects in the city that I decided i'd like to visit. One was a project providing education for disabled children and young people and the other was a project that provided special seating for disabled children.  So, the plan (ahem) was to visit both and then move on.  But after visiting, I decided i'd like to try and be a bit useful, so offered to help out for a while. Below is a little information about both.

Special Hope Network
Special Hope Network is an organisation based in Lusaka run by an American couple and staffed by local people. The organisation runs two main projects - a special school for children with learning disabilities and an outreach project for disabled children in the poorer districts of Lusaka. I visited both projects, but spent most of my time based at the school. There, i helped to create educational activities and communication resources, including a communication folder / eye-gaze frame for one young man with Cerebral Palsy. (Champions! - check out the Boardmaker symbols!)  It was lovely to spend time with the children and young people, to meet everyone involved with the projects and to see and hear about the progress the children had made since receiving support from the projects.

Apters
Apters is a small organisation based in Lusaka run by 'physically challenged' Zambians. (The term they choose to use)  Apters trains and employs local disabled people to breathe new life into waste paper and cardboard by turning it into new, useful products. In itself, that would be a pretty cool organisation. But what makes Apters even more amazing is that the majority of products they make from the waste paper and cardboard are special seats, standing and walking-frames for disabled children!

The Apters workshop is open all through the week, but Wednesday mornings are clinic mornings. This is when families visit with their disabled children in order to have them assessed by a volunteer physiotherapist and measured for whichever equipment is recommended. Whilst in Lusaka,  I spent some very happy Wednesdays helping the physio and spending time with the families and children. It was a very special project and deserves its own blog post which is coming soon! 

Another reason that Lusaka seemed like a good place to pause from travelling for a while was the people I met there.  At the backpackers' hostel where I stayed, there were quite a few people who were staying in Lusaka for a while -  doing medical placements in local hospitals, carrying out research for their studies or looking for jobs as bush pilots! It was quite a different environment from many hostels where you meet lots and lots of people very briefly because everyone is staying just one or two nights and then moving on. (like I was supposed to!)  It was really lovely to spend some time getting to know people well.  Through helping out at the organisations, I also got to know quite a few people who lived in Lusaka, which gave me an opportunity to learn more about the place.

Bastien, Marcela, Margherita and me!

Staying in Lusaka also gave me my first experience of 'requesting a visa extension'.  I had been granted a standard 30 day visa for Zambia, so had to get it extended in order to stay longer. I imagined a process involving dark offices, strict-looking immigration officers and hours of interrogative questions about exactly why I wanted to stay longer in the country, followed possibly by me handing over some dollars... But no, quite the opposite! The actual process involved one smiling lady, no questions and no dollars - I was in and out in under 5 minutes! 

Whilst I had a great time in Lusaka, I didn't learn to love the noisy, traffic-filled streets, so it was lucky that there were some quieter, more beautiful places to visit only a short ride from the city.

Elephant Orphanage 

'Monkey Pools'

Staying a while in Lusaka was a really positive experience because of the projects and people that I got to know, but also because it was an important reminder that travelling is about more than just racing from one place to the next and ticking countries off a list.  It also has to be about stopping and experiencing and getting to know. Lusaka, its residents, its immigration officials and its other visitors gave me that opportunity and for that I am very grateful!


Interesting Facts:

• Zambia has borders with seven other African countries 
• Many Zambians enjoy fried caterpillars as a tasty snack! Yum! And no, I didn't try any! 

:) 

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January 20th - 25th : Zambia, Livingstone

So. After many, many hot and dusty hours behind the wheel of a car, my next journey was as a passenger - on a 22-hour bus ride from Windhoek, Namibia to Livingstone, Zambia. 

Considering the state of the roads, vehicles, driving and time-keeping I had experienced in Southern Africa so far, i was impressed that the journey was pretty smooth and comfortable and our arrival in Livingstone was only a couple of hours behind schedule. 

My first day in Zambia happened to be the day of the presidential election.  The last president died in office last year, so the purpose of this election was to find a replacement for the rest of his term.  Unfortunately, things didn't go entirely smoothly. First, the heavy rains prevented many people living in more rural areas getting to polling stations, so the government decided to extend voting by a couple of days.  Then, once voting was closed, there were long delays with the vote counting. Finally, there were suggestions that votes had been incorrectly counted, so re-counts were demanded and carried out! It went on for a long time!

The whole process was fascinating to follow - particularly because it was such a close race between the top two candidates. Everybody was talking about it and the latest updates were showing on televisions in all the local bars and cafes, so after not too long I realised that I knew the names of most of the main candidates, their respective parties and even some of their policies!

On my 4th day in Livingstone, this information came in quite handy.  I was sitting having a coffee in a local coffee shop with Sandra when a television crew came in.  They were interviewing local people - asking them their views on the elections. As we were not local people we were fairly confident that they would ignore us, but we still tried to make sure we didn't catch their eyes just in case.  No such luck.  They decided it would be interesting to hear tourists' views of the election and came over. Five minutes later, my vast (!) election knowledge had been filmed by the Zambian National Broadcasting Company.  Whether or not the clip ever made the news, is something I will thankfully never know!

