Blog

May 4th – 13th, 2022

For our first night back in Zambia since November we stayed at the Flowers and Ferns B&B Campsite. There is no sign, but after some trial and error and asking around we found it. It’s on a working farm and we drove around the maize fields and irrigation pivots to arrive at the campsite. It is a nice wide open spot, maybe a repurposed old horse paddock, surrounded by greenery and on a gently sloping lawn.

There is room for a dozen or more campers, but we had the place to ourselves. Firewood is provided, along with a very nice private ablution with hot water from a donkey boiler, what luxury.

There were fresh herbs growing in the campsite and we harvested a few. Several places we’ve stayed have a small herb garden and it really brightens up our meals to have these from time to time. Jenny preserves them for as long as possible in the fridge, misting them with water and wrapping them in a damp paper towel and storing them in a zip lock works very well.

It’d been quite a while since we’d seen a reliable source of meat so we kept to our vegetarian diet and enjoyed a quiet evening around the fire, contemplating how different East Africa is to Zambia and parts south.

I think a lot of this is because East Africa is much more densely populated. Rwanda is the second most populated country in the world, at an astounding 441 inhabitants/km². Kenya (79 inh./km²), Uganda (165 inh./km²) and Tanzania (56.6 inh. /km²) are less dense, but still much more than Zambia, which is 22 inh./km², while and Namibia and Botswana are around near empty, at 3 inh/km². There are of course cultural differences in all these countries, but just the population density changes the feel of a place quite a bit.

Our plan was to shoot south pretty quickly, with the intent of visiting the remote Marienfluss Valley in Namibia in late May. Namibia had received good rains for the first time in years and there was a possibility to catch the valley with rare green grass, as opposed to the sandy desert scape we’ve seen it before.

With that in mind we got cracking, slowly, from Flowers and Ferns campsite. The owner stopped by and we had a great chat about Zambia, farming and the like. I also saw a group of the beautiful Livingstone’s turacos in the trees around camp just after I got up. 

The day before we’d picked up some eggs at their farm shop by the gate and we made eggs and toast for breakfast. These were perhaps the finest eggs I’ve ever eaten. The finest eggs I ever will eat? Could be. After the mealy texture and weak and pale yokes found in much of East Africa’s eggs, these were decadent.

With the success of the farm fresh eggs on our minds Jenny noted a place on iOverlander that sells meat from straight from farm not far south. There was no sign and it took us some back and forth to get there, but once we did we managed to pick up some marinated spatchcocked chicken, bacon and t-bone steaks, rare luxuries. 

Back on the road we cranked off the miles, continuing to listen to Bill Homewood’s excellent reading of Dumas’s masterpiece, The Count of Monte Christo. The trials and tribulations of Edmond Dantes being even greater than our suffering on the atrocious Old Great North Road, who’s potholes could swallow a giraffe and sometimes devolved into dusty clouds of gravel pits hundreds of meters long. Given the magnitude of Dante’s misery we kept our complaints about the road to a minimum.  

Somewhere along the way we were stopped at a checkpoint and were charged for what we think was a council tax. I forget the fee, 50 KW? Or was it 200? A receipt was provided and some northbound travelers were paying the same fee, so it all seemed legitimate. 

Not far south of here we encountered our first road toll point. Here we explained that we hadn’t paid the road tax yet, having just entered from the north. The toll booth attendant was very friendly and helped us pay our road tax. We had a nice chat and after a few minutes in the office we had our road tax certificate. This is one of the things about Africa that I love, that things have a curious way of being inconsistent (must pay x/y/z fees at one border but not another), but then things also seem to have a way of working out. 

Roadside sellers had new products this time of year. Instead of the loquats and huge mushrooms we’d seen in November, they now had raw peanuts in the shell. I bought a huge bag of them for…peanuts. 

After many hours we arrived at the very wonderful Kapishya Hot Springs. This lodge and campsite we had been to before. The campsite, recently expanded, is set on sloping green grass with foliage all about, alongside a river. We were the only guests and managed to get the same spot as we’d had in 2018, right alongside the river. 

As soon as possible we took advantage of Kapishya chief attraction, the hot springs. At near 2000 meters of elevation it is cool in the mornings and evenings and we partook of a soak soon after arrival.

The hot springs are only a hundred or so meters from the campsite. On our short walk we passed through a forested area that surrounds the natural spring. The greenery around the pool forms an oasis, with steaming water rising up from a pristine pool about 15 meters in diameter. The spring is natural and devoid of any sulfur. It has been dammed to form a soaking pool that is the perfect depth, allowing one to find a spot to sit on the white sandy bottom with the water just below your chin.

