16. Elephants On The Road

You’ll recall from the last blog that we had said our goodbyes in South Africa and were about to embark on the journey north to Zambia. For those of a nervous disposition, or those pressed for time and wishing to jump to the conclusion, let me tell you right now that we arrived safely, and in good spirits.

We’d planned our route very carefully, looking at distances, researching border crossings, checking out the online forums for advice (because if it's on the internet it's bound to be true), and we ended up confident that the journey was do-able in a fairly relaxed manner giving us plenty of time to enjoy the view. We even built in large margins for error, so we knew we had more than enough time to get to each of our waypoints while it was light. It’s 2100km, and apparently you can do this journey in 2 days; we planned to do it in 4. 

We decided to go up through Botswana (rather than Zimbabwe), because, although it’s a couple of hundred kilometers further, it does have the twin benefits that the border crossings are apparently easier, and you’re less likely to be kidnapped for ransom by armed despots.

Our days were planned to go like this:

Day 1, 1002km: set off midnight, arrive Martin’s Drift border post 06:30, be through the border by 08:30, be at our campsite in an elephant sanctuary in Nata, Botswana, by 13:30. It gets dark about 18:00, so that’s a nice 4h30m margin in case of delays.

Day 2, 314km: get up early to see the elephants, leave around 11:00, arrive Kazungula Ferry around 13:30, be through the border by 14:30, be at our campsite at Victoria Falls by 16:00.

Day 3, 477km: get up early and see the falls, leave around 11am to arrive at a guest house in Lusaka by 17:00.

Day 4, 319km: have leisurely breakfast, leave at 09:00 after the first rush of traffic in Lusaka, stop at the missionary-run Fig Tree Cafe for lunch around 12 noon, arrive Ndola around 15:00.

Now, before anyone shrieks “Naive fools! This isn't Europe you know!”, we’d talked to quite a few people and looked at a few travel forums, and this itinerary was eminently sensible.

So, day 1, we arrive at the South Africa / Botswana border as planned at 06:30... and joined the back of a queue at least a kilometer long. Turns out this was the day that 200 cars were returning to Botswana from an annual gathering of some international church. Gosh. So a border crossing which was supposed to take a maximum of 2 hours actually took us 6.

We’d hoped to be through the border by 8:30, but in the end we got into Botswana at 12:30 with a 6-hour drive ahead of us to the campsite. By this point our usually patient and compliant kids were showing clear signs that they had just about had enough.

The main road up Botswana isn’t all that great. It’s full of potholes, there are frequent herds of cattle blissfully chewing cud while they wait for you to crash into them, and there is the ever-present risk that elephants will just wander in front of you as you drive.

The other big problem is that speed limits are frequently not sign-posted. You just have to know that the approach and departure of a town is 80kmh, and the bit in between is 60kmh. And for ‘town’ read ‘two or more  huts’. So it wasn’t entirely surprising when, as evening approached, a police officer stepped into the road and waved us in. We [Ed... Jason is being generous here... I was driving] [JCS...You're right, I was being generous, you despicable criminal] were doing 80kmh, but unfortunately this was in a 60 limit. There was no way we could have known.

Before we were stopped, the satnav was saying we’d be at the campsite at 18:00 - just about ok to get there and get the tent up before it got too dark. After we finished with the police it was looking more like 18:45 so we decided to bail out and find a closer campsite. Claire had the inspiration to look at Points Of Interest in the satnav, and found a campsite close by that turned out to be excellent. Not so many elephants, but a lovely spot with a nice restaurant and we decided we deserved a nice meal after a tough day.

Day 2 dawned and we thought we’d pop in to the elephant sanctuary we were supposed to stay at the night before, so after paying the speeding fine at the local police station (and they were somewhat surprised that we had bothered), we set off. The website said that the road was unsuitable for road cars, and that a 4x4 was required. Well we have a 4x4 so we thought we would be ok. Turns out we weren’t. About 1km down the road we got totally beached in soft sand with a full car and a heavy trailer. Claire and I spent half an hour digging the trailer out and turning it round by hand, and, with the weight off the back of the car, I then managed to get the car out, smoking the clutch in the process. It’s quite unnerving to be in the middle of nowhere with no support driving a car which is spewing smoke from the engine compartment.

