BootsnAll Travel Blogs

Rags, David and I left the Ilala at Nkhotakhota and had a reet laff getting ashore and to the hostel: we left the ferry by lifeboat (along with about another 200 others!) but that boat only gets so far and then you either wade the rest of the way to shore (not appealing at 10:30 at night) or you pay some guys with another boat who push that right into shore, once you clambered across form the lifeboat (MUCH more appealing) As we landed, some local women started to sing songs together, under the watchful eye of the poilce (well actually the watchful eye of the civvy driver of the police car, as the cops seemed to be otherwise engaged doing nothing in particular) we also got a ‘guide’ at this point to protect us “from the gunmen”….shades of Chamois here as the ‘guide’ was about 20yrs old and smaller than me. We also asked him later (the walk to the hostel took nearly an hour) about the gunmen “eh?” he answered ” theres no gunmen around here” ….typical

The hostel is just a rest house used by local truck drivers etc. me and David shared one twin room with Rags in another. pretty basic place, but at least it had an electric shower!…….sadly it didnt have any water though as I found out when I tried to shower in the morning. the guy that was kind of running the place brought a bowl of water to ‘shower’ with ….hey ho!

The 3 of us jumped in a minibus for the trip to Salima (in Davids case) and Lilongwe in mine and Rags.

not alot to report from Lilongwe other than we met an american guy who whetted our appetite for a trip into Zimbabwe and who generously gave us some extracts from a Lonely Planet to go with Rags ‘bible’ of info

from Lilongwe we minibused to the border and then thru to Chapata in Zambia, where we stayed at a hostel and met a dutch couple travelling thru to Vic Falls. Rags and me went for a walk to the bus station  to get tickets for the next day: what a nice bunch of people in Zambia!..lots of peoplecame over to say hello, WITHOUT trying to sell us anything and the guys in the bus station were very friendly and helpful, even giving me their phone number so I could check the bus was gonna be OK in the morning!

MEGA heavy rain that afternoon (Zambia are gettting their whole rainy season in 2-3 weeks it seems) and a canny night sitting with the dutchies and then bed ready for another early morning for a long bus ride to Livingstone (Vic falls)

 

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Friday, January 25th, 2008 at 1:06 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.