Although none of us had a booking we all managed to find a room for the evening, and after a couple of beers at the bar went for tea at an Indian restaurant. It was immediately obvious to us that Zambia was considerably more expensive than its neighbours, and after arriving at the restaurant the rest of the group, except another couple we had picked up atthe hostel, decided that a fast food snack was perhaps a more reasonably priced option. We returned to the overpriced hostel after tea, to fall asleep by the noise of drunken groups partying outside our bedroom door.We were up early to explore the streets of Lusaka and were thoroughly underwhelmed. The main street of Cairo Rd was a nice enough place, wide with a strip of trees running down the centre, but it had a soulless sort of feel about it that reminded me of downtown Canberra. We wandered the street, but found little of interest, just an irregular number of photo shops, and few banks and commercial buildings. It was fairly clean and tidy but fairly uninteresting and when I posed the question to Kaz on how to describe it in one word, the answer was "ok".By lunchtime we figured we'd seen enough of Lusaka, and made our way to the bus station to book a ride out the following morning. The bus station like the city was clean and well organised, still African but without that seedy or chaotic edge that gave it character.We hit the net that afternoon to sort a few things and not long after Kaz had had enough and made her way home. I stayed on, doing a few things that needed to be done but before I knew it time had gotten away from me and I wandered out on the main street to be confronted by darkness. Unlike the typical twighlight buzz that consumed most African cities, this place was weird, fairly quiet and mostly deserted but for the cars. It had been suggested that I not walk home and it was the sort of place where snotty nosed street kids would roam in packs looking for someone to mug. The shops were all closed, barely a door open to run into if there was trouble I thought, so I kept my eyes open for a taxi and began walking. It was the first time in Africa I had felt seriously uncomfortable about my surrounds, I was not in any direct danger but I felt nervous, and when a bum jumped out of the shadows and started yelling at me, I shat myself and then figured it was time to find a cab. There were no relieving yellow glows of roof mounted taxi lights amongst the stream of headlights coming towards me, but by now I had moved onto the road to clearly show I was looking for a lift. It was one of those times when had it been sunny, everyone wouldve been selling umbrellas only for them to all disappear with the first drop of rain - it was never hard to find taxis in Africa. I wandered along the edge of the road nervously, and soon enough a car pulled over claiming to be a taxi. I was unsure of his credentials as a cabbie, I was almost certain he was a local with an eye for an opportunity and a few bucks from a hopeless Mzungu, but I sized him up and he was smaller than me and seemed friendly enough, so I figured my chances were better than on the street. We agreed a price and I was on my way home, of course passing a gathering of cabbies only a couple of hundred metres up the road. Turned out my "cabbie" was on the way to the supermarket down the road from our place, so after picking up Kaz at the hostel we continued on at a discount rate. He offered us a lift home aswell, after he'd done his groceries but we figured wed find our own way.We returned to the hostel for another night much like the one previously, but were far less impressed with the prospect of a 5am start ahead. We were glad to be moving on from Lusaka, it was nothingy and as far as African cities go, extremely overpriced. The hostel was as equally unmemorable as the city and as we rolled out of Lusaka, surprisingly on time our lasting impressions were of somewhere there should be no need to return to - the highlight almost certainly the being getting our clothes washed in a washing machine for the first time in 4 months.