What can we say? After 359 days in Zambia, it was a very emotional bittersweet goodbye. Bitter in that we are leaving behind our good friends in Lusaka. Sweet in that we are at last continuing our circumnavigation of South and East Africa. We will miss the friends we have made and the farm pets.
Between October and December each year, about 12 million straw coloured fruit bats descend into a tiny patch of evergreen swamp forest inside Kasanka National Park, Northern Zambia. It’s the largest mammal migration in the world. We decided that this was not to be missed, despite Big Bertha being temporarily immobile, and so we hired a car and drove the 1,040km round […]
Zambia gained independence from the United Kingdom 56 years ago yesterday (24 October) and to celebrate, our good friends, Tahira and Marco, invited us to their home for a traditional and ubiquitous Zambian meal – Nshima accompanied by a meat stew and vegetables. How to describe Nshima? It is made from mielie meal, a relatively coarse flour made from maize […]
270 days have now passed since our arrival in Zambia and we are considering citizenship! COVID 19 has placed a giant sized spanner in our overlanding works, but as recently reminded to us by a German gentleman, “If you go on an adventure, then you had better expect an adventure!” Very true. We continue to reside at Dylan’s farm, with […]
It has been 238 days since our arrival in Zambia. We intended to stay no longer than our 90 day tourist visa allowed, but COVID 19 has put paid to that. Luckily, Zambia is allowing internal travel and the National Parks remain open. And so we made the 1,500km round trip to South Luangwa National Park in the east of […]
Lyndon and Ruth established Pinnon Lodge in the Kafue National Park, Zambia. Their story is interesting, so interesting Channel Four featured them in TV programme ‘Our Wildest Dreams’. We got to know this lovely couple and their adorable kids, Indiana and Ivy, through Dylan – they stay at his farm when doing a supplies trip to Lusaka. Lyndon’s and David’s […]
It could so easily have been ‘Locked Down in London’. We first started noticing reports about COVID19 in January 2020 , just prior to visiting the UK to celebrate David’s parents’ diamond (60th) wedding anniversary. In February the reports intensified, but not to the extent that unduly worried us, and we returned to Zambia in early March. The reports then […]
March 2020 has been a very challenging month for Big Bertha. We flew back to Zambia in early March, having celebrated David’s parents’ diamond wedding anniversary in the UK, and headed north east towards the waterfalls. The rains have been exceptional this year and the water table has risen, making the dirt roads very fragile. We ended up getting stuck […]
We were wondering whether we should make the 485km return trip to Livingstone from Lusaka to see the Victoria Falls. After all, we’d be visiting the Zimbabwean side later in the year. However, with a week to kill before flying back to the UK, we decided to go for it and boy, are we glad that we did! We visited […]
Chimfunshi, the world’s largest chimpanzee sanctuary, is not exactly on the tourist trail, being located smack bang in the middle of the Zambian copperbelt in the north of Zambia. We weren’t sure what to expect and almost didn’t bother visiting, it being 15km or so into the bush up a dirt track. But we are so glad we did. Meeting […]