It is difficult to state how luxurious this was and we soaked away any stress and road weariness we had. We were only two nights here, soaking morning and evening and braaiing over the fire, generally laying about. A third night would not have gone amiss. 

I took a stab at roasting the peanuts. After brining them in salty water for a while I slow roasted them in the dutch oven over the fire, stirring often. This did not work very well. Or I should say not very consistently. There were a few delicious peanuts amongst a lot of overcooked and undercooked ones. After we ate as many as we could I gave the rest to one of the staff, who with a big smile declared them perfectly roasted. 

Since 2020 I’ve been in contact with a fellow overlander couple, Bud and Mary Melcher, before we both started our trips. They are also one of the few Americans over here and they were northbound, and it seemed we’d be able to rendezvous at Mutinondo Wilderness. Unfortunately we’d miss Mary, who’d gone home temporarily for some family reasons, but it would be great to meet up with Bud in person.

On the road out from Kapishya we drove through the wondrous Shiwa Ngandu. It is indescribable, a sort of Zambian piece of merry ol’ England. It’s an estate of sorts, with a village, clinic, school and also a manor house built by the eccentric Stewart Gore-Brown. He began building Shiwa sometime after World War One. The whole bizarre history is documented in the wonderful book, The Africa House, by Christina Lamb.

To go meet up with Bud we continued to another spot we’d been before, the wonderful Mutinondo Wilderness, another good hop south. At Mutinondo we shared a campsite with Bud for two nights. Many an hour was spent discussing the minutia of life on the road, of 70 series Land Cruisers, Africa, and of places to camp and see. 

It was a real pleasure to share a fire and spend some time with Bud. He was northbound and we swapped notes on various places and generally had a nice social time in camp.

On top of this we enjoyed Mutinondo’s surroundings and had a chance to meet and chat with the wonderful owner, Lari. She has owned and managed this private wilderness reserve for many years (20?) and has tales to tell. On top of this we discussed politics, covid and Trevor Noah. She was wonderful to talk to and it was fascinating to think of moving out to the bush to live here for so long. 

Interestingly she said business has been good during covid, with all the Zambian’s that couldn’t leave the country. This echos what has happened at home in the States, people went camping during covid. It also matches what we heard in November, that a lot of budget and midrange priced accommodation did well during covid, while the high end safari camps had to shut down and wait for things to improve.

After two days at Mutinondo we said our fair wells to Bud hit the road again, making for the Forest Inn. This well known campsite is a perfect stopover on the way to or fro from points beyond. Again we were the only campers, but there were a few guests staying in their chalets and their restaurant was clearly a popular spot with local farmers. This is not far from the interesting “farm block,” where many white Zimbabwean farmers fled in the disruption of the early 2000s to start anew.  

The region around the Forest Inn is the only part of Zambia that we have seen large scale production farms, whereas everywhere else it is small hold and subsistence farming. Some of these farms are highly technologically developed, pioneering new techniques that are beyond me, but a guy we met went on for a while about how impressive it all was.

At the restaurant we sat next to a businessman traveling for work who solved a great African mystery for us. He was originally from Ghana, but had emigrated to the UK and worked all over Africa for the World Bank. Previous to Zambia his most recent posting had been in Somalia, but now he was here in Zambia surveying the roads for a report on their condition (spoiler alert: they need some work). 

He was some sort of civil engineer by training. Given his expertise we asked him our question, why is it that much of the tar road in Zambia and Tanzania (mostly between Kapiri Mposhi to a bit north of Mbeya) has ruts in parts of the tarred road? 

These grooves run longitudinally and are the width of a big trucks wheel base, a bit wider than ours. This means that one of our wheels is in one groove, and a second sometimes riding on the corner. It’s dangerous, and particularly makes overtaking so hazardous as to be impossible. The possibility of catching the edge of a tire and rolling the vehicle just seems too easy. 

What the heck causes these, we have often wondered? Locals have told us it is the heat, but many other African countries are hot and have no such problems. Some sort of road quality was our guess. Our newly met engineer friend knew exactly what we were talking about and said it is trucks that are overloaded on certain axels. 

Weigh bridges are common, to prevent overloaded trucks on the roads. He said that the problem is the uneven distribution of the loads, that a truck will comply with the overall weight limit, but have particular axels that are far over the limit. This combined with poor road construction and heat will produce these dangerous ruts in the tarmac. Mystery solved.

At The Forest Inn we began to confront a topic that had been weighing on us for a while. Jenny’s mother had been diagnosed with cancer just after we left the States and was now going through a particularly rough stage of chemotherapy.Jenny wasn’t at ease being so far away, galavanting around Africa during this difficult time for the whole family. For a while now we’d been discussing the possibility of her or both of us going back to California for a visit, and recently it was feeling more and more pressing. 

