I know I've been absolutely terrible at keeping this blog even remotely close to up-to-date over the past few years, but I've decided that I am turning a new page, and will be back at work over the next few months trying to keep Graydon's Travels current while working through the backlog of documenting my travels over the past few years.
I have just started work at a new school, the American International School of Zambia in Lusaka. We arrived a week ago and it's been a whirlwind, not just the past week of orientation, but also the previous month of outfitting Stanley II and driving him north from Cape Town to Lusaka. Let me bring you up to speed.
I was offered this job in late November, 2024 over a dodgy internet connection at Two Fish Divers in Lembeh Strait, one of the great muck diving locations on the planet. I had been actively looking for my next teaching gig since September on the Search Associates website, and had applied to dozens of schools. I was angling for a job in Colombia, Ecuador, Oman or Japan, but international teaching job searching is an unpredictable game, and I ended up having to choose between schools in Sapporo (Japan), Almaty (Kazakhstan) and here. Japan's salary (after taxes and deductions, and taking into account the weakness of the Japanese yen), was almost laughably low; what a contrast to when I worked there as a lowly English teacher in the 1990s and early 2000s! Kazakhstan had a much more competitive offer, but it is a slightly experimental problem-based learning school and I wasn't sure whether that would be my thing. Lusaka (a school that I almost didn't apply to) had the most lucrative offer as well as a position teaching IB Higher Level mathematics and physics, my favourite courses, so it was a pretty easy decision.
After seven months of subsequent travel (Philippines, France, Switzerland, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Rote Island, Lombok) interspersed with loafing and diving at our home base in Lipah, Bali, Terri and I were ready for the big move. We had discovered that vehicles are quite expensive in Zambia for what you get, so we decided to buy a pickup truck in South Africa and drive it north. Our trusty old camper insert was still sitting, unsold and unloved, in storage at African Overlanders outside Cape Town, so we resolved to put it into our new truck's loadbed and use it for weekend trips into the Zambian bush. After a frantic last week of packing, we boarded a flight to Lusaka on June 30th.
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Cape of Good Hope (at last!)
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| Some assembly required; putting Stanley II together |
The plan was to hit a few of our favourite places in Botswana en route. We put in a long day driving to Brandvlei, a dusty little town in the Northern Cape. Our second day of driving was supposed to see us arrive at lovely Kalahari Trails, a campground we had visited in 2022 where we had been captivated by the meerkats who inhabit the area.
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The wheel that came off, with the damaged rim
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Sadly, this was not to be. Just 20 km north of Brandvlei, I heard a strange noise from the vehicle, followed by an uncontrollable wobble in the steering as we raced north at 95 km/h. I slammed on the brakes and the truck slowly tilted to the side with a sickening scraping noise as our left rear wheel went flying past us. We ground rapidly to a halt while the wheel continued careening along the shoulder of the road for several hundred metres before finally coming to rest in the ditch. We were extremely lucky; the road was flat, straight and deserted, so we stayed on the road and the wheel didn't hit any other vehicles, and we didn't lose control and flip the truck over. We sat stunned in the truck for a few seconds, unable to process what had just happened, and then I was out of the cab running after the bouncing wheel.
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Aschra and his wife, our Good Samaritans
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Taking advantage of our inability to drive...
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The rest of the day was a long, frustrating experience. A car stopped fairly soon afterwards and offered assistance. Aschra, a veteran sergeant-major in the South African armed forces, and his family were incredibly helpful. They drove me back into Brandvlei and found a mechanic who thought he could help. We drove back out to where Terri was sitting with the truck, and Aschra and his family went on their way. The six wheel studs that hold the wheel onto the axle of the truck had all sheared off, and so we needed replacements. It was a Sunday morning in a tiny village, and after driving in the mechanic's car back to town and hunting around, we only managed to scrounge up three studs from a local mechanic. We drove back out to Terri and Stanley and the mechanic and his assistant tried to reattach the wheel. No luck; the studs were just slightly the wrong shape. They then tried to take off other wheels to steal studs from them, with the idea that we could then drive slowly and carefully to Upington, where proper repairs could be made. This proved well-nigh impossible, as this entailed disconnecting the front disk brakes, something that they didn't have the tools for. Eventually they admitted defeat and attached the wheel precariously and loosely with the three bad studs so that we could roll it off the road onto the shoulder, and I then caught yet another lift into Brandvlei to call for an emergency tow truck (there was no cell phone signal at the accident site). We waited for a few hours, and then rode into Upington in the dark in the cab of the tow truck, with Stanley winched into place on the flatbed of the truck. We slept in a little bed and breakfast while Stanley spent the night on the truck. Our best guess is that the 4x4 fitment centre (R&D in Brackenfell, Cape Town) didn't tighten all of the wheel lug nuts sufficiently when they put the wheels back on, and they worked their way loose on the road north.
