Victoria Falls: Part One - The Journey to Zambia

A man in a crocheted red and green hat taps on the window and holds up a handful of spoons. “I give you good price,” he says in an encouraging tone. “I’m sorry,” I reply, “I don’t need any spoons.”

I am sitting on a minibus in what is commonly referred to as the ‘bus station’ here in Lilongwe. In truth, it is just a desolate area of land behind the main mosque where rows upon rows of tatty white minibuses, all destined for different parts of the country, sit waiting for passengers. There are no timetables here—when a minibus is full, it departs. You might have to wait two minutes or you might have to wait two days for no bus ever leaves with an empty seat.

In the meantime, local entrepreneurs hustle from bus to bus trying to sell to the patient passengers sitting therein, anything and everything they could possibly need for their journeys. There are newspapers for those who like to read, phone cards for those who love to talk, bottles of soda for the thirsty, samosas for the hungry, spoons for the… spoonless? Fortunately, I am heading to a popular destination—the Zambian border—and only two seats remain vacant. Before long, these are taken by a gentleman carrying a rather smart, black leather briefcase, and a lady with a chicken.

The road into the West is straight and flat, bordered on both sides by barren, desolate savannah. The monotony of the view is saved only occasionally by a seemingly out of place copse of banana palms or a lonely mango tree. Every now and then we pass a small collection of huts, made from mud and thatched with grass they seem a world away from the rapidly developing city we have not long left behind. When the rains arrive, this landscape will be totally transformed, awash with lush, green maize; but for now the land lies dormant and the villages seem bleak and deserted.

An hour-and-a-half after leaving Lilongwe, the Zambian hills appear on the horizon. As the hills begin to loom large, the minibus pulls into the border town of Mchinji that nestles quietly in their shadows. It is a sleepy market town with little to recommend it—the only town in Malawi, as far as I know, not to be mentioned in the Bradt travel guide. The centre of Mchinji is a wide open T-junction where locals sit listening to gospel music and drinking beer in front of small concrete shops with gaudy signs. Most of my fellow passengers will go no further than here, but I press on up the road, past the BP filling station, past the soccer field, to the border itself.

Nobody is manning the Malawian side so I pass through the gate and walk on into Zambia as if I were no more than crossing a street. I enter the small customs and immigration office and am greeted by a rather jolly woman in a dark blue uniform who beckons me to her counter. There is nobody else around. She removes a large tube of paper from beneath her desk and surreptitiously unrolls it for me to see. It is a poster of a lion. “He is waiting for you in Zambia!” she whispers. And then she looks at me blankly, and I can’t quite discern her intention. Rupiah Banda, the President of Zambia, stares menacingly from his portrait hanging high on the wall behind. ‘Is she threatening me?’ I think to myself. Maybe the immigration official is simply boasting about her country’s prolific and renowned wildlife, but I don’t trust her smile, so I thank her politely and move on with caution to take my chances at the next window.

Somebody is sitting at the desk there, hiding behind a newspaper. I clear my throat and the paper falls in slow motion to reveal a more sullen gentleman with a large, bulbous nose, staring at me like a wild beast woken from slumber. “Passport!” he growls. Now this is the type of service to which I am infinitely more accustomed. Within a minute my wallet is fifty dollars lighter, and in exchange I have received the smudged stamp in my passport that allows me to enter. I am on my way out of the door, onwards towards the great city of Lusaka, onwards towards the historic town of Livingstone, onwards towards one of the seven wonders— “Hey! Excuse me!” barks the man, pointing to a large mass of paper on a shelf along the back wall. “You have to sign the visitors’ book!” Now I’ve travelled to my fair share of different countries and I can honestly say this is a first. The man holds me with a mean stare, gesturing towards the huge volume. “Can I borrow a pen?” I ask, my voice trembling with trepidation. The man behind the counter thrusts his pen across the desk and lets out a brief sigh of frustration as if to say, “Why would anyone come to Zambia without a pen?”

‘Stationary,’ I think to myself, ‘not cutlery’ is what the man in the red and green crocheted hat should have been selling. I am now standing in a parking lot in the blazing midday sun, surrounded by trucks, ready to continue on my journey to the mighty Victoria Falls that are now only some 1100km away.