11 August, Day 59: Jenny's place

Started off with a nice big breakfast of eggs and toast, fruit salad and such. The fruit for the fruit salad, including papaya, apples, oranges, spanspek, almost everything except bananas come straight out of Jenny’s garden! Later I found out they grow at 18 different types of fruit and vegetables on site. They farm with bees (not too good for Mattie, but at least it’s on the other side of the estate), cultivate their own compost via a wormary (did I spell that right? Big heap with earth worms in it...) and recycle pretty much everything. A real inspirational example of self sufficiency, something the whole world is abuzz about for economic reasons. Here in Zimbabwe, it’s a necessity since you simple cannot buy things in shops anymore!

Anyway, after breakfast I unpacked everything from the Bullet and setup a sorting area outside in the sun. Man, this is a really painful process. It’s like repacking your entire closet every 2-3 weeks and re-arranging everything! What a mission. We also meet Jenny’s son, Gerald, nice guy. He runs the day to day operations of the fishing business. Annelie helps me out with a haircut and a beard trim. I reckon she did a good job and I look partly human again!

In the afternoon Jenny takes us to the only store around, which surprisingly has stock of quite a few items. A few items we missed from our shopping list could at least be bought here, including the two crates of soft drinks we intended to buy here. We can then return the crates and empty bottles for a return deposit. We make a turn at Gerald’s house to say high to his wife and to pick up the e-ticket for Marietta’s flight. Before we head back, Jenny takes us to a high lookout point with a fantastic view of the Lake, just before sunset, so everything is that gorgeous golden colour. There is a small market up there, so Annelie buys a little handbag and I add a bracelet to my growing collection of useless trinkets.

Back at Jenny’s, we finish up with the repacking operation and get ready for the braai. Gerald and his wife arrives a bit later and he asks me about the Bullets rear tires, since the rims don’t match up to the front. I tell him about the punctures in Tanzania and how I now have another puncture. He offers to take the wheel in to have it checked out, since as it turns out he’ll be taking a few tires down to the shop tomorrow anyway. Score! Means I don’t have to do it! Awesomeness, I accept his offer, of course.

Meat goes down a storm with our last bottle of wine I discovered during the repack (something good DID come out of it, then!) And that’s about it.

Highlights: A cool lesson in self sufficiency

Getting my admin up to date, DVD backups and the like

[G & A], out

Lady lady love me

10 August, Day 58: dancing with Interpol

Way before sunrise the others were already off to Moonia’s shop. We take our time with breakfast and repacking a few things before we head out at 10:00, after the pick up our order of meat and eggs from the butcher.

By 12:00 we arrive back at that little shopping complex we used previously, at the beginning of our journey. Shopping is in full swing and 2 full trolley loads are already done and dusted. We offer to pay for the third along with our own stash of drinks and alcohol. It was decided that each couple will cater for their own drinks while the food is a group effort. The girls already worked out a menu for us, since how it works is that you supply the ship’s cook with the foodstuffs and a general idea of what you’d like him to do with it and he’ll cook it up.

Fanie and Hannelise will be driving with us to the border today, so we needed to clear the back seat of the Bullet again. All loaded up with groceries and our new passengers the group heads out to the Zambia / Zimbabwe border. A quick stop will be required before that though at a resort on the banks of the Kariba, on the Zambia side. Here Fanie will organise with the owner of the lodge to receive the repaired Colt so that he can collect it once we return from the boat trip. Moonia has written a letter and made the required calls ahead, so that Fanie can just leave the money with the lodge and get the car keys. Cool, huh?

The road is very scenic, consisting mostly of mountain passes. After a short winding drive we are treated to the first view of the lake. I have to admit, if I didn’t know it was a lake I would have thought we’ve reached the ocean again! Because it was a bit hazy as well it seemed like the horizon never ended, as sky and water met in perfect colour balance.

