Not all Zambians are thieves

Posted on 24 October 2011

About 13 years ago I was racing the setting red sun somewhere between Lusaka and South Luangwa National Park in Zambia, trying to find somewhere to stay for the night.

Mrs P and I make it a rule that we don’t drive at night in Africa and that we find somewhere to camp, or a bed for the night, well before sunset. This time, however, we’d underestimated just what a long drive it was from the capital to Zambia’s best known game park, and overestimated the number of likely places to stay on that road.

We passed a very run down looking roadside hotel whose sole occupants, judging by those in plain sight, were plying or availing themselves of the world’s oldest profession. About a kilometre further along the road we came to a police roadblock – it seemed like the ninety-ninth of the day. I asked the officer who stopped us if he knew of anywhere close by to stay.

“Did you see that hotel about a kilometre back, towards Lusaka?” or Rusaka, as he pronounced it.

My hopes faded. “Yes.”

“Don’t stay there.”

“Phew. What about camping?”

“Nowhere. And do not bush camp. You will be robbed, as all Zambians are thieves.”

Fortunately for Mrs P and me the policeman, while not a very good advocate for his fellow citizens and his country, was very hospitable and offered to let us camp in the car park of his police station. We drove the short distance to it and he joined us after he knocked off, accepting a beer in thanks, and re-iterating what a nation of criminals he lived amongst.

I have to say that first trip, and a couple of successive short visits to Zambia left me feeling pretty much the same as the policeman. I had a service station attendant try to rip me off by not returning his meter to zero after the previous customer left; a policeman try to fine me for imaginary infringements; a money changer try to fleece me by substituting 10,000 Kwacha bills for 100,000 notes; and a mechanic charge me US$20 for a litre of gear oil.

It wasn’t just me and the cop who thought all Zambian were criminals, either. Some Zimbabwean friends of ours who were kicked off their farm and offered a job managing another in Zambia were relieved of their new Hilux by a man wielding an AK-47 near Lusaka shortly after moving.

I caught up with a national parks ranger friend of mine in Hwange, in Zimbabwe recently, and he told me he’d been in a contact with poachers a couple of weeks earlier and wounded one of them in a gun battle.

“Zambian,” he added.

I nodded. “Naturally.”

It seemed to me, in those days, that as well as the ubiquitous criminals, Zambia was also full of atrocious roads, and under-stocked and overpriced national parks and supermarkets.

I probably would have been quite happy never to visit the country again, but our friends Brett and Claire from Australia, repeat visitors to Africa, said they were interested in checking out Kafue National Park. I had to confess that one place I did want to visit north of the Zambezi was Kafue, so Mrs P and I decided to hold tightly to our wallets and give Zambia one last chance.

The last time I’d crossed the Zambezi River on the Kazungula Ferry from Botswana to Zambia had been a nightmare – four hours of chaos, queuing, hassling and paying. It was probably my worst ever border crossing experience so Mrs P and I had a little chuckle when Gertrude, the lady who lives inside our GPS said; “proceed 200 metres and board ferry.” Ah, Gertrude, if only life were so simple.

As we exited the Botswana side of the border crossing, however, to our astonishment we did exactly as Gertrude suggested. There was not a single car waiting (though there was a long line of trucks) and we rolled straight on to the ferry. When we docked on the other side there were no other cars or people waiting impatiently for their turn to be ripped off.

We went from one counter to the next without queuing once and while there are still a mind boggling list of charges to pay every official we encountered was polite, efficient (in a ponderous rubber stamp thumping way) and, to my amazement, seemingly honest.

We paid a tout to shepherd us through the formalities (actually it was all so easy we could have done it without him, so in truth we only paid him to shut him up and stop pestering us). He seemed honest at first, but he tried to tell us the cost of insuring our South African vehicle would be $260 instead of the $116 I’d been told by another official I’d quietly quizzed. Aha, I thought, nothing has really changed at all – this Zambian was clearly a thief.

But the surprises continued after we entered the country proper. As we approached the first police road block I steeled myself for an hour’s arguing over the presence or lack of an appropriately coloured reflector. Instead, the smiling copper waved me through. Over the next week I would pass through perhaps another half dozen roadblocks (in the old days it would have been 127 checkpoints) and at each one the same thing happened – nothing. It seemed that instead of being instructed to flag down and rip off foreign registered vehicles the Zambian police were now being told to smile and wave at them.

Too good to be true, I thought. I stopped for fuel and leapt out of my Land Rover to check the meter.

The pump attendant smiled at me and pointed to the machine, “See how I have reset it to zero,” he said proudly.

