Kapishya Hot Springs, Zambia (completed at Lake Shore Lodge, Kipili, Tanzania)
Terri and I are sitting between a swiming pool and a river here at idyllic Kapishya Hot Springs, one of our favourite spots from our 2016-17 edition of Stanley's Travels. We are planning to spend a couple of days here before starting the drive north to Tanzania, and it seems as good a place as any to take stock of our time in Zambia so far, which has been sharply divided between almost three weeks spent in one spot (Livingstone), followed by a couple of weeks of moving northward and seeing sights along the way.
Our time in Livingstone was not at all focused on travel or seeing the sights. Livingstone is familiar territory to me, and even more so to Terri, who has been coming to Livingstone regularly for the past 15 years. She first came in 2007 to scout out the possibilities of running a service trip for students from Kumon Leysin Academy in Switzerland (KLAS), the school at which she was teaching. She found a worthwhile project, at Olive Tree Learning Centre (OTLC), and brought students from KLAS to OTLC almost every year for a decade. The students would spend much of the academic year fundraising and preparing for the trip, which was a very intense week-long immersion in the reality of building up a school in one of the most impoverished neighbourhoods of Livingstone, the township of Ngwenya. For many of the Japanese students on the KLAS team, it was a life-changing experience, opening their eyes to the hardships and challenges that children in much of the developing world face.
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| One of our young stars |
I was on the final KLAS student trip to OTLC in 2016, and have visited several times since then. When KLAS stopped sending student trips, funding the school became a much bigger challenge which has occupied a great deal of Terri's time and energy and focus over the past six years. Because of the covid pandemic, it had been three and a half years since Terri had last been to Livingstone, so there was a lot of catching up to do. The school has expanded steadily since its inception as a pre-school with 15 pupils, and in 2021 it graduated its first grade 7 class, sending most of them off to high school, an outcome that most parents would not have dreamed of a decade ago. OTLC now has 420 students, and is in constant flux, building new classrooms, hiring new teachers and trying to incorporate technology into the classroom. It's a constant struggle finding funding, although this past year has seen a big uptick in the number of people from around the world willing to sponsor an OTLC student for US$10 a month (click here if you might be interested in joining them).
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| Class performance of poetry |
This time around both Terri and I were struck by the maturity and eloquence of some of our students, especially compared to my first visit six years ago. It's gratifying to see that all this effort and fund-raising is paying off in terms of successful outcomes for our young learners.
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| Wonderful Zambian flag outfit |
We also had a team of visitors from the United States drop into OTLC, bearing some welcome educational supplies. Brian Bohne, the team leader, is a friend of ours who has worked in Leysin at the LAS summer school several times, and who visited us in Georgia back in 2018. He brought three of his high school friends from Minnesota, along with his son Bryce and a Zambian friend, and the OTLC students and staff pulled out all the stops to give performances of song, dance and poetry. It was a high-energy, memorable day, and left our visitors with unforgettable memories.
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| Brian Bohne and his team of volunteers with some OTLC folks |
Our time in Livingstone flew by, and before we knew it almost three weeks had passed. There were a lot of bureaucratic steps to be endured to bring the school's structure up to date with the Zambian authorities, new classrooms to be commissioned, meetings with the school's headmistress and business manager to hash out future plans for the school, and a long-simmering deal to buy another piece of land for the school's future development. When we weren't scrutinizing budgets or making sure that sponsors were receiving reports on how their children. were doing, Terri and I managed to get out to a local gym fairly regularly to do some weightlifting, or visited 10th the Royal Livingstone Hotel to enjoy sunset over Victoria Falls.
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| Gift, one of the sixth graders |
We also nipped over the border to visit the Zimbabwean town of Victoria Falls, which I had never seen before. We stayed with a Zimbabwean friend, Courtney, who showed us the community development project she is running, the Jafuta Trust; Terri and I were envious of the resources available to them to create a state-of-the-art community centre, with adult education, sewing and welding workshops and a well-engineered children's playground constructed largely out of old tires.
We camped in the grounds of the Tabonina Bis guesthouse, a stately spot full of mature trees. Most of the time it was quiet, although it was used as a base for long rafting trips and was a hubbub of activity inbetween for a few days. We got used to our base in the middle of Livingstone, and it was hard to pry ourselves away from it on November 10th.
