zambia
April 2024
The hippo was ready to charge.
It's 3 AM. We're inside our rooftop tent on our truck, parked on the banks of the Zambezi River. I've been holding in diarrhea for an hour while the hippo's been grazing around our campsite, and can't wait any longer. I exit the rooftop tent and climb down the ladder, standing naked and barefoot in the hot African night.
I turn on my headlight and lock eyes with the hippo. The bathroom is only 100 feet away. Would this 5,000 pound beast care if I sprinted across the grass?
Silence. Neither of us moved.
Then he charged.
I flung open the driver's side door (which I'd deliberately left unlocked as a precaution), jumped in, and slammed it shut. I closed my eyes, bracing for our truck be rammed. It was completely black.
He was outside, now ignoring me, but only feet from the truck.
As often happens in Africa, what occurred next was unexpected. A local man wandered out of the bushes with a cellphone light, made some odd clicking sounds at the hippo, and it waddled back to the river. All at 3 AM. Africa.
I got out and ran to the bathroom, arriving with not a moment to spare.
*****
Zambia is a mysterious country of vast wilderness, extreme poverty, corrupt police, severe thunderstorms, and few travelers. There are a fair amount of ultra-rich package safari tourists that visit in the high season of July and August, but otherwise there's just not many independent travelers here. Prices are high, infrastructure is lacking, and corruption is rampant. It's quite safe, but there are still many unnecessary hurdles here to get the rewards. Outside of Lusaka, few people speak English.
We entered Zambia with our rental truck in April 2024 from Zimbabwe as part of our Coast2Coast2Coast Africa Overland Expedition. The goal was to do everything independently and on a tight budget, including Zambezi River ecosystems, the chaos of Lusaka, villages in the middle of nowhere, and fantastic self-drive trips in the glorious savannah. No guides, no high payments, no bribes. Was this unrealistic?
The short answer... yes. It's hard to do much without a fat budget. We skipped a lot of parks which would charge $125 USD for the day, or require a guide. While we never paid a bribe, we got stopped a lot for no reason, including one tense encounter where a female officer in downtown Lusaka told me that I must pay a $400 USD fine for driving through a yellow light, or our car will be impounded and we'll be sent to jail for a month to await trial. (We got out of this by insisting we weren't carrying cash).
After the Zambezi and then Lusaka, we took several days to drive out to South Luangwa. Here, we had decided to bite the bullet and pay the absurd $75 USD entrance fee, but the ticket office didn't have a credit card reader. I told them we only had $40 USD cash. They sent me to the only ATM in town, which was broken. We returned, negotiated, and they took $40 and waved us in. What followed was a priceless day, the two of us lost in a maze of African safari-land, alone with majestic animals, and not a person in sight. Magical.
The real highlight was the baboons. Everywhere in Zambia are baboons. They run across the highway. They climb trees, rip the rooves off thatch-roof huts, steal food, and roam the savannah. It's impossible not to be fascinated by these intelligent, playful, and utterly silly creatures, and how beautiful they are. We woke up before dawn every morning to watch them start their day by terrorizing the campgrounds. One morning, a baboon actually climbed up the ladder to our tent, freaking out when he saw us inside.
There are many great parks in this fascinating country that we never reached. A pinnacle area might be the Mutinondo Wilderness, but we never made it. There's just too much to see here, and travel can be tough. That said, if you're willing to make the effort, this may be one of the most underrated and rewarding countries in Africa.