I pinched myself. I was alive. I was in Zambia. So far I hadn’t been robbed (although the tout’s scam still left me thinking this was all too good to be true).

As Mrs P and I spend nearly six months of the year living in a tent we decided to start our visit to Zambia the easy way, with a fair dollop of luxury at the Royal Livingstone Hotel. I planned to include a scene there in my next novel so I wanted to check the place out for research purposes. (See what a tough life I lead, writing books for a living?).

I actually prefer viewing the falls themselves from the Zimbabwean side, but there’s nowhere I’ve seen on the Zim side that can match the location, location, location of the Royal Livingstone and it’s equally well-located but less expensive neighbour the Zambezi Sun. Also, to be fare to the Zambian side it was the end of the dry season and the water level was low.

The falls were a short walk from the hotel, down the garden path and through a security checkpoint. A big benefit of these two hotels is that they’re located inside the Mosi Oy Tunya National Park on the Zambian side and park entry is included in the tariff so there’s no fiddling about with paying entry fees. If you’re staying at either hotel you can come and go to the falls as often as you wish.

The biggest draw card for me, however, was the bar (I know, I’m a shallow person, but I have seen the falls themselves a few times). The sunset bar on a deck overlooking the edge of the falls has to be one of the best places for a drink in the world. There’s also a very pukka bar furnished with dark wood, ceiling fans and colonial ephemera, a lovely lounge and a formal dining room. The best option for dinner for us, though, was sitting out on the terrace under the stars.

All the hotel’s rooms are strung out along the river in clusters. Some would be a fair walk from the restaurant and bars, but who needs to walk when you have golf carts piloted by pith-helmeted drivers 24 hours a day?

I’m pleased to report that the only thief I encountered at the Royal Livingstone Sun was a cheeky vervet monkey who was darting out of the refurbished room I was being shown during a tour of the hotel before either the friendly public relations manager or myself even knew it had entered. He escaped with a banana and an apple from the fruit platter on top of the widescreen television and munched smugly on them from the steps of the next cluster.

The road from Livingstone to Lusaka looks perfect and it almost is. Built by a Chinese contractor with money from the European Union it’s a far cry from the potholed mess it was a few years ago, although its invisible rippled imperfections can make it seem like you need a wheel alignment.

At Kalomo we stopped for diesel but couldn’t fill up as there was no electricity. This was more like the Zambia we knew, but we had enough in the tanks so we turned left and headed north for Kafue National Park.

People who tell you how bad a national park is generally haven’t been there or, at most, have spent only a day or two there. I get sick of people telling me how crowded Kruger is when they don’t know where and when to find the park’s quiet spots; and I get very frustrated when a stranger tells me there’s no game left in Zimbabwe’s Hwange even though during the 13 annual game censuses I’ve participated in the findings have been that game numbers have remained stable.

The people I’d spoken to about Kafue either hadn’t been there or had spent very little time there. It was either going to be an unspoiled, untamed wilderness, or a burned-out wasteland teeming with tsetse flies and poachers.

At Kafue’s southern gate, Dundumwense, we were greeted by two Zambian Wildlife Authority (ZAWA) rangers and a four-man Chinese work gang, one of whom wore a conical hat of woven bamboo and was bending over a wok, whipping up a stir fry. Another of the Chinese, who were apparently working on the roads, wore the camouflaged uniform of the People’s Liberation Army. I couldn’t really work out what they were up to as none seemed to speak English.

Zambia’s new president is not as pro Chinese investment as his recently defeated predecessor. These guys were the tip of that investment iceberg, I reckoned, and I wondered just how far and how deep into Africa the Chinese have moved. Dundumwense was as close to the middle of nowhere that I’ve been, and here they were.

Driving north into the park, towards our first stop, Nanzhila Plains Camp, we had our first wildlife encounter, a skittish herd of Lichtenstein’s Hartebeest. Despite the fact that they bolted from us I thought this was a good sign. We’d seen no other vehicles and to give Zambia the benefit of the doubt I theorized that perhaps the animals were nervous because they rarely saw vehicles, and not because all Zambians were poachers.

Clearly there were some animals in Kafue, but what about the dreaded tsetse fly?

Yes. Oh, Yes. Millions of the vicious little devils, so it was time to put the latest tsetse fly repellent to the test. My mate Brett had been doing some research into tsetse repellent. I’d told him that as far as I knew nothing really worked; the tsetse laughed off shop-bought sprays and roll-ons, and was not fazed at all by the industrial strength stuff we used back home in the Australian Army.

