the long busride to Zambia....

This two week trip to Zambia and Zimbabwe meant quite the busrides. From our city in the south of South Africa, Plett, it is about 8.000km back and forth to Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, which to compare it is as if you would cross Canada completely, from one coast to the other. And, broke and adventurous as we are, Thomas and me decided to do it all with the bus (as opposed to Kristien, who flew it all, taking about 5h per trip). Us, we spent a total of 119 hours traveling, 56 hours going up, and 63 going back down.

And we know and knew it, T.I.A. (cfr. Blood Diamond: This Is Africa) so why should we rely on timetables and ETA's? But somehow, living in South Africa and reserving tickets online at respectable buscompanies such as Greyhound, you tend to forget TIA...

So, a short list of what went wrong:

- our first bus (Plett-George, 2h) was swapped for a small mini van that nearly left us behind (after all, we were looking for a big bus no?)....

- our bus n°2 (George-Jo'burg, 12h) turned out to be the bus that was supposed to pick us up, and not the confy sleepliner we were expecting;

- our bus n° 3 (Jo'burg-Harare, 21h) started breaking down around 3h in the morning, being repared (with my borrowed pocket knife!) and then driven forward for another 10km, until fumes started coming out, and after three such make-shift repairs, it finally exploded and was put down to rest. We managed to hitch a ride to Harare but arived to late to be going with Veerle and Kristien in the car to Zambia - which meant bus n° 4....


- bus n°4 (Harare, Zimbabwe-Lusaka, Zambia, 9h): well, not much went wrong except that it left about four hours late, and then couldn't find any petrol, so we had to scout around till it was discretely refilled at some hidden away compound.... The picture to the right I found on the net, a petrol queue, saying it all about the situation in Zimbabwe. You can tell the regime was Soviet-inspired huh?

But after bus n°4 and a hitched ride, we finally managed to meet up with Kristien and Veerle, and from then on it was a confortable 4x4 drive around Zambia and back to Harare. All nice things coming to an end though, the bus rides back to South Africa still had some bad karma to send our way:

- bus n°5 (Harare, Zimbabwe-Jo'burg, 26h instead of the scheduled 16h) at the stop at a gas station in Zimbabwe, the scheduled 10 to 15 minutes turned into 9h cause some turning element in the engine had severed some wire (I know, this might be too technical for non-mechanics, but I wanted to be as precise as possible;-). In the morning, another bus showed up and we changed, and then another bus came and we changed again, and then still once more.... General gruntling was common among the passengers and a revolution was upcoming till Greyhound gave us breakfast and accomodation in Jo'burg for the once who had missed a connecting bus (such as poor us). It did mean however that we were going to have to spend an entire day in Jo'burg and miss out on our planned three day hiking of the world famous Otter Trail with our roommates.

But while we were in Jo'bug we got to visit the ApartheidMuseum (5 minutes walking away from the hotel where Greyhound had put us). Quite an interesting place to visit, and there was also a very good exhibition of pictures of Ernest Cole, a black photographer from the sixties that made it out of South Africa and published House of Bondage, which depicted apartheidrealities...

For more details about the trip in itself, check out Thomas' post.