Raining cats and dogs in Lusaka

January 22, 2010
Lusaka, Zambia

I flew from Dar es Salaam to Lusaka on Friday via Zambezi Air. Who's ever heard of Zambezi Air? I haven't and I deliberately did not check the statistics, because sometimes you just don't want to know. As it turned out, it was totally fine, and even though the flight was only two hours long in the midafternoon, we were served a "real" hot meal. Africans love their hot, hearty meals!

Zambia seems more spacious and more laid back than Kenya or Tanzania. Lusaka is a little sleepy, with good roads, orderly traffic and, best of all, American style shopping centers with MOVIE THEATERS! Wonderful! I went to see Invictus, the movie with Morgan Freeman and Matt Damon about how the South African rugby team the Springboks, once reviled, became a symbol of the new, reunified South Africa and won the World Cup. It was so great to see a movie, and the Zambians in the theater were really into it! They were cheering for the team and singing along with the soundtrack!

On Saturday, I lounged around the backpackers. It was raining really hard, and I wasn't in a hurry to go anywhere. I knew I had to make my way to a campsite outside of town later that day to meet up with the group, and I was dreading the reunification. In the afternoon, I moseyed around the shopping center again, and, suddenly I saw a dude who looked kind of familiar. Wait, he was a dude from the overland tour! They're here! I thought, with real dread. And soon I saw more of them. They looked scruffier and more disheveled than they were when I said goodbye to them in Zanzibar a week ago and a little chubbier (due to all the bread / pasta they've been eating and the long days of sitting on the truck, doing nothing).

I've been trying to pinpoint why exactly I'm so filled with trepidation at the prospect of rejoining the group and I've decided that it has more to do with group dynamics than with individuals. As individuals, they are probably fine (with the exception of a few intrinsically annoying people) but as a group they are intolerant of difference, homogeneous, vulgar and obsesses with scatology. I was curious, when I saw them at the shopping center, how they would be a week later, after many, many long, uncomfortable days traveling through Tanzania, Malawi and Zambia (a distance that I flew in 2 hours).

Later that evening, I met them at the campsite. Apart from being scruffier and fatter and altogether more unhealthy seeming (with, perhaps, jaundiced livers from all of the drinking they have enjoyed at Lake Malawi), they also seemed weirder in the way of a group of people who have been together for too long. I remember my Peace Corps group become like that during the course of pre-service training; we had lots of silly inside jokes and a strange sort of groupthink. The humour of the overland group also seems a little meaner and more personal. I heard people disparage other people's ethnicity and nationality, and it was clear that some people's feelings had gotten hurt.

I'm happy that I'm only along for the ride from Lusaka to Livingstone on Sunday; I'm booked at a backpackers in Livingstone and I'm, again, breaking from the group for 5 days. I rejoin them to continue to Botswana, Namibia and Cape Town.

In other news: I started a minor taxi war when I got one driver to take me to the campsite, 10km outside of Lusaka, for 60,000 Kwatcha rather than 100,000 (16 USD vs 20 USD). The other taxi drivers found out and berated him loudly for undercutting their rates. Hey, it's a free market, baby.