Back on the Road
We drove out of Livingstone mid-morning on Thursday, November 10th, and in retrospect it would have been a good idea to leave earlier in the day. It was a fairly uneventful trip most of the way, through dry, sparsely-inhabited countryside at first, but eventually passing through greener, more agriculturally productive areas until we joined the main road from Harare, Zimbabwe. At this point traffic got a lot heavier and we crawled into town slowly in a mass of heavy transport trucks. As we got into the city the roads got more and more congested and we were stuck in the worst traffic jams of our trip so far. It took hours to crawl through town and out the other side to our guesthouse, and we arrived in pitch blackness, tired and irritable from dealing with big-city traffic. We ordered a pizza and were in bed very quickly.
We spent all of Friday running errands in Lusaka, and much of Saturday morning as well. We were successful in most of our tasks, with the major achievements being obtaining COMESA car insurance for all the countries north of Zambia, and getting our malfunctioning solar power system diagnosed and repaired. It turned out that there was a short circuit between the solar controller and the battery which had burned out the controller. We had a new controller installed and finally saw our solar panels start to recharge our battery, a relief as we will have mains electricity less and less frequently as we head north, leaving us dependent on our batteries.
We finally tore ourselves away from the prosperous shopping malls of Lusaka by mid-afternoon on Saturday, November 12th and drove north along a horrible highway. It was clogged with endless lines of heavy trucks headed north to the copper mines of the Zambian Copperbelt and of DRC's Katanga Province. The trucks had, over the years, deformed the road with their tires into a series of long ruts separated by high ridges, making for challenging driving. We were headed for Kabwe, but the heavy traffic slowed us down and we arrived in the dark, after a futile search for a camping spot on a local farm that we never found in the dark. The night was full of millions of flying termites who had erupted from the soil with the recent rains, and it made for eerie driving. We finally found a room at a roadside "lodge" (more of a motel) next to a truck parking area, gobbled down some goat stew and were in bed early, glad to be under a solid roof as a titanic downpour raged all night.
We awoke to find Stanley covered with discarded termite wings. We drove off, with less traffic but still the same terrible road surface, stopping from time to time to stock up on vegetables being sold beside the road; I was particularly excited by enormous mushrooms being sold by young children which we ended up grilling that evening. We also picked up 1.5 litres of delicious honey near Kapiri Mposhi; we had bought honey there six years ago and had spent years reminiscing about how good it was. I'm pleased to say that our memories were completely accurate: it's some of the tastiest, most floral honey I've ever had! At Kapiri Mposhi the road split, with truck traffic continuing north while we headed west on a blissfully smooth and open road. Just past Serenje the smooth pavement came to an end in a series of immense potholes, bringing progress back to a crawl. It was a relief to turn off the truck road and north towards Kasanka National Park, where we camped on the park boundary at the Community Education Centre.
Batty About Kasanka
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| I think this is a light-coloured sitatunga doe |
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| The bats seemed to rise from the horizon |
We spent a while at the Wasa Lodge, birdwatching from their back terrace which overlooks Lake Wasa, before proceeding to our campsite at Kabwe. We set up camp, had a big lunch and then set off to see the bats. We had been told that they started to leave their roosts around 4 or 4:30 pm, but this proved to be untrue; the first bats started to fly overhead at around 6:00 pm. The initial individuals and small groups rapidly swelled, and within five minutes the sky, already losing light since the sun had set twenty minutes earlier, was further darkened by millions of bats flying overhead in unimaginable numbers. It seemed unreal, a trick of computer graphics, with bats seeming to rise out of the earth at the horizon in an infinite stream. It was an awe-inspiring spectacle, and we spent a long time just staring up in silence, before remembering to take photos and videos. The bats were mostly silent, but we could hear the wind over their wings, as they weren't that high above us. Just as we were reaching sensory overload, the numbers began to dwindle, and by 6:25 it was all over. A guide told us that GPS sensors attached to some bats have shown that on the average bats fly 50 km from the 1-square-kilometre Fibwe bat forest every night to feed, returning 50 km in the pre-dawn hours; some bats have been recorded as flying twice as far in a night. We drove back to camp in the dark, trying to spot some nocturnal species as we drove; we had to be satisfied with an elephant shrew.
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| Bats filling the sky |
We had a lazy morning in camp the next day. Our campsite had a nice view out towards the Kasanka River and we could see dozens of puku, their reddish-gold coats shining in the sun. An elephant wandered by in the middle distance, but we couldn't see any of the shy and reclusive sitatunga antelope that are a Kasanka specialty. We went for a game drive in the afternoon and didn't see any sable antelope (our target for that day), although we saw lots of puku and an assortment of interesting birdlife, including a lovely African cuckoo, a woodland kingfisher, a racquet-tailed roller, some wooly-necked storks and a few saddle-billed storks. We were back in camp early, in time for sundown and a delicious steak dinner, before hitting the sack early in order to see the morning return flight of the bats.
