The benefit of staying in a house is that you can leave early in the morning so we were able to be on the road at 7 am comfortably for what we expected would be a long drive to Chipatta, Zambia's gateway town to Malawi. It was also a blessing to be on the Great East Road side of town that we missed the traffic and were easily out into the bush. The trip is almost divided into two sections, roughly split at the Luangwa River. The first runs from Lusaka past the L...

Our Saturday in Ndola was dominated by a visit to Kitwe where Benni Banda had organised a meeting for his leaders and worship teamchoir. We found out from Benni the previous day we were meant to speak at least twice at this meeting. We had already got out of a pastor's fraternal that had been organised with 20-30 pastors from the area. We were supposed to speak on the role of the pastor and the pastor's wife in ministry so we were lucky the dates and times were ...

There is an air of excitement in Lusaka, of a city that is developing and showing obvious signs of economic growth. For some reason Lonely Planet states that Zambia is a real African experience after SA, and Botswana (Africa for beginners - in terms of infrastructure and availability of South African luxuries, and probably right). This was difficult to understand as we sat in Mugg and Bean in a new upmarket mall in the city centre. Livingstone, Ndola and Chipatt...

We are slow learners. We are also slow drivers and very optimistic about the road conditions and budgeting time for travel in Africa. Hence we were driving into Lusaka in the dark again on a very aggressive section of road. The trouble is that your destination will often be the most busy section of road and therefore the section you will most likely drive after dark. We packed up camp and then enjoyed the views of the Gorge around Taita Falcon Lodge, which are b...

Some of the things you forget are easy to replace, some are expensive like a computer cables and some can be just painful like your yellow fever cards left in the car in Durban. We spent the morning trying to print out copies so we could get into Zambia, having got Elsje to send them on to Lusaka, only to find after a morning of internet cafes and hotel receptions that we didn't need them until we entered Tanzania. We decided to take the Kazangula ferry (R220...