We arrive at the Lake Safari Lodge and meet with the owners son, Matthias. Fanie speaks to him and hands over the letter and the arrangement is made. We order some soft drinks, in order for me to rid myself of the remaining 675 000 Kwacha I still had in my pocket. The Fantas arrive flat and devoid of carbonated delight. I send it back, saying it’s flat. The waiter argues that Fanta doesn’t have gas in it. I guffaw, and order a coke instead. This time, it has gas.

Turns out, he was right. You see, there is a large bottling plant in Zimbabwe, that still bottles Fanta. Only, they cannot buy the gas to carbonate the drinks anymore. So Fanta does indeed devoid of bubbly. Heh, imagine that.

All done, we prepare ourselves for one of our final border crossing adventures. The Zambian side is quite easily done although the guys that work in the office there clearly have nothing to do with themselves. To get to the Zimbabwe side we are have to drive across over the dam wall and we’re treated to a magnificent site. A few stats: the Kariba reservoir is an expansion of the Zambezi River. Built in 1955-1959 it’s a great hydroelectric facility that straddles the border between Zambia and Zimbabwe. The dam itself is 128 m high and has a length along its crest of about 610 m. Lake Kariba extends upstream for 282 km (175 mi), through Kariba Gorge, and has a maximum width of about 40 km (about 25 mi). When the lake was formed, in 1960 and 1961, some 50,000 persons required resettling, and many wild animals were evacuated in a project called Operation Noah.

We clandestinely snap a few pics, not sure how they’ll turn out...

On the other end we park the vehicles and start dancing through the red tape, in a little LOUD office with a door that slams shut every 2 minutes. We pay our carbon tax (what a joke) and clear the vehicles through customs. Then something unusual happens: we are requested to step around the back and fetch Interpol so that they can inspect our vehicles. Oooo, kay.

So I go around the back to find these two dudes just kicking back on a bench. I humbly request their presence to inspect the 3 vehicles around the corner and after some more Q & A they finally agree to do some work today. Next, they want me to pop the hood so that they can check the engine and chassis numbers to the Carnets details. And wouldn’t you know it, the chassis number of the Bullet doesn’t match up to that on the Carnet...

Fak.

Okay, in all fairness, it’s a small clerical error. The 20 digit number has one “0” missing in the middle, but the rest, including the engine number, number plate, description of the vehicle even the colour of the leather seats are spot on. But this is Africa, and now we have a problem. As I’m trying to figure out a way to explain Mattie goes on a rant about what bullshit this is, why do they have to check the cars, surely a Carnet is enough and and and... (at this stage, he didn’t know the chassis number didn’t match up!). There goes a perfect opportunity to try and clear the border quickly, and now we have a situation on our hands. More back and forth between the two Interpol guys and Mattie, before Interpol walks off. I explain to Mattie, through gritted teeth, that his timing is more than unfortunate, before walking after them. They check out Dirk’s Toyota in the meantime, and I tag along like a god damned puppy holding the Carnet, asking them to please be so kind as to check my vehicle.

I’ve played this game so many times by now, it’s not unlike working with children. They’re feelings have been hurt now, you see, so there is a lot of soothing and making jokes and ass licking involved to get the fucking guy to just do his job. And of course it makes it harder, now that I’m technically in the wrong, since the docs don’t match up. We walk back, he double checks all the info again, Mattie has calmed a bit after my pep talk and they clear the Ford. Back to the Bullet and we still have a problem. I make jokes, explain that it’s clearly a dumb clerical error, that I’ll kick some ass when I get into Cape Town, how observant they are to notice it, how they’re only doing their job (the other, ratty looking one keeps swigging from a little vodka bottle during all of this. I ask him if he’s allowed to drink on the job and he leers at me...) and what we can do to “remedy the situation”. The Interpol talking head explains that the usual procedure in this situation would be to detain the vehicle and have the AA send a letter explaining the fault. It’s 17:00. Oh, and it’s a public holiday in S.A. today, Woman’s Day, I believe.