Anyway, back to Livingstone.  Livingstone is most famous for being the home of Victoria Falls, named by the local tribe as 'Mosi-oa-Tunya' meaning 'the smoke that thunders'.  In fact, Livingstone is only home to half of the Falls, as the other half is in neighbouring Zimbabwe - the falls forming the border between the two countries.

Victoria Falls is one of the largest waterfalls in the world. It isn't  the highest, or the widest, but it is the waterfall with the largest 'sheet' of falling water. In the rainy season (while I was there) over 500 million cubic metres of water pour over the edge every minute. Which is quite a lot of water!

There are lots of adrenalin-filled activities available to do at the falls - including white-water rafting, bungee-jumping and gorge-swinging. However, as my Mum made me promise not to go over the edge by bungee or rope, I had to settle for a relaxed dip on the edge in a small pool known as 'Angel's Armchair'... Those with a fear of heights (or of bad rain coats) might want to skip the next few photos...

As i mentioned earlier, the falls forms the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. I hadn't planned to travel through Zimbabwe during my year away, but as it was so close, it seemed a shame not to pop in.  In fact, it turned out to be incredibly easy to do so  - by taking one small step across a white line on the bridge over the falls, I was in Zimbabwe! It was undoubtedly the shortest visit I have ever made to a country, as not wishing to pay for an official entry visa, I was back in Zambia within half an hour! 

 

Despite it being the main reason for tourists going there, Livingstone wasn't all about the falls. Whilst there, I also spent some time introducing myself to the local animals - well it would have been rude not to!

After 5 busy days in Livingstone, it was time to move on.  Having so far travelled by plane, car, bus and boat, it seemed like a good idea to try out a train. Train travel in Africa is not the faster option - the train from Livingstone to Lusaka (Zambia'a capital city) takes twice as long as the bus! (or longer if it derails...which we were told it regularly does)
  
The train was quite a fancy new one - less than 6 months old in fact. Sandra and I booked a sleeper compartment for 3 people and luckily nobody booked the 3rd bed so we had the compartment to ourselves. There was even a little restaurant and bar on board, so after dinner and a drink we returned to our compartment, climbed into our 'beds' and settled down for the bumpiest and noisiest night's sleep so far!  Amazingly - considering all the swaying and jolting - the train remained on the tracks for the entire journey. However, it of course still pulled into Lusaka several hours late..

...more on Lusaka in the next post! 

:)
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January 1st - 19th: Namibia

My original plan for the first couple of weeks of 2015 was to travel by road up through Mozambique to find (amongst other things) an elusive Mozambican xylophone virtuoso. But as many of you will know, I made a decision to not really make too many plans, in favour of just letting my trip evolve.  So it was, that on 1st January 2015 I found myself not on a bus to Mozambique, but instead on a plane to Windhoek, Namibia on the opposite side of the continent.

On arrival in Windhoek,  I made my way to the Chameleon backpackers' hostel and met up with a Dutch girl - Sandra - who I had met briefly in South Africa and had been in Namibia for a week already. Sandra and I decided to hire a 4x4 with camping gear and embark on a two week Namibian road trip.

Namibia is an incredibly beautiful country; probably the most beautiful country I have ever visited. It has mountains, canyons and desert and a huge blue sky with the odd little fluffy cloud in it. It is home to a relatively tiny number of humans - just over 2 million (there are 4 times that many in London alone) - which means that you can drive for hours without passing another car. It is also one of the few places left on earth where many large animals live outside reserves and alongside the local people - including lion, elephant, black rhino, leopard and giraffe.

Below - in words and pictures, but mostly pictures - is beautiful Namibia.


On the road 
Driving in Namibia was so much fun. The roads ranged from smooth, fast tarmac ones (the minority) to very bumpy, very slow gravel ones (the majority!) Considering the road conditions, we were astonishingly lucky to not suffer from even one flat or burst tyre on our journey! Camping on the roof was also a great experience and surprisingly comfortable. 

Arnhem bat caves, Fish River Canyon and the Orange River
On our first day of travelling, we headed to Arnhem to meet some bats. It was a very dark, very dusty and VERY smelly experience! 

Kolmanskop and wild horses (and friends!) 
Kolmanskop is a deserted (in every sense of the word) diamond-mining town established by German settlers in the early 1900s. The last settlers left in 1954, after which the sand dunes, snakes and brown hyenas took over. Eerie and wonderful. 

Sesriem and Sossussvlei
An incredibly beautiful and unique landscape and the place where I climbed my first sand dune (you can see my footprints in the second photo) - a disconcerting, disorientating, exhausting but exhilarating experience.

Swakopmund, Desert tour and Cape Cross
It was amazing to meet the creatures that make their homes in Namibia's varied and often apparently inhospitable environments.  

Twyfelfontein Cave Engravings
Twyfelfontein is a World Heritage Site. The cave engravings there are at least 6,000 years old and were made by Stone Age hunter-gatherers as maps, teaching tools or part of Shamanic rituals. 

A Himba homestead
The Himba people live in the North of the country. We managed to find a local guy who was happy to take us to a remote Himba village and introduce us to the villagers there. They were incredibly welcoming and it was a huge privilege to spend the afternoon in their village, finding out about their way of life and their traditions and receiving some wisdom from the chief! 

Etosha National Park
Because you can never see too many animals...

:)
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