Long good bye to Zambia
Trip Start
Dec 27, 2010
1
54
56
Trip End
Jul 06, 2011
What I did
Waiting for a train in a dusty backwater town
Kasama, Northern, Zambia
Monday, March 28, 2011
Here we expected to get onto a Tazara train and ride back into Dar es Salaam in a relatively short time, but had missed the last train by about 12 hours, so we had three days to wait.
We booked into a guest house on the corner of the main square. The guest house had a bar that served savanah ciders, so we settled in to drinking them out of stock (great way to overcome a bout of flu and bad luck - ev). The kitchen cooked large servings of local food, fried chicken and nshima, or mealie meal, a maize flour dumpling similar to Tanzania's Ugali.
This was all good, and the large bedroom with television(local Zambian) and a fan had a shower and a semi-flushable toilet. We were comfortable enough, that is until about 9 o'clock, where the guest house filled with prostitutes and loud drunk men would ran down the halls banging on the doors to see who was free.... including our door, and then once they found a vacancy the night filled with a different sound of banging.
The town was friendly enough, we used the same cab driver over our three day period, and we looked at all the old building from the Rhodesian days, but finding places to eat that opened seemed hard, and the places that did seemed to sell chicken and nshima only. We frequented the bus stop cafe as they cooked pies and chips, hung out in an internet cafe and tried to figure out what we could do.
If we had of looked harded, either on the net or if we bought a zambian travel guide we would have discovered that the area was nown for its stone age rock paintings. but we didnt. We spent our time there kicking stones and wishing we were back in Tanzania ( You mean Australia? - Ev), and Travel Karma was back on our side, and we could order curries and seafood instead of fried chicken.
As we didnt give Kasama a chance, not much happened.
There was a massive Shoprite in town. It was on strike because the workers were not being paid what they should be (typical of a multinational company, but good for the local markets), but it opened the day before we left allowing us to stock up on goodies before leaving Zambia, we had our first Ham sandwich in Africa that night. (You have no idea how deliciously amazing it was to have a ham and salad sanga with mayo and cheese. Ooooyeah! - ev)
The other thing that happened that was an amusing story was we tried to change all fo our kwacha into US dollars before crossing the border.
The Barclays did not have enough greenbacks for us and so we went to the Bank of Zambia, where we stood in line for about thirty minutes, the entire time a loud bell was sounding.
when we got served the guy at the counter asked where we were from and all the usual chit-chat to travellers, it was all very polite and i leant over and asked
"Are you aware there is a very loud ringing in here?"
"Yes, sir, it is the alarm. It means the safe is open."
(Actually we had a second funny encounter as well. at breakfast one morning a local man said to me "you are not from here" and I responded "what makes you say that?" knowing full well that Josh and i were the only white people in a 100km radius. He looked extremely awkward and said "well, because you are white!". - Ev)
We travelled to train station at 10 pm, as the train was due in at 2 am. it was packed with people sleeping on the floor. we had booked out a 2nd class sleeper cabin (6 beds) instead of the first class. it was about 100,000 kwacha cheaper. when we arrived we sat on our bags on the floor behind a row of plastic chairs.
A man (possibly a Tazara employee) asked us to come and follow him. We refused, so he came with a man who was dressed in a Tazara uniform and asked if we would prefer to be in the first class lounge, we told him we were travelling second classs, but he insisted we follow him.
Te first class lounge was actually good (compared to Dar's crappy room with blaring michael bolton on repeat) with large soft lounges and a bar (empty, but it was a bar once) the Tazara workers left us there with a Nollywood movie on. The acting was below what you'd excpect on days of our lives, but the story was alright... the movie was like 3 hours long and before it finished the Tazara worker changed it over to a recording of Zambian stand up comedy. It was brilliant, save that he switched betwween English and Zambian constantly, a joke with an english set up had a zambian punch line and vice versa. Some were really funny, one was really racist and anti-chinese, apparently that's ok in Zambia... Ev snatched sleep as we waited and the first class lounge filled with people bribing the Tazara workers. It seemed to be reverse racism, we were moved in for free because they thought we had money based on our skin (and the fact that anyone how travels for fun must have loads of money) while other people had to pay.
This reverse racism didnt extend to the smelly toilets. you had to pay to use them. god know what the money went to. they were not clean!
Finally the train tooted into the station just as the sun was rising and we hurried aboard to find our cabin and settle in for the next few days back to Dar.
