Ramadan to the rescue!

We arrived mid-afternoon in Lusaka, the dusty and hectic capital city of Zambia. After managing to wade through the sea of sweaty bodies waving taxi keys at us, we managed to get to our backpackers, Broads Backpackers. One thing we have learned from this trip is that the word of the Lonely Planet is gospel… When a backpackers fails to appear in the guide you know it is a terrible sign! We arrived to meet a hilarious Estonian guy, and a Spanish couple who were sharing our dorm room, who filled us in with stories of goats and chickens being slaughtered in the campsite a few feet away…bizarre!

To get away from the smell of the towering rubbish pile and the swarms of flies that surrounded it, we decided to take the opportunity to find an internet café. We asked our receptionist where we could find internet access and he directed us left and then left again to Lui’s Logde. After an hour and a half of wandering the dusty streets, it began to get dark and we started to lose hope as there were no street lights and no one had a clue who Lui was!! Eventually a man and his children pointed out Lui’s (it was more like right and then the third right!). We were delighted to find Lui, until he promptly informed us of a power cut. NIGHTMARE!

So we decided to head straight on towards Malawi, and boarded the bus the following morning to Chipata, just inside the Zambian border. Busy does not even nearly describe how RAMMED this bus was! There were rows of five seats with an aisle, however in each row there were around 7 people, with children and luggage stacked high and totally filling the ailse! We saw the funny side and sat squashed for the first few hours, until we took a break for lunch in a town in the middle of nowhere. We tried without success to buy some chicken with US Dollars as we had run out of the local currency (Kwatcha), and alas we continued the journey with empty stomachs.

Typically the bus was running a good few hours late, and we were aware that we were going to arrive in Chipata after dark and with nowhere confirmed to stay! Thank goodness a group of 7 brilliant but a bit crazy Indian guys from New Delhi got on and were sat close to us! A simple solution to any problem in Africa is knowledge of Premiership Football, the Universal Language of Football has proven its worth on more than one occasion on our trip so far! Ewan and the Indian guys chatted on about football, then about their children, then about Cricket, then about Ramadan and Mosques, then they showed us lots of pictures…then finally they made it their mission to help us find accommodation! Following various phone calls with their Zambian friends they managed to get hold of the number for Dean’s Hill Veiw Lodge in Chipata and we were able to secure beds for the night. We also had a countdown until official sundown (the end of fasting for the day) at 6.05pm, and celebrated with them as they cracked open and shard with us their biscuits and fizzy drinks!