Zambia? You must be Kwachas!

"Why don't we just stand here and hand money out?"

Angela's somewhat sarcastic comment to the Zambian Customs official fortunately didn't register! It was an understandable reaction to a two-hour frenzy of form filling and wallet emptying in a ramshackle collection of buildings that pass as the Shesheke border crossing from Namibia to Zambia.

In two hours we parted with £138 to get ourselves and our car in to Zambia for 30 days. Just to make it interesting some charges could only be paid in US dollars, others only in Zambian Kwachas. Paying ZK30, 000 local council tax levy sounded frightening until we remembered there were 7,500 to the Pound. Whilst not as crazy as neighbouring Zimbabwe the currency takes a bit of working out, not least because there are no coins (not worth minting!)

There was a certain charm to standing in a caravan that looked old enough for Livingstone to have used, on a rubble floor that had long since replaced the rusted original, counting out thousands of Kwachas as two "elegant" looking women lay on the beds behind us. What tax they were collecting remains a mystery!

Besides the council levy we paid for visas, a carbon pollution tax (ironic in a country where teak forests have been burnt down for subsistence farming and charcoal production!), third party car insurance, road access fee and Human Methane Emission Tax (ok so I made that one up, just as well as my old colleague Gary could never afford to enter the country)!

Despite warnings to the contrary it turned out that the Zambians are friendly and charming people, in fact much more so than their Southern African neighbours.

After driving through the capital, Lusaka, in the evening rush hour it is still difficult to believe the guidebook blurb that Zambia, with it's 16 cultural groups and 70 Bantu dialects, is one of the least densely populated countries in Africa! (Thanks for timing that drive in to Lusaka, Jerry!)

A couple of weeks earlier we'd left a ton of gear and the off road trailer in Gaborone with the long suffering Dian & Elzana and headed up the west side of the Okavango Delta towards the Caprivi Strip of Namibia. Being experts at driving in sand and unburdened by the complication of towing the trailer, I decided not to deflate the tyres as we approached the 13 kilometres of deep sand track on the way to Guma Lagoon Lodge.

This explains why we needed local villagers, two shovels, three hours and much perspiration to extricate ourselves from the sand, at which point the car decided it was being driven by an idiot and overheated! 8 kilometres short of Guma, with more deep sand ahead, steam pouring out of the radiator, no cell signal and a track that was tricky to follow in daylight, at least it couldn't get any worse…..yes, in true Spilsbury tradition it did get worse, we ran out of daylight. It was then that an elephant herd started to demolish trees nearby!

As Angela fought to retain her bodily fluids, your hero managed to re-fill the radiator and get the car started, in perfect time to follow the lodge rescue vehicle in to camp. Phew, it had been a close call, we nearly suffered the ignominy of being towed in by a Toyota!

Sitting on the Guma deck, overlooking a stunning moonlit lagoon and reflecting on the peace and tranquillity of the Okavango Delta, we gradually relaxed and chilled, the day's trauma receding fast….at which point the car alarm went off and frightened us, the rest of the lodge guests, the hippos, the elephants….we probably won't go back…..!

Crossing the border from Botswana to Namibia was, unlike Zambia, a breeze and we met up with Simon and Lyn from Cape Town. Simon, who nearly killed us by taking us on a "doddle" of a mountain hike last time we met, decided to try again (was it something we said?)

This time he invited us on a game drive in Buffalo National Park, Caprivi, as passengers in his brand new Toyota Stationwagon. Four hours of leaf spring bouncing torture clearly wasn't a quick enough death so, pretending to be momentarily distracted by his GPS, he attempted to park the car up the backside of a rather large bull elephant.

My side window view was an unusual one, a huge grey contoured orb that blocked out the daylight. Fortunately the elephant was as shocked as we were and decided to retreat in to the forest, clearly happy to lose it's dignity in return for retaining it's virginity!

I'm not sure whether it was the bout of dysentery, the elephants in camp, the hippo encounters, the close proximity of a 2 metre black mamba or the aforementioned elephant enema but we suspect it will be a long time before Lyn accompanies Simon on another bush trip!

As Simon and Lyn headed south to Botswana and home, we met up with fellow Brits Jerry & Lisa and their 110 Defender and headed for Zambia. Calling in at the Landrover garage in Livingstone we received a huge shock, our car was working perfectly and nothing appeared to have dropped off since the last check in J'burg!

Sadly the same could not be said of Jerry & Lisa's vehicle, their fuel tank (the third to be fitted) was leaking and needed replacing. We took the opportunity to see the Victoria Falls from the Zambian side for the first time, stunning despite the low water levels. Despite elephants strolling around the campsite and the town the most worrying event we experienced in Livingstone was a conman attempting to relieve me of my credit card at an ATM.

Utterly charming and helpful he tried to persuade me that the ATM would swallow my card if I did not hold it in a certain way and place it in very slowly. With that lightening intelligence I'm renowned for, it dawned on me that I was being conned and I grabbed his arm just as my card was disappearing up his shirtsleeve! It would have been a perfect sleight of hand trick, with the ATM getting the blame for eating my card!

Of course you may wonder why I would let anyone near the ATM or my card, but in Africa people are (usually!) very helpful and chatty at cash machines, and personal space does not exist in the way that Europeans/Americans understand it!

Lesson learnt though, Angela now stands guard at ATMs and snarls at the rest of the queue as I get the money out. Talking of which we are finally multi millionaires thanks to the Zambian Kwacha, we can withdraw 2 million of them at a time. This is just as well as petrol prices in Zambia are not far behind the UK, and this is a big country to travel around!

We decided to spend our millions by driving north to Kafue National Park (5th largest in the world and another one bigger than Wales). Roads in this area are actually 4x4 tracks, making a good GPS and Tracks4Africa software a pre-requisite. This was also a reason for travelling with friends, but as we don't have any, we had to make do with Jerry and Lisa!

Travelling with them proved to be a masterstroke, the problems with their Landrover made us think we were driving a Toyota! Their chassis, victim of too many years parked by the seaside in Scotland, cracked for the third time as we made our way north, then they suspected their fuel tank was leaking again, then they began to lose power!

Despite these technical difficulties Kafue proved to be a beautiful park, and the Kafue River a highlight, with classic vistas and wall-to-wall elephant and hippo. The latter was literally a wall at Mukambi River Lodge. Basil the Hippo uses the lodge Lapa area as a sunshade during the day and we had the rare experience of standing 4 feet from a wild hippo. Check the photos out, it is stunning to think he is only a half grown teenager!

After 9 days in Kafue it was a total shock to get back on tarmac and hit Lusaka at peak time. Besides the traffic and the heaving mass of humanity crossing it and spilling in to it, street vendors here have raised the stakes compared to their South African counterparts, we were offered puppies and rabbits as well as the usual football regalia, airtime, oranges, phone adaptors, wicker chairs, lampshades and brooms!

As Jerry & Lisa nursed their Landrover back to the experts in Livingstone, we pointed our's in the direction of the Lower Zambezi River, which forms Zambia's southern border with Zimbabwe, but that's for another blog.

Thanks are due to Simon & Lyn for a great time in Caprivi, see you at Christmas. Thanks to Jerry & Lisa for a great Kafue trip and for introducing us to Zambia, we love it!