But, here’s the thing, had we not had that speeding fine the night before we’d have pressed on to this campsite and got stuck on the road in the dark with no other options. It’s not often in this world that you are ever thankful for a speeding ticket.

The good news is that we got the car out of the dune, turned round, and managed to drag the trailer out and back to the main road. The next hour was a bit fraught as we had to get confidence back that the car was ok and not going to break down - a dead clutch on the M1 in the UK is inconvenient - the same on the R1 in Botswana is a disaster. But it was fine, and we got to the Kazungula ferry across the Zambezi in good time at about 14:00. 

On the approach to the ferry we finally saw what we had been hoping to see - a herd of elephants crossing the road. It was a great end to the Botswana leg of the trip.

As you approach the river, people come up touting for whatever business they can get; changing money, looking after your car, selling you insurance. We eventually managed to fend them off enough to enjoy the trip over the river. 

Crossing the Zambezi was quite a moment for us - one of the iconic things to do at some point in your life, only slightly marred by explaining, again, to that guy that, yes, we're white, but that in no way means that we are rich. Eventually we gave him the equivalent of £1 and he promised to sit on our trailer and not steal anything.

Customs and immigration were a breeze, the car was stamped through with no issues, and within half an hour of leaving the ferry we were on our way to Livingstone. Moreover, we were in Zambia. Still two days away from our destination, but nonetheless in Zambia. 

It’s an odd thing, but as soon as we were on Zambian soil, our stress levels went down - I guess something to do with knowing people in the country; having a number to call if anything went wrong. It’s daft, really, because it would be somewhat inconvenient for anyone to travel 14 hours down from Ndola to help us out, in just the same way it would be if your mate called you at home in Manchester/Houston and asked you to kindly pop over and pick him up from Munich/Mexico City (delete as culturally appropriate). Still, it was comforting to know we knew people.

The Maramba River Lodge campsite was great, and within 4km of Victoria Falls. Bounded by a river, at dinner that night we saw a hippo and a crocodile just over the balcony, and apparently an elephant walked through the camp in the night. Quite a cool place. In the morning of day 3 we packed up and went out early to see the falls. 

Considering Vic Falls is one of the 7 natural wonders of the world, the area is pretty low key. There’s a fairly subtle entrance on the Zambian side which takes you into a carpark/curio market. It’s $20 per person to go into the falls and $5 to park your car, which we thought was quite a lot. Randomly we got talking to one of the security guys and came round to the fact that we were missionaries and coming to live in Zambia and he went and chatted to the entrance people on our behalf and got us in half price. In Zambia, it really is all about relationships. Next time we go, though, we’ll be Zambian residents and then it’s only $7 each. If you get chance to go, please visit Ephraim in shop 46 - he was disappointed that we couldn’t afford to buy anything so we said we’d send some rich westerners his way.

At this time of year it’s dry season and the flow over the falls is as low as it gets. It’s still impressive, but not nearly as impressive as it will be in March. Consequently there were few people around and we could wander in peace. Our friendly security guard showed us round for a while and took us out onto the rocks (strictly forbidden for the unaccompanied), and then left us to it. We had a pleasant hour leaning on railings admiring the geology and watching the insane throw themselves down the rapids attached to bits of polystyrene.

Here and there are information boards with some of the history of the falls. They are bizarrely inconsistent - one board tells us that ‘previous generations would have seen the water falling into gorge number 2, rather than the present gorge’. The water has been falling into its present gorge for at least 200,000 years, which would mean that the sign writer counts Homo Erectus as a ‘previous generation’, now I love good prose as much as the next man but that's stretching it a bit even for me. Another board talks about the start of the Jurassic era 200 years ago (that would be 200 million years ago), and still another board describes ‘stone age visitors’ to the falls 2000 years ago, which surprised me because the orthodox interpretation of history sees the stone age ending about 6000BC when some enterprising chap discovered how to smelt copper. It was interesting to me to discover that the Roman empire was, at least according to the historians of the Victoria Waterfalls Trust, a stone age civilisation. Here's a picture of Reuben, shaking his head with incredulity at the folly.