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Crossing a dubious bridge into Khwai
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The next day it was a surprisingly efficient matter to get repaired. The hardest thing was taking the damaged and loosely attached wheel off, as it was about to break the studs. Once that was done it was a matter of a couple of hours to hoist the truck aloft, repair the damaged rear brake (which we had landed on when the wheel came off), replace the rim (badly damaged where the studs had worked loose) and check for any further damage. By 11:00 we had a functioning truck, but we had also realized that our camper's electrical system wasn't working, so I took Stanley to an auto electrician while Terri went shopping at a local supermarket. It turned out that we had had a big and rather alarming short circuit in the electrics, and so a lot of wiring had to be replaced; we took advantage of this to also have a charging circuit installed to recharge the two storage batteries in the camper from the car's alternator, something that we hadn't had time to do in Cape Town. By 4:30 pm we had the vehicle back, and we sadly gave up on the idea of sleeping at Kalahari Trails and returned to our Upington guesthouse.
The next couple of days saw us lay down some long days of driving along Botswana's flat, modern and untrafficked highways. We drove 800 km to Kang on the first day, crossing into Botswana at the tiny Gemsbok/Bokspits border crossing which sees fewer than 10 vehicles a day. After a night in the trusty Kang Ultra Stop guesthouse, we hammered out another 550 km to Maun, arriving in time to pay for a few campsites that we had reserved but had been unable to pay for online. We spent the night at Audi Campsite, another spot from our past, ready finally to start enjoying our trip.
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Magotho Campsite, Khwai
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July 17 saw us drive north out of Maun towards the Khwai Conservancy, a jewel of a wildlife park that we had last visited in 2016. The road there was much, much worse than it had been nine years previously, and it took much longer than it should have. We took the road through Moremi National Park, but didn't have time to stop and look around much. The track was slow and sandy and washboarded, and we were relieved when we crossed a rickety-looking bridge and entered Khwai. We spent the night at beautiful Magotho Campsite, where we had the first campfire of the trip, grilled some amazing steaks, enjoyed a bottle of South African red wine and listened to the sounds of the African bush. We deployed our wildlife trail camera that night and it showed hyenas coming to sniff around the embers of our campfire.
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Terri in her happy place, Khwai
 | Black-backed jackal
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Elephants in the Khwai River
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The next morning we set off early for Savuti, a legendary spot among overlanders that we had never visited previously as reservations are hard to come by. Somehow we had lucked out and gotten two nights there, so we were excited as we set off. We spent a few hours that morning looking for game in Khwai and in the adjacent southern bit of Chobe National Park, and were rewarded with lots of antelope, plenty of elephants along the Khwai River, six confident ground-hornbills who took over the track and wouldn't let us past, and plenty of birdlife on the riverbanks. Eventually we tore ourselves away from the green loveliness of Khwai and started the 90-kilometre drive to Savuti. It was the first real test for the Ranger and it performed very well.  |
Ground-hornbill, Khwai Conservancy
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It has a 6-speed manual transmission rather than the 5-speed in our old Mitsubishi Colt, and the extra gear allowed for selecting a better gear, especially in low-range 4x4 which we used to slog through the deep sand that plagues sections of the track. It was slow going, but parts of the drive were beautiful as we skirted the Savuti Marsh (dry in this season), full of zebras, giraffes, wildebeest and impalas. We got to Savuti Camp, set up, relaxed for a while and then drove out for an evening game drive. We checked out the man-made waterholes just north of the campsite and were rewarded with a big herd of elephants at one and a magnificent male lion, awake and sitting up in a picture-perfect pose, at another. We could see that other tourists were looking intently into the vegetation, and realized that there were other lions in there. Eventually they emerged and it proved to be an adult female and no fewer than three youngsters. We returned to camp in an exultant mood, cooked up some delicious sosaties, and settled down for a night in the middle of lots of wildlife. The trail cam revealed more hyenas and a couple of jackals who visited in the middle of the night.