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| Puku buck in full flight |
Our alarm went off at 4:00 AM and by 4:18 we were driving towards the hide. The first light of dawn was already in the sky (sunrise was at around 5:15) and as we approached the bat forest, we realized we were too late at 4:50; the last bats were flying overhead as we were in the car, and by the time we had parked and walked to the viewing area, it was all over except for a few stragglers. It was disappointing (we should have gotten up at 3 AM, not 4!), but at least it gave us lots of time to look for sitatunga, the shy and hard-to-spot semi-aquatic antelope who are Kasanka's other attraction. We had seen two on our previous visit in 2016, but this time, driving along the Kasanka River, we saw two dozen or so. Most fled once they saw us, bounding into the water and hiding in the dense reeds, but we saw a number out grazing who didn't seem too bothered by us. We were able to see enough individuals that we could appreciate the wide range in coat colour from dark brown (almost black) to Bambi-coloured. The males are impressive with their twisted horns, while the babies we watched were amazingly agile, leaping through the water to keep up with their parents. We returned to camp satisfied with our sitatunga, if not our morning bat-watching.
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| Dark-haired sitatunga parents and their light-coloured offspring |
Marvellous Mutinondo
From Kasanka we drove back south to the main truck route and its vehicle-swallowing potholes and incessant heavy-goods traffic. The road led through small roadside clusters of truck stops and bars, some of the poorest and most unappealing places we had yet seen in Zambia. Thankfully it was only 125 km or so before we turned off and found ourselves on a well-maintained dirt track leading to our next destination, Mutinondo Wilderness; it was so smooth that we didn't even bother to lower our tire pressures, which we do on almost all dirt roads for a smoother ride. Much sooner than expected we pulled into a lovely campground, popped up the roof and started exploring.
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| Sweeping views out over the plains from the top |
Mutinondo was a place which I had heard a lot of good things about back in 2016, but we had been in a bit of hurry and hadn't visited then. It turned out to be a case of good things coming to those who wait. Mutinondo is a fabulous place to stay for anyone who likes the outdoors and either hiking or mountain biking. Started in 1995 by Lari and Mike, a Zambian couple who fell in love with this area and secured a lease on a huge block of wilderness. The area is covered with pristine miombo woodland, dotted with dambos (marshy open spaces) and granite monoliths that rise steeply above the forests, and dissected by pristine streams that carve through the landscape in a series of pools and small waterfalls. Lari and Mike have established some 60 km of signed walking trails that allow travellers to explore the area on foot completely independently. The forest is full of plants and birds; Lari has co-authored a two-volume book on the plant life of Mutinondo (a highly impressive labour of love), while it is also a bird- and butterfly-watching hotspot. There are no lions or leopards in residence, but there are lots of antelope, including roan and sable, as well as klipspringers who bound up the steep granite walls at the first sign of humans.
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| Atop a Mutinondo monolith |
We ended up spending four full days at Mutinondo. It was a perfect spot for us to get some exercise after a week spent doing a lot of driving. We ended up climbing eight of the ten monoliths nearest the main lodge; they were steep and hard work in the humidity, but gave sweeping views across the landscape, which seemed to be an unbroken carpet of virgin forest, with almost no signs of human settlement. Mutinondo is part of a long wildlife corridor stretching from the Bangweulu Wetlands south through Kasanka towards Mutinondo and beyond to the wildlife meccas of North and South Luangwa National Parks. We felt privileged to have the chance to spend time in such a beautiful landscape, so little touched by human activity.
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| Mayense, the highest of the Mutinondo peaks |
In addition to hiking 15 km a day, we also spent some time paddling an old canoe along a long level stretch of river, through reedbeds and under overhanging trees, looking for kingfishers and other birds. When the light was right, it was almost painfully lovely, and we floated along in a haze of sensory overstimulation. We also ended every hike with a dip in one of the many swimming holes, adding to the sense of perfection.
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| Cooking in our potjie over the fire in Mutinondo |
One our last full day in Mutinondo, we didn't try to hike too far or up too many peaks. Instead we broke out Terri's new guidebook to reading the signs and tracks of African animals. Using it we were able to identify tracks of sable antelope, the droppings of sable, roan, baboon, civet, white-tailed and yellow mongoose and klipspringer, as well as the diggings of mongoose and aardvarks. The forest floor was scarred by enormous numbers of aardvark dens and feeding sites where these nocturnal excavating machines had demolished termite mounds in search of food. It was an eye-opening experience and made us feel (for a few minutes) like experienced game trackers!