But dodgy history aside, it was awesome, and we’re looking forward to going back there in rainy season to see the falls in all their watery splendour.

We’d been told that the journey from Livingstone to Lusaka, the capital city, was between five and six hours, and since we had booked into a missionary guest house for the night we were fairly relaxed about setting off, so we were on the road about noon. 

Zambia has lots (and I mean lots) of police check points, and the convention is that you approach them slowly with your main and hazard lights on, roll down your window, take off your sunglasses, and greet the officer loudly and cheerfully. We’d done this at every check so far and been waved through with pleasant words. 

Just on the outskirts of Livingstone, however, was a checkpoint that I didn’t see in time, approached too fast, and ended up with the police woman putting her hand out to show me to stop. After that she was looking for any reason to haul us in, and she objected to the way our bikes were being carried on the roof. She waved us in to the police compound and told us they were impounding our car - obviously a nervous moment. 

As we drove in there was another police guy driving out and we stopped alongside him to ask where we had to go. It turns out he was the chief inspector of the division and shook his head when we explained what had happened, that we were new in Zambia, and were not tourists. I got the feeling that this particular police woman was known for doing this. He told us to follow him out and he talked to the guys at the check point after which we were waved through with a cheery “go well” and “God bless your journey”. Again, as I said above, Zambia is all about relationships. Everything happens in a manner dependent on the way you deal with people - in fact, since arriving in Ndola we’ve been ensuring we stop longer than we need to at our local police check point to get to know the guys there; you never know when a friendly police inspector might come in useful.

The rest of the journey to Lusaka was fairly uneventful until we got to about 40km from town and discovered the road had been removed. Literally. There was a guy with a flag waving you off the side of the tarmac, and beyond him there was just sand. Not only that, but the ‘diversion’ was completely un-signed, and basically through the bush. At this point is was 5pm and starting to get dark, and there was hardly anyone else on the ‘road’. But when the only road between the 4th and 1st largest towns in Zambia is missing, there’s little option but to do what a man with a flag tells you. So in approaching darkness, and on one of the worst ‘roads’ I have ever seen, we slowly carried on. At one point the track dove off into a carpark full of trucks and crowds of drunk guys before before emerging again, and then later it went through a quarry - the road actually wound down into the pit of the quarry before climbing up again past a whole village on fire and back to the trail.

I can’t describe how stressful it was - we were both tense, the kids were fractious, and of course the satnav was having a hissy-fit because we were so far from any known road that even David Livingstone would have scratched his head and wondered if he wasn't just a little bit off piste.  After about two hours of this we found ourselves behind a truck, which we guessed, most likely, was going through to Lusaka so we just stayed behind it and went wherever it went - if we hadn’t had that I don’t know what we’d have done because in the dark it was impossible to know which way to go. It took us 4 hours to do 40km, making our easy 5-hour journey into a deeply stressful 9 hours. It’s incredible that the government can just remove the main (and only) road between two major cities without any other provision. 

At least we had the number of the guest house and kept in contact with them, so it was that when we arrived at 9pm they were waiting for us with a hot meal and cheery company. It was a nice end to a tough day.

The next day, our last on the road, was fine. We got up late, had a leisurely breakfast, and left just after nine. After negotiating the Lusaka traffic we were on our way. We stopped off for lunch at a very cool diner called The Fig Tree Cafe, run by missionaries and famous in Zambia, and then arrived in Ndola about 4 in the afternoon. We collected the keys to our temporary house in the middle of a banana farm and let out a sigh of relief for a safe arrival.

The journey had been eventful but now, looking back, it was great and we always arrived safely. We’ve got some good stories to tell, and we had an adventure. Sitting at my desk writing this and looking out at the farm, well, it’s a pretty nice place to be. We have a lot of adjusting to do, not least to really define what we’re here to do, but we think we will be just fine.

So starts the next stage of our African adventure.