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Stanley II in action, Khwai
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Giraffes on the Savuti Marsh plain
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July 19 was spent exploring the wildlife trails around Savuti. We visited the nearby waterholes first and were rewarded with more lion youngster sightings. The rest of the drive we slogged through sand in an unrewarding exploration of some of the higher-lying ground, before making our way down to the flat plain of the "marsh". Once again there were plenty of giraffe, wildebeest and zebra, along with abundant spurfowl running around on the ground. We somehow completely managed not to find the San rock paintings shown on the map, but the scenery around there provided some compensation. Unfortunately, though, our bad luck with the rear left wheel continued when Terri, as always at the wheel in 4x4 situations, didn't see an evil, jagged rock that protruded out into the sandy track. The rock peeled back our rim and punctured the tire with a loud bang. Luckily we had bought the sockets that we needed (in addition to the tire iron that came with the truck) in Upington to take off the mangled wheel, with the help of a passing safari driver. It was also fortunate that we had practiced how to let the spare wheel down from its hiding place underneath the truck, as we had signally failed to manage to do that beside the road outside Brandvlei. We now had no spare tire, so we needed to be particularly careful around rocks until we got to Kasane.
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Driving along the Savuti Marsh track
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Male lion, Savuti
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Savuti wildebeest
 | Savuti lion cubs
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Savuti lion cubs at play
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Savuti lioness
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Our destroyed rim, Savuti
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We relaxed in camp for a while in the heat of the day, and then nipped out for a late-afternoon game drive. For once the lions weren't around the waterhole, but we spotted lots of wildebeest and zebras. Another memorable campfire (with more nocturnal hyena visits) marked the end of our Savuti idyll. It was a beautiful place to sleep (as it should be at US$50 per person per night!) and we were glad that we had lucked into getting reservations.July 20 saw us driving north towards Muchenje, but before we left we stopped off to look for the lions again. We were rewarded with our best sightings yet, as a lioness escorted three energetic, playful young cubs on a morning stroll. The cubs took turns pouncing on each other, play-fighting and running around after each other. Since so many lion encounters in Africa involve comatose lions passed out immobile under a tree, seeing so much movement and energy was a great treat. We drove north through more deep sand, but by now Terri was much more confident in the Ranger's capabilities to handle sand, so we ground along steadily without incident to the park gate at Ghoha. We didn't see much wildlife along the way, but the bush scenery was pleasant enough. At Ghoha we learned that we had another 50 km of sandy track before we reached pavement (we had thought that we had only 8 more kilometres). The track was a bit worse than in the park, but still the Ranger handled it with consummate ease. We reached pavement, reinflated our tires to asphalt pressure (ten minutes of work with our compressor) and then drove up to our next campsite, located outside Chobe in a short strip of riverside communities along the Linyanti River.
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Lovely baobab tree, Savuti
 | Savuti lioness on the prowl
 | On the track north from Savuti
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| Reflating the tires |
After a few hours off in the campsite (in the course of which Terri baked a loaf of bread and made pancakes for lunch) we set off for another game drive, this time in the amazingly rich Chobe Riverfront sector of the park. We were rewarded with a plethora of animals, although no leopards or wild dogs. We loved the huge herds of elephants, impala and zebra along the river, along with no shortage of giraffes. We got back to our campsite just in time for a perfect sunset over the Linyanti River, looking out at flocks of birds.