The campsite was well-designed as well; although there were a few other campers in residence, we were barely aware of their existence, sheltered as we were by trees. We watched the sunset almost every afternoon from the deserted bar perched atop a west-facing rock outcrop, and cooked on wood fires in our campsite, sitting out afterwards to sip wine and try to spot nocturnal birds and creatures (we managed to spot no fewer than four bushbabies (lesser galagos) on one memorable night walk). It was hard to pull ourselves away in order to continue our onward journey; Mutinondo will live on in our memories as one of our favourite spots in all of southern Africa.
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| A perfect swimming hole for the end of a hike |
Hot Spring Haven at Kapishya
Our last major destination in northern Zambia was another old favourite from 2016, Kapishya Hot Springs. We drove our final stretch of the infernal truck route, dodging Tanzanian fuel tankers driven by homicidal maniacs, stopping for fuel and supplies in the small city of Mpika. We hadn't tanked up in Serenje when we had the chance, and had watched our needle steadily heading towards empty as we drove on through a long stretch of road devoid of gas stations; good thing that Stanley's fuel tank holds 150 litres of diesel! From Mpika we turned off onto the Old Great North Road, with fewer potholes and almost no traffic, before turning onto a rough track that leads 45 km to Kapishya.
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| Kapishya |
Kapishya is a great place to camp, with good facilities (like electrical power, lacking at Mutinondo) and the bliss of hot springs in which we immersed ourselves several times a day. It's also a wonderful place to birdwatch, with Ross' Turaco the most spectacular species. Mostly, though, we took a few days to edit videos for our YouTube channel, trying to get several weeks ahead of the game and use the decent wifi to upload our finished products. It worked well, as we are now a month ahead and are getting into the groove of editing.
Running For The Border
From Kapishya, from which we pried ourselves after four nights, it was time to get serious about reaching the Tanzanian border before Terri's visa ran out (I had extra days from going to Zimbabwe one day for some money-changing, and having my visa reset for another thirty days). It was a long slog back to the Old Great North Road and then north to the major city of Kasama for some resupplying (it even had a Shoprite supermarket, something we hadn't seen since Kapiri Mposhi) before carrying on to the final town in Zambia, Mbala. We stayed indoors at a small lakeside lodge (Lake Chila Lodge), then set off the next morning for a 20-kilometre rumble along a gravel road to a tiny border crossing at Kasese. We were nervous at the crossing since we had recently discovered that both of us had had our most recent yellow-fever vaccination more than ten years ago. In theory this meant that we could get rejected from entering Tanzania, but we were in luck: the immigration guy checking health records only looked at the outside of our little yellow booklets and of our covid vaccination records, checked our temperatures, and then let us go. Phew! We now need to find someplace to get another yellow fever jab since we probably won't get so lucky at future border crossings!
Final Thoughts on Zambia
So much of what we did during our five weeks in Zambia was revisiting familiar haunts, although Mutinondo was a wonderful new revelation. Zambia is always fun to visit, although it's definitely more expensive than the countries further south like Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. Parts of the country are quite prosperous, especially along the central transport corridor running from the Zimbabwe border north to Lusaka and continuing towards the Copperbelt; big commercial farms are interspersed with smallholder plots who all seem to be prospering growing for the market. Lusaka is a thriving city (with terrible traffic jams!) that has so much more prosperity than anywhere else in the country. Livingstone seems much less thriving in comparison, although Ngwenya township is definitely less desperately impoverished than it was when Terri started working with OTLC fourteen years ago. Northern Zambia is still noticeable less developed than the rest of the country, but it also hosts jewels like Kasanka and Mutinondo.
The new government of Hikainde Hichilema (HH) seems to have turned the mood of Zambia in a more positive direction than the tired old corrupt regime of Edgar Lungu, but life is still a struggle for many poorer Zambians like the parents of OTLC students.
One thing that we would love to see would be a concerted effort to repair the asphalt highways which have been systematically destroyed by the pounding of truck tires since our last visit in 2017. Driving the main highway from Lusaka to Tanzania is a miserable and dangerous experience, and we were overjoyed to escape from it to cross the border at Kasese rather than the main border post at Nakonde.
We might well be back in Zambia in a few months unless Ethiopia changes its crazy rules about driving one's own vehicle into the country. If so, we will visit the one great attraction that remains on our Zambia to-see list: South Luangwa National Park. We shall see; much can change in a few months.