Jenny’s mom had insisted that we shouldn’t interrupt our trip and hated the idea that her illness might be detracting in any way from our journey. She has been to Africa and is excited about our Adventure. We’ve always understood that taking an extended trip comes with the possibility of events that warrant traveling home. Of course the lives of your friends and families do not just stop because you are on holiday. We were counting our blessings that this trip home was for for moral support and not something much worse.

With this urgency in mind we headed off after one night at the Forest Inn, bound for Lusaka. There was some thought to stopping at Fringilla Farm to camp and visit with the friendly owner, Andrew Woodly, who we’d met when northbound. Instead we stopped for lunch. He was about farm business but Jenny managed a brief hello after having some delicious Fringilla pies (chicken for me, pepper steak for Jenny). 

Lusaka was calling, though the big cities of Africa do not usually attract us. We had a laundry list of chores to attend to, and we needed to reckon on whether Jenny would fly home. 

There were numerous errands to run. We made good time on the way and stopped by Mudpacker’s, the 4×4 shop in Lusaka, to talk about the work list on the Cruiser. While I was inside working on what would be done the the Cruiser Jenny was busy buying a ticket home on her phone. 

It happened very quickly, Jenny was headed back to California. It turned out that there was a reasonable deal on a flight, but only if she left the very next day. This was all very sudden, but definitely felt like the right thing to do. Family is much more important than whatever travel plans we have, and Africa will be waiting for us when she returns. We were assuming she’d be gone for a few weeks, but a small part of us wondered if this was the end of our trip? If it was we were eternally grateful for our adventures thus far and this would make for a logical break point in the trip. 

To avoid rush hour we wove through the back streets of Lusaka, in something of a daze at the rapid change to our plans. The new plan felt right, but also sudden. I would be overlanding Africa solo, and Jenny was headed home. 

Instead of staying at Pioneer Camp, as we have the two other times we’ve been to Lusaka, we elected to try a new spot, Lukasa (not a spelling error). Lukasa lies in the Balmoral neighborhood, in Southwest Lusaka. We arrived to find a large old looking farmhouse with a big swimming pool and beautiful grounds. It is mostly a B&B, but has space for a few vehicles to camp on the lawn. 

It’s run by a Dutch expat couple and we felt welcomed home, the perfect thing in our somewhat muddled state. We signed up for dinner, a social group affair at a big outdoor table. It was a perfect antidote to distract from our worries, to chat with fellow travelers and enjoy a night outside with good food and good people. 

The next day was spent on logistics. Laundry, packing, organizing for Jenny’s trip back and for my onward solo travel. My plan was vague, but more or less that I’d continue south to Botswana and once Jenny was home we’d make a plan for a rendezvous spot, probably either Maun or Windhoek. 

After a whirlwind of activity she took a shuttle to the airport for her evening flight, and all the sudden I felt very alone. I haven’t traveled solo since I was in my early 20s, and even that wasn’t much of a success. 

I was optimistic, curious, interested, but not excited about my solo time ahead. First I had to survive Lusaka. Often Jenny does the city driving and I do the city navigating, but this time around it was just me. Mudpacker’s had agreed to work on our electrical system and a few other odds and ends, which was about 45 minutes away through the back streets of Lusaka. 

You may laugh at my dependence on Jenny, it’s just a drive across town, right? I can’t stress enough how much of a team we are in our Africa travel efforts. And what would she say if I got into a fender bender in Lusaka?! It was a little unnerving the first time, but I made it to the shop alright. 

Technical Digression 

At the end of the first day the work wasn’t done and I resigned myself to more driving back and forth across Lusaka. 

The work was chiefly installing a Victron 712 battery monitor with a shunt, as well as a fuse block. This would solve two problems. One, it’d clean up the mess of wires attached to the axillary battery. Before each load had a wire run all the way to the battery, creating a nest of wires stacked onto terminals and a host of inline fuses all over the place.

The second problem, more interesting (to me) but less important, is the shunt allows reading of how much load (amps) is on a battery in any given moment, and the cumulative debt of amp hours (Ah). This means we’ll be able to count the amount of Ah being taken out of the battery, compared to its theoretical capacity (102 Ah), and thus be able to accurately tell how badly we’re torturing the battery.

Without a shunt the only way to tell how much capacity a battery (non-lithium) has remaining is by measuring its voltage. The problem with this is it’s an incredibly imprecise method. To accurately asses a batteries remaining capacity by voltage it needs to rest unloaded for 15 minutes, then have the voltage checked. A battery monitor to check voltage is cheap and simple, but it is rare that a load does not kick on for 15 entire minutes, usually one of the two fridges we have. This means that any check of the battery voltage is likely to read lower than the true voltage, resulting in thinking the battery is more depleted than it actually is. 