15. The End Of The Beginning

When you're a kid, time ticks by so slowly. An hour in the car is torture, a school day stretches to some distant invisible horizon, the summer six-week holiday feels like a year, and Christmas is always an eternity away. As we go into the last days of our time in South Africa, I wish I was a kid again so the days wouldn’t scream by so quickly.

Our time here has been amazing, we've been part of an incredible community and formed lifelong friendships. We've accepted and been accepted. We've been part of a great church, marked down only because of the instant coffee (I ask myself, what would Jesus drink? And I think it’s clear he drinks Espresso).

When we first came here, we were planning on heading to Zambia about the end of June. Round about May we decided to have an extra month and extend our stay until the end of July. Then we realised a bunch of people were visiting from our church at the start of August, so we said we'd stay until end of the first week of August. When you love living somewhere, it's all too easy to push your leaving date ever further into the future. And then Claire's sister announced her wedding date in mid August, and it would have been foolish for us to go to Zambia only for Claire to fly back a week later leaving me in an unknown country with two small boys and no support network. So we extended our visas until the end of August. 

Then, just this week, Reuben was admitted to hospital with pneumonia. He’s on the mend, but we’ve been advised to stay another two weeks [Ed. - the blog was started a couple of weeks ago - Reuben is back to being his cheeky self].

But despite these extensions, our leaving date is approaching fast, and, you know, we're ready to go. We're excited about the next part of our challenge. Excited about getting stuck in. Excited about the next part of the call God has given us. One of the J-Life guys here described it like this "For you guys leaving here is bitter-sweet, bitter saying goodbye to your friends, but sweet going where you're called to be. For those of us who have to let you go, it's just bitter." That says it all, really. We, and the community we have become part of, have changed, grown. I like to think that God has been planting, and now he wants to start harvesting. We’ll grieve the leaving, but:

"Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over. In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you'll have life forever, real and eternal" (John 12:24-25 Message translation).

We’d love to be the grain of wheat, hopefully being part of something awesome growing in Zambia.

The last month has been an interesting time. We even had a cool minor miracle, which I’ll tell you about now.

My folks were here for a couple of weeks, and one day we were in the car on our way into Johannesburg. Driving up a hill on the motorway the car lost power and the engine light came on. We pulled over to the side, and saw that the car was blowing copious amounts of steam out of the exhaust. Now anyone who knows anything about cars will be thinking “Uh huh. Head gasket. Definitely head gasket...”

So we called our friend and he towed us back into town, and we left the car at a garage. The mechanic said “Head gasket. Only thing it can be. We’ll test it and give you an estimate for the repair.”

Now the last time anyone I know had a head gasket repair done in the UK it was £1200, so we were pretty concerned. So at staff prayers the next morning we just asked everyone to pray that it would be less than R10,000 (about £700).

As the day ticked by we were getting increasingly worried. And then the next day went by without word from the garage. When it comes to cars, no news is bad news in my considerable experience (I once owned a Morris Minor, so I know whereof I speak when it comes to money-sucking rust-buckets). On day three the garage phoned and asked me if I would go in to have a chat. The zeros were mounting up.

When I got to the garage the mechanic took me aside and asked me to describe what had happened again, which I did. “Well, it just can’t be anything but head gasket...but...we can’t find a single thing wrong with your car. Nothing. We’ve run every test we can think of, we’ve driven the car for two days, we’ve checked everything. There is nothing wrong with this car...sorry to ask you this...but are you sure you saw what you saw?”

So that was that. We paid £130 for the testing and a full service and drove the car away. Since then we’ve done 7000km and it’s not missed a beat. I’m really not the kind of guy to ascribe any and all unusual happenings to God-did-it (or, as Richard Dawkins says, smuggling in magic whenever it suits you), but I’m inclined to let Him have this one.

Staying on the theme of God sorting stuff out, a few weeks ago, after months of trying to arrange houses and the like in Zambia from afar, we decided to take the hit and I flew up to Ndola for a few days. Some friends of ours up there had given us a lead on a house and I wanted to check it out for myself, amongst other things.

