Victoria Falls: Part One - The Journey to Zambia
on Me Talk Pretty One Day (Malawi), 10/Sep/2009 13:20, 34 days ago
Normal0falsefalsefalseMicrosoftInternetExplorer4st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) }/* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;}A man in a crocheted red and green hat taps on the window and holds up a handful of spoons.“I give you good price,” he says in an encouraging tone. “I’m sorry,” I reply, “I don’t need any spoons.”I am sitting on a minibus in what is commonly referred to as the‘bus station’ here inLilongwe. In truth, it is just a desolate area of land behind the main mosque where rows upon rows of tatty white minibuses, all destined for different parts of the country, sit, idle, simply waiting for passengers. There are no timetables here—when a minibus is full, it departs. You might have to wait two minutes or you might have to wait two days, for no bus ever leaves with an empty seat.In the meantime, local entrepreneurs hustle from bus to bus trying to sell to the patient passengers sitting therein, anything and everything they could possibly need for their journeys. There are newspapers for those who like to read, phone credit for those who love to talk, bottles of soda for the thirsty, samosas for the hungry, spoons for the… spoonless? Fortunately, I am heading to the Zambian border, a popular destination, and there are only two vacant seats which are soon taken by a gentleman carrying a rather smart, black leather briefcase, and a lady with a chicken.The road into the West is straight and flat, bordered on both sides by barren, desolate savannah. The monotony of the view is saved only occasionally by a seemingly out of place copse of banana palms or a solitary mango tree. Every now and then we pass a small collection of huts, made from mud and thatched with grass they seem a world away from the rapidly developing city we have not long left behind. When the rains arrive, this landscape will be awash with lush, green maize, totally transformed; but for now the land lies dormant and the villages seem deserted.An hour-and-a-half after leavingLilongwe, the Zambian hills appear on the horizon. As the hills begin to loom large, the minibus pulls into the border town ofMchinjithat nestles quietly in their shadows. It is a sleepy market town with little to recommend it—the only town inMalawi, as far as I know, not to be mentioned in the Bradt travel guide. The centre of Mchinji is a wide open T-junction where locals sit drinking and listening to music in front of small concrete shops with gaudy signs. Most of my fellow passengers will go no further than here, but I press on up the road, past the BP filling station, past the soccer field, to the border itself. Nobody is manning the Malawian side, so I pass through the gate and walk on intoZambiaas if I were no more than crossing a street.I enter the small customs and immigration office and am greeted by a rather jolly woman in a dark blue uniform who beckons me to her counter. There is nobody else around. She removes a large tube of paper from beneath her desk and surreptitiously unrolls it for me to see. It is a poster of a lion.“He is waiting for you inZambia!” she whispers. And then she looks at me blankly, and I can’t quite discern her intention. Rupiah Banda, the President of Zambia, stares menacingly from his portrait hanging on the wall behind. ‘Is she threatening me?’ I think to myself. Maybe the immigration official is simply boasting about her country’s prolific and renowned wildlife, but I don’t trust her smile, so I pass the picture back, thank her politely and move on with caution to take my chances at the next window.Somebody is sitting at the desk, hiding behind a newspaper. I clear my throat and the paper falls in slow motion to reveal a more sullen gentleman with a large, bulbous nose, who immediately demands to see my passport. Now this is the type of service to which I am infinitely more accustomed. Within a minute I have received a stamp in my passport that costs me fifty US dollars and I am on my way out of the door, onwards towards the great city ofLusaka.“Excuse me!” calls the man, pointing to a large book sat open on a shelf along the back wall. “You have to sign the visitors’ book!” This is a first. “Can I borrow a pen?” I ask. The man behind the counter pushes his pen in my direction and lets out a brief sigh of frustration as if tosay, “Why would anyone come toZambiawithout a pen?” ‘Stationary,’ I think to myself, ‘not cutlery’ is what the man in the red and green crocheted hat should have been selling.I am now standing in the blazing African sun, ready to continue onwards on my journey to the mightyVictoria Fallsthat are now only some 1100km away.