Fak Fak.

I down to smiling and making sexiest jokes at this point (“oh, it’s woman’s day!? Ja, I didn’t even know that, since I’m not a woman! Stupid woman, why do they need a holiday?? Get back in the kitchen! Har har hahah...)

Anecdote: did I mention I die a little inside each time I have to condescend to these meat balls?

So he looks at his drink-swigging ratty friend and asks “should we do him a favour?”. Slight pause, there is a mention of beer, at least I can buy them a beer, under breath. He stamps the Carnet and starts signing it, I ask how much a beer costs, they say about $1.50 (Ratty colleague mentions under his breath that he needs at least $10 to get pissed. Lightweight...) so I hand them $8 to go have a beer on me, not a bribe, more like “friends buying other friends a nice cold round”. Handshakes, smiles, I’m told that I’m a very friendly guy (thanks. Asshole) and I now have to head back to the office to get the gate pass stamped for 4 people. I do so quickly, lest we get stuck into another round of negotiations.

Get the stamps, go to the gate, and we hit another snag. “Can you open the back please, let me see your luggage.” Annelie says : “what? Really?? HAHAHA, Good luck”.

*sigh*

Please baby, PLEASE don’t aggravate the last damn obstacle to get into this freaking country!! I smile my best game show host smile and say “sure, be my guest!” and open the back. Guy asks what’s in the fridge. I reply meat. Fanie is horrified, says in Afrikaans I shouldn’t have said that. Didn’t have a choice Amigo! So the guy asks me to open it, and I do. He asks how it’s packages and I make a big show of proving it’s from Shoprite and it’s fresh and all good. He pauses and says ok, I can close it. As I do, the other guy with him says “stop, open again please.” He asks how many KG’s I have in there, I say, gee, I dunno, enough for 12 people for 4 days? He says no no, we have to unpack it all and declare it, I protest and say no, it’s food for us, for 4 days. We have to further explain that it’s for 8 of us, travelling in 3 vehicles (4, I mean 3! One is broken!) and then we’re meeting one more person, plus 3 crew on the boat. So how much meat is it? I reply, again, for the slow class, “enough meat to feed 12 people for 4 days”. Pause, uncomfortable one. He loses interest and says we can go.

FINALLY!!

Over to the other side, into Zim (bye bye Zambia!) and meet up with (yet another) cousin of Fanie’s, named Jenny. We all pile in the cars and head out, away from the twilight zone that is a border crossing in Africa.

We approach a rather large looking house through a set of security gates up a slight hill. Before the hill to the left are rows on rows of large blue nets that I recognise from the fishing village we visited in Malawi as drying nets for fish. Once at Jenny’s house, we park the cars and can finally relax. Teas and coffees and a fantastic view of the lake from Jenny’s lawn. The house is perched on a cliff that leads down stone stairs to a harbour and bay about 15 meters below. She owns a Kepenta fishing company, and the harbour and bay with it. It’s quite a large stretch of real estate! Kapenta is the name of a very small fish, a bit like sardines or bokoms. These are caught in droves by Kapenta boats, who look just like cockroaches, by dropping nets behind the boat and luring the fish with a light attached to the back. The boats are quite basic, resembling a poor man’s catamaran built on oil drums, all of them pitch black and gangly looking. But, they sure get the job done! The fish are then brought to shore and dried in the nets and so on I saw earlier and sold to the locals as a abundant source of protein. The fish are consumed as is or added to porridge and other dishes.

Tonight we are sleeping in what is the lounge of a two bedroom bachelors flat, across the way from the house proper. Tomorrow we’ll have a moment to catch our bearings again, pack for the 4 day cruise / stay on the lake and rethink our strategy for the last bit of the journey once we return. Looks like we may go through Botswana on the way to South Africa, or maybe just cut strait South, to Beitbrug. Mattie has organise a plane ticket for Marietta home on the 17^th, so the following Monday. And I think Fanie would need to head back to Zambia to fetch his car, while Dirk and Marieke aims to head straight home on the day we return.