My intention was that I would stay with the J-Life Zambia director, but he wasn’t available for me to stay with him for the first two days of the week that worked best for us. I decided to contact the aforementioned friends who, well, they are definitely friends, but I wouldn’t think we’d invested enough in our relationship yet to leave me comfortable rocking up for four days and leaving tide marks in their shower. They live at a bible college and are building a school for orphaned kids, and we know them because her mum goes to our church in the UK. Anyway, of course they said I was welcome to stay with them, because they’re that kind of people.

I went to look at the house, which is a couple of doors down from friends of our friends which is how we came to hear about it. The house is great, or, it will be when the landlord finishes renovating it. Turns out that the landlord is a deacon at the church we had been planning to go to. Anyway, the house might be just right, but won’t be finished until at least mid October which left us with nearly two months with nowhere to live. That night I was talking to our friends about it and they said “oh, there’s a guest house here on our site - why don’t you stay here until your place is ready?”. 

So that was that. I went to look at the guest house and it’s great. It is in the middle of a banana farm, and right next door to a couple with kids the same age as ours. It gives us a fantastic soft-start to life in Zambia while we get to know people, and how things work there. Also, we were keen to build on links with the bible college, and living there for a couple of months is a sure-fire way to kick that off. Also, despite our extreme desire not to, we’ve been told we must have a dog, and the couple next door have a pregnant doberman so we’ve reserved a puppy [ed. ug].

On to the next coincidence - having seen the area where the house is, and the route to Daniel’s school, and the distance to the J-Life training centre, we came to the realisation that we need a second car. We’d really hoped to get away without it and cycle the kids to school, but it’s just not possible - the road is just too dangerous for us to consider it. So, again, I was talking to our friends about this and they said “oh, some missionary friends of ours are going home for a year and want to sell their car. They’re asking half what it’s worth just to get rid of it quickly...”. I went to see the car and it’s perfect, a 7-seater estate in great condition. And they really were asking half the market value for it.

Having agreed on the car, we were talking and I met their 5-year-old daughter, and it turns out she’s going to be in Daniel’s class at school. Now, I didn’t know this because it came out with Claire while I was away, but Daniel has been really anxious about going to a new school. So when I came home and told him that I had met Emma and she was going to look after him in class it was if a weight had lifted from his shoulders. It was only after that that Claire said he’d confided in her about his anxiety.

So we’ve got a set of things that have fallen into place because of those unexpected days staying with our friends at the bible college - somewhere to live while our house is being made ready, an easier start to our life in Zambia through living in an established community, a puppy from a known dog which is good with kids, a half price car, a school mate for Daniel, and the chance to kick-start links with an organisation we were already keen to partner with. Oh, and one more thing, the bible college runs a saw mill which can make bunk beds for the kids at a very good price.

Christians often have this idea the God goes before us. I don’t believe that - I think that God is already there and we go to join him. For me, being Christian isn’t an insurance policy to make life easy, far from it, but looking back over things we often see what looks very much like a plan being followed.

Back to the present: Friday (30th August) was an interesting day. Winter in South Africa is a very dry time, and fires are a problem for farms. Over the last few days the wind has been building up, and yesterday it was blowing at probably 20 miles an hour. A massive fire started a few farms over - in fact one of the guys we know saw it start, from a smoldering log left over from a previous burn. 

As he drove past, the fire raced out in a V-shape, jumped the road in front of his car (a distance of about 8 metres), and raced through the adjacent farm. By the time he’d driven the 10 or so kilometers back to our farm to warn people, the fire was already over the fence line and every man available was rushed out to try and fight it.

Until you’ve seen a burning grass in a 20mph wind, you just can’t grasp how scary and destructive a wild fire can be. I was with 8 farm men fighting one flank of the fire (bearing in mind that it was burning as a continuous line probably 10km long) and we pretty much had our section under control using water spray and beaters, when the wind changed and the fire billowed back towards us. Fire in a strong wind, moves faster than you can run. People have told me that before and I didn’t believe it, but it does. The only advantage you’ve got when it does that is that you’re marginally smarter than the fire. Now I’ve been told that Johnny Wilkinson can run the 100m on a rugby field in 11 seconds. Yesterday I saw a 50-year-old 130kilo black man in wellington boots in a maize field smash that record. Stick that in your Ruck and Try it, Wilko.