July 21 was supposed to be our last day in Chobe, but we got lucky once again. We were up earlyish to drive the length of Chobe Riverfront, but when we arrived at Ihaha Camp, the only public campsite in the park, Terri insisted that we stop and ask about staying there. We had checked on availability a couple of times, including once in Maun a few days previously, and been told that it was full. However when we talked to the camp staff, they told us that two of the ten campsites were available, and we chose campsite 3, in a spectacular location right on the bank of the river. We lounged around during the heat of the day, and then headed out at 3:20 for a quick jaunt along the river. Chobe Riverfront is so full of animals that it's easy to become jaded, but seeing these vast herds contentedly grazing on the green growth beside the river, watched by hippos and crocodiles in the water, with storks and herons and cormorants and Egyptian geese looking on, we were both reminded of what an overwhelming wildlife experience Chobe is.
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First view of the Chobe River
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| Giraffe abstract art |
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Yellow-billed stork, Chobe Riverfront
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Young zebras, Chobe Riverfront
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Muchenje sunset
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Ihaha campsite
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Female kudu, Chobe Waterfront
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We returned to Ihaha in plenty of time for sunset. Terri kindled a perfect campfire and we braaied steaks. We ate watching the sunset light the horizon aflame, then sat late into the evening around the fire telling stories and staring up at the stars. In the distance we could hear the distinctive whooping yelps of hyenas and the roar of lions, but nothing came to bother us. When we retired to sleep in Stanley, we set up the trail cam and also raked smooth a stretch of the vehicle track to help capture footprints in the night.In the morning, looking at trail cam footage, it wasn't clear what we had seen, as the camera screen is tiny and the images were even tinier. It wasn't until reaching Lusaka and downloading the images onto my computer that we realized that we had spotted an African civet (not, as we had guessed and hoped an aardvark), lots of hyenas and (a surprise to us) a leopard who had come to investigate the camp. It was our first nocturnal image of a leopard, which was very exciting. We spent a few hours driving along the Chobe Riverfront in search of leopards (ironic, as we didn't know that a leopard was right in the camp!). No leopards were seen, but there were hundreds of elephants, some lechwe (a stocky, semi-aquatic antelope), plenty of buffalo and impala, a multitude of zebra and, in the last few kilometres before exiting the park, a magnificent lone sable antelope, his ribbed horns curving majestically skyward. We drove out of the park, reinflated our tires again and headed into the bustle of Kasane
town.
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| Ihaha noctunal hyena |
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| Pachyderm pelt |
We set up camp at the ludicrously overpriced Chobe Safari Lodge, ran a few errands, and then set off for a 3:00 river cruise run by Kalahari Tours, an outfit with whom Terri has been running trips for 18 years. As always, the cruise was fabulous, with dozens of species of birds, hundreds of elephants, lots of crocodiles and hippos and incredible views over the river, capped off by a spectacular view of the sun setting behind herds of elephants on the river's edge.
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Pied kingfisher
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Hippos in the Chobe River
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Monster crocodile
 | Chobe Riverfront
 | Pied kingfisher
 | Red lechwe, Chobe Riverfront
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After all this hectic travel, it felt good the next night not to go anywhere, except for a brief walk in fruitless search of a new rim. We had been going hard for three weeks, and some down time was just what the doctor ordered.
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Elephant sunset
 | Chobe sunset
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Terri, Stanley and OTLC students
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Young white Rhino, Mosi-Oa-Tunya National Park
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We crossed the next day into Zambia. It should have been a simple process, but the fact that I had a South African-registered car and was entering the country to work threw a spanner in the works. It took five hours of arguing, begging, cajoling and pleading to be allowed into the country, but only after we had provisionally paid the import tax due on the car, some US$2000 which we had to withdraw in cash from the one ATM at the border; luckily it didn't run out of bills to dispense! Finally, exhausted but slightly triumphant, we drove the 60 km to Livingstone, checked into our hotel and went to bed early after a meal of takeout Hungry Lion fried chicken.
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Terri dancing with a cultural troop, Royal Livingstone
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And then it was time for the long drive north to Lusaka, where we moved into a beautiful house on the outskirts of town and prepared for the next two years of teaching here in Zambia. We will keep you posted, and also try to catch up on our 2022-2023 African journey, which I left hanging somewhere in Uganda, along with our 2023 sprint up the west coast of Africa. Stay tuned!!
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Sundowner beer, Royal Livingstone Hotel
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Ihaha sunset
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