In truth all this electron nonsense is probably unnecessary, but the care and feeding of the auxiliary battery does cause me some stress, on top of being interesting. Thus, the shunt installation. 

Finally Mudpacker’s got the shunt and fuse block installed correctly, and lo, detecting of Ah was possible and easy. And fantastic. I learned that we are nicer to the battery than I assumed, and because all the loads were run to the fuse block instead of the battery it was possible to remove quite a bit of wiring. Less wiring is less opportunity for chafe (chafe can cause fires, like that one time) and less weight and easier troubleshooting. All good stuff.  

We also bought two more 20l jerry cans. I loath to add more weight to the rack, but we have found that we just don’t have the fuel endurance to manage what we hope to accomplish in Kaokoland or possibly Angola. Perhaps someday we’ll get a proper auxiliary tank and be able to take the weight off the roof, but that costs more money and auxiliary tanks seem to often cause other problems, so we’d stick with simple for now.

They also checked our suspension. We had concerns that our bushes were done, but they checked all the shocks and leaf springs and so far the Old Man Emu suspension was holding up very well after ~40,000 km of hard service in our fully loaded vehicle.

They were not able to get our canopy repaired, even though they are theoretically the Alu-Cab technical representative in Zambia. The shop has an aluminum welder they use sometimes, but he never showed up. The crack repair would have to wait until Botswana. This was causing me some stress, but in looking back at photos it’d been cracked since Rwanda, and I planned no hard off-roading in the mean time, so it should hold up.

During all this I was able to have lunch with the wonderful Ilse Mwanza, her husband and grandson. It was great to visit and talk travel tales. Her grandson is a professional who is very much in the know with Zambian politics and it was fascinating to hear the banter between him and the grandparents as they discussed the latest news. 

After the work was done on the Cruiser I spent a day getting ready for the road solo. It took much longer to get the vehicle ready alone than with Jenny’s help. After provisioning, laundry and a couple odds and ends I couldn’t think of any other excuses, it was time to tackle the roads alone. 

The Nitty Gritty

Border Crossing Notes – Kaseysa/Zombe South Bound into Zambia from Tanzania

Crossing at this border is easy. The Tanzanian immigration officer recognized us from last time and stamped us out in just a few minutes. We were then sent to health, which is telling. 

If they really were serious about screening for covid or covid vaccination cards they wouldn’t stamp you out of immigration first. What if you didn’t have the right paperwork? I suppose everyone always makes it through the health screening one way or another. Our covid vaccination records were inspected and our names entered in a ledger, and in another few minutes we were waved on.

At customs there was some minor kerfuffle, looking for a particular piece of paperwork that wasn’t the TIP. Finally we found it and again were sent on our way in short order with no vehicle inspection. We were officially out of East Africa and into no-man’s land.

At Zambia we did the health screening first with a more professional health officer, but again it was quick and easy. From the health tent we went to immigration. On our way to immigration we saw the same customs officer that had helped us through this theoretically closed border post on our way north. He also recognized us and took our carnet and began processing it while we were in immigration. This is technically a no-no, what if immigration denied us entry, but the vehicle was processed in?

In the immigration office the junior officer stamped us in and wrote our details in a ledger while we gossiped with the senior man. In no time at all we were done, and when I popped my head into the customs office the officer handed me back the carnet, already completed. What a pleasure. I asked if there was anything else and he said no, waving us on.

It wasn’t until later that I remembered that when you enter from the south of the country there are a whole other list of steps. You must pay a carbon tax, road tax and council permit, which we now had none of. We hoped that if any police officer stopped and asked for these that they’d be understanding that these weren’t on offer at the small border posts. The road tax gets inspected often, at the various toll crossings, and we’d try to buy one at our first toll point. 

Also there is no interpol or police clearance required here, that seems to be only at the southern border posts.

The Forest and Ferns B&B and Campsite has potable water at the campsite, as well as a small farm shop at the gate. The ablution is a single shower and toilet, really convenient, clean and nice. 

With Jenny heading home the Marienfluss plan is on hold for the time being and we’d just have to wait and see how things transpired.

Lusaka Recommendations:

Mudpacker’s seems to be a pretty good 4×4 shop, the only one in Lusaka as far as I can tell. Has a fair array of accessories to replace things that might have broken.

The Butcher Block is adjacent to Mudpacker’s and has very good meat, eggs and a few other specialty items.

The Zambean Coffee Company, also adjacent to Mudpacker’s, has excellent food and coffee (add an extra shot to the Americano), and the best green salad I’ve had in months.