The good news is that we got the fire out. Took about ten hours of constant work and we were up and down rocky hills all day chasing the burn line back and forth. As it turned out we were lucky - the neighbouring game farm lost all their land and lots of animals to the fire, and only managed to save their lodges by driving round them with a fire truck spraying the ground with water until the fire past. Their two leopards were rescued with minor burns - their herd of hartebeest wasn’t so lucky.

At one point we completely lost control of the fire after the wind billowed and the flames jumped back behind us to race up the next mountain. With no way we could catch it, the men were all rushed in tractors round the base of the mountain with the intention to deliberately burn the whole of the next valley to give the fire nowhere to run. When we arrived round there (about 10km drive) we found that somehow the “puller” (a petrol fire lance) had been forgotten and we had no way to start a controlled burn. Some of us sat by while one guy went back to fetch the puller.

In our group was an old guy with a crutch, which the others called Mkulu - a term of respect for an older man. Mkulu set off to amble up the mountain from the our side to see for himself how the fire was progressing. About half way up a young guy followed him, and then about twenty minutes later I went to call them back down so we could start our controlled burn. 

When I got to the ridge and looked over, all I could see was fire raging out of control. The line must have been 300 metres long and racing through long grass - I thought that it would be utterly impossible to control it, even if we could have got the fire trucks up there (which we couldn’t). I found the young guy stood up top and asked him where Mkulu was. He just shook his head and pointed down into the smoke and said “Napa” - That side, over there. Now I had focus I could see Mkulu at the edge of the fire line beating at the flames with a branch - just a small old man with a grey beard against a huge wild fire. I still thought it was pointless, but I went down to join him thinking at least I could support him.

When I went down the young guy followed me, and we broke branches off a tree to go and help Mkulu. Between the three of us, and against my pessimistic predictions, we killed about 100m of fire. By that point three other guys came and the six of us killed the whole line before it reached the ridge. I’m not being prosaic here, but I genuinely couldn’t believe it. If it weren’t for this guy who refused to be beaten we would have just given up and burned out the next valley in desperation. But because of his quiet inspiration we just tried anyway and beat a fire I thought couldn’t be beaten. It was a real lesson. And that guy never said anything, just quietly ambled down the mountain through the char to join the men at the bottom who were in the process of killing the opposing flank of the fire. 

For me, he was the hero of the day, if it wasn’t for him we’d still have been burning a fire break at 3am. As it was, we were all safely back in bed by 10. All because one old man didn’t know when to stop.

So we come to our last day in this part of our journey. We just had a staff braii with all our friends. My buddy Matthew and I went and shot a couple of pigeons which we cooked on the fire next to the sausage and steak, and we sat around in groups eating meat and pasta and drinking Stony Ginger Beer: about 30 of us having a good South African time to end this South African leg. People said lovely things about us, which has made it all the harder to leave this amazing community. I’m welling up now just thinking about it. We’re leaving some great, great friends, but, as someone said tonight, it’s not goodbye, it’s just farewell until we meet again, which will hopefully be at the annual summit in February.

Our kids will miss people here a lot. In particular Daniel, who really doesn’t form relationships easily, has developed a real bond with a couple of our friends, so much so that when Claire couldn’t get past yesterday’s fire to pick him up from school, our friend David went over from town to collect him and take him to Wimpy for dinner and Daniel took it all in his stride without freaking out. Anyone who knows Daniel will know that that is very special.

That’s the essence of community - everyone supporting everyone else because you’re all striving for the same goals. You can’t get to pick your kid up from school? No matter, someone else can. You had a bad day and need some company? Knock on any one of five doors and you’ll find it. Your car breaks down and you need a tow? I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Your youngest child gets rushed to hospital and you need an overnight sitter for the other? No problem, bring him round, we’ll do pizza, someone else will take care of your washing, someone else will bring you what you need for hospital and someone else will come and say hi. Community rocks.

So we love it here. Really love it. We wish we weren’t leaving, but we are looking forward to working with the J-Life team in Zambia. 

See you on the other side.