So basically this should be the last trip were the entire group is together before everyone heads their separate way to reach S.A.

Highlights: Only about 2 more border posts to cross before we get back home!

Looking forward to 4 days of being catered for

[G & A], out

One more time, with feeling

9 August, Day 57: on magical items

Before we leave Loza I take an opportunity to update the online journal with the last week or so worth of stuff. Have breakfast, its sunny but quite windy today. SMS from the stragglers is that they’re about 250 KM’s behind us. We are heading to a campsite called Frangella, or something. It’s not on the GPS so we’ll have to keep our eyes open. There is supposed to be a very good on site butchery as well and this is where we’ll probably buy most of the meat for Kariba.

Mattie has to settle the bill with some Pound Sterling travellers cheques, which we determined works out to our advantage. The hotels exchange rates are quite wonky, and the end total for paying in one currency <> another, taking official exchange rates into account. Total bill for me and Annelie, including drinks and the meals: 570 000 Kwachas. Works out to about R 1 140 or £91. Quite a lot, like I said before, for what we got in terms of room quality. And this is AFTER we negotiated a better price. Our options were limited in this part of the world though.

Speaking of which, it’s beautiful out here. Lots of wide open fields and old farm land that must have been quite successful in its day. Now it’s all tall golden grass but it’s still a very nice scene.

At the next town we finally see signs of civilisation, the first since we’ve crossed the border. After a brief stop over in Kapwe, we just manage to catch the Shoprite before it closes and after much trouble to find an ATM that accepted a VISA card (even though most have VISA stickers on them, but don’t accept VISA).

During our drive we have been keeping up to date with Fanie and Dirks movements. They seemed to be tracking along but we knew that the road they’d have to face was lined with pothole on pothole on death trap. Towing a 3 ton trailer shaped like a Mitsubishi Colt cannot be fun if driving it was such a headache.

Anyways, we make quite good time and the road is very smooth all the way, so we arrive at Fringilla just after lunch. The sign post fortunately is quite large and hard to miss. On arrival we are all blown away by the setup. The best I can describe it is that it’s a rather large farm with an onsite butchery, big restaurant and bar with outside seating, a handful of very large conference facilities, play pens, pig pens, goat pens, chickens, ducks, on site post office, Western Union (for money transfers) and a large camp site. The camp site also has numerous lapa’s for making food and top notch cottages and bathroom facilities. Being Sunday afternoon, the place is buzzing with families and large groups of people kicking back, having a nice Sunday roast lunch and chilling in the sun. We register at reception, camping is a mere 25 000 Kwachas each (about R50, or £4) and setup our tents. We bought some nice boerewors at the Shoprite in Kapwe so that goes on the gas stove and lunch is sorted.

To our great surprise, at around 15:00 a white Toyota Fortuner towing a very broken green Colt rolls into the campsite! Mattie quite literally sent them an SMS 10 minutes earlier asking how they were, where they are and that he would like to offer them some chow if they get here. The victorious towing party gets out and we all greet them.

First things first, and we get another round of drinks and seats and settle in to hear their tale, of the 4 tow bars...

We already knew that the Colt blew up again after the engineered timing belt form another make and model broke again. So they ended up towing the car. When they reached the border, well, they had their own adventure with customs to get the vehicles across. During the circus that is a border crossing a very kind truck driver from South Africa took one look at this setup and offered them a real tow bar, instead of the rope they were currently using. He also advised that it is illegal to tow a car with a rope in Zambia (I thought there may be some interesting traffic law eccentricity that they should keep in mind). Also, a tow bar needs to be tied with a rope at both ends anyways, as backup, for in case the tow bar fails. This was especially important for driving over potholes and such: if the front end should fail off the front vehicle, they broken end could stick into a pothole and spear right through the towed vehicle! They arrange to get the truck drivers details in order to return the tow bar once they arrive in S.A.