Locals, I’d heard, used a mixture of Dettol and water, but even this was of limited use. In past trips to Mana Pools in Zimbabwe, where tsetse are also a problem, Mrs P and I had burned elephant dung in an old fruit can inside the Landy. The smoke did deter them, but we ended up getting slightly stoned and smelling of pooh.

Brett had found something so good that the most macho of the macho, the British SAS, used it to repel insects while hiding in swamps waiting to kill people.

The name of this hard-core Special Forces miracle compound”¦ Avon Skin So Soft. And yes, that’s Avon as in “˜ding-dong, Avon calling’. It’s important, as we later found out, to get the right type of Skin So Soft (there are several). Best is the spray-on, dry oil kind that comes in a fetching little silver can, just the right size for one’s purse or ammunition pouch.

At the first sign of tsetse we broke out the Skin So Soft. As we sprayed the Landy was filled with a hint of perfume and as I massaged the dry oil in I felt as though my skin was becoming, as the writing on the can promised, soft and sensual.

And the tsetse flies hated it.

I’ve been chowed on by tsetse fly several times in the past. The bite is maddening and I didn’t truly believe spray-on skin lotion would work, but it did. For the next couple of hours the closest I came to a tsetse bite was one determined little blighter who nipped at my eyelid (the only exposed part of my body I hadn’t sprayed.

The drive to Nanzhila took us through kilometre of miombo forest. I’m not very good with trees but this stuff is beautiful. Although we were at the end of the dry season and fire had swept through much of the park, the trees were feeding from underground water and many still bore green leaves, or perhaps it was new growth. Either way the mix of emeralds and coppers from the living and dead foliage was very agreeable.

The forest gave way to open vleis and we started seeing good numbers of sable antelope and wildebeest. Mud-blackened warthogs trotted around in their puffed-up, self-important way as we approached the camp.

Managers Brad and Ruth said they’d been busy, but greeted us as though we were the first people they’d seen in six months. Cold Mosi Lagers were handed out as Brad regaled us with the story of a guest who’d been baled up by a lion while walking from his chalet at night a couple of weeks’ earlier. There had also been a cheetah in the area.

We were the only people staying that night, in the campground situated a couple of hundred metres from the lodge, but still with a good view of the waterhole in front of the shady communal deck where we’d had our welcome beers. We saw Defassa waterbuck (their rumps are all-white, rather than the toilet seat markings of the other one), impala, warthog, an elephant, and a pair of impressively statuesque wattled cranes.

Brad was a goldmine of information about other camps in the park and gave us some good tips on where to go. We settled for one none of us had heard of, called Hippo Bay, on Lake Itezi-tezi (pronounced Itetchy-tetchy).

Hippo Bay, the satellite campsite of Konkomoya Lodge, was one of the most beautiful places I’ve come across in Africa. The lodge was closed, but an enthusiastic team of three caretakers told us that although the Bwana was in Lusaka we could call him and find out how much it would be stay.

Call him?

Amazingly there was a strong cell phone signal in the camp from the town of Itezi-Tezi across the lake. The Lake itself reminded me very much of Kariba in Zimbabwe – broad and shimmering silver in the midday sun with stark white dead trees providing a perch for several Fish Eagles. On the shore, though, were shaggy red-coated Puku – scores of them. The Puku seemed totally relaxed as the caretakers dusted off cushions for us so we could sit on the lounge under a thatched lapa overlooking the lake while we tried to make contact with the Bwana.

We couldn’t contact Bwana Chris Cooke, the manager, but we left a message with the Bwana’s father, the Big Bwana, Howard, who said he would get Bwana junior to call us back. The signal got a bit iffy (it was, after all, another middle of nowhere place), and the caretakers assured us it would all be fine.

Wood was chopped, the donkey boiler stoked, and a braai set up at the camp site. We lit a fire and drank cold Mosis as the sun set behind, us, bathing our resident herd of puku, and some impala who showed up to join the party, in mellow yellow light.

“What’s that noise? Is that a hippo?” asked Claire, Brett’s wife.

“No,” said Brett, looking at me to see if I’d heard it. I had. “It’s a lion.”

We stoked the fire, had a few more beers and retired to the relative safety of our roof tents. There’s something about the sound of a lion calling during the night. It should be scary, but I find it’s like a lullaby. It was nice, I thought, just to know he was there, within mobile phone range and alive and well in a park some people had told me had nothing but poachers and tsetse flies.

I’d encountered plenty of wildlife, my skin was soft and sensual and free of tsetse bites, and unless Bwana Chris called the next morning to inform me it was US$100 per person per night to camp, then I’d so far found no evidence to suggest that all Zambians were thieves.






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