But first they needed to clear the border. Which was made double difficult by the abundance of trucks trying to do the same thing. And then by a very aggressive and tall Traffic Control Officer (dun dun dun.... probably the same crotch stain that wanted to fine me two days before). Very long story short, but Dirk manages to con his way through it all with the finesse of a Steam boat gambler and through sheer frustration they finally let the injured convoy through. Speaking of which, this “injured convoy” thing worked quite well for them later on, when pulled over at police stops. After Dirk gave them the whole act they usually apologised and wished them all sorts of luck before letting them through.

Anyway, roughly 50 km’s down the road and *klang-KLANG-klangklangklang!* That’s the end of tow bar number one. The secondary safety rope does the trick from keeping the tow off the road. Cool. Rather, not cool: the tow bar snapped in two. Just a few minutes later, another truck stops and the driver jumps out to offer help. They manage to secure yet another tow bar and secure this to the two cars. Few km’s further, *clang-KLANG-klangklangklang!* Second tow bar kaput, broke clean off at the end. The SAME truck driver from tow bar number one stops to offer help. Between the tools in the Fortuner and the tools in his truck, they fashion another tow bar from a combination of leftovers. They give tow bar number one to the driver to go ahead to the next town and at least drop it off at a metal work shop where they can maybe repair it. Oraait, off they go.

*clang-KLANG-klangklangklang!*, third attempt, broken. Running out of options here! So they take a chance to at least tow the car by rope to the next town to the work shop where tow bar number one should be.

Luck smiles on them and they at least reach the town and shop without incident. But as it goes in African countries, not all the ingredients are on site to bake a healthy, welded tow bar. So the locals first need to go off site to another part of town to fetch the flux. Now they don’t have brackets, so off they go again. And one more time, for the bolts and a chain.

After much applied violence, something borrowed and something blue, forged in the fires of Mount Doom, a +3 tow bar of Superior Towing emerges.

Armed with such a divine artefact, the pair managed to tow the Colt the remaining 350 k’s all the way to Fringilla, through horrible potholes and with the aid of extreme anger management counselling (from both Hannelise and Marieke. Apparently Fanie and Dirk was getting quite pissed off with one another, as you’d expect).

At any rate, everyone is still friends and we’re all happy to be together again. We tell them a bit about our adventures on Zanzibar. Annelie and I also explore the pig pens, with the biggest sows we’ve ever seen, each enclosure filled with little piglets squealing for a teat. Annelie melts, as she usually does around small cute animals. Just before 17:00 we make our orders for meat at the butchery: a few kilos of boerewors, chicken, a lamb joint and 9 large T-bone steaks, to be collected tomorrow morning at 09:00. This will supplement the rest of the shopping list (rather LARGE shopping list) that we will be picking up in Lusaka tomorrow for our 4 day boat trip on Lake Kariba (more like the Kariba “dam”, but anyway).

On the way to the butchery, we run into the owner, George, who happens to be from Kenya and just so happens to know Fanie’s dad and uncles! It may seem coincidental, because that’s exactly what it was. It’s also true that before the Mao-Mao’s drove all the white farmers out of Kenya about 40 years ago, the white farming community there knew each other quite well. I guess it’s still a small world after all.

Later in the evening George came to chat some more and inquired about the broken vehicle. George recommended that they tow the car to Moonia Singh’s workshop just before Lusaka. Moonia is well known in these parts as Zambia’s world rally champion and he has his own engineering shop here. A few phone calls later and it’s done.

So tomorrow first thing they’ll head off the workshop and we’ll catch them at Shoprite.

Highlights: The others making it in one piece in such a short time with so much uphill!

Piglets! Delicious looking piglets!

[G & A], out

Organised and dangerous