Bwana Kileo

Most of the tales from my African trip last month are stories of everything working out perfectly. Most of them. The one exception to this rule is the story of my side trip to Zambia on day two of my holiday. It was for sure an experience, albeit unexpectedly brief, and it taught me a lesson about what I already knew and failed to do. Here it is for your amusement and enrichment.

Generally speaking, I think of myself as a fairly prepared person. Whether I'm at work or just living life, when I go somewhere I know how to get from point A to point B, have contingency plans if things go wrong and I know what to do when I get wherever it is I am going. I like to have a schedule and stick to it but understand how to improvise if something goes wrong.

I travel in much the same way I live my life. I know this drives some of the people I travel with a little nuts, but I just can't live any other way. A typical vacation for me is scheduled. Like really scheduled. I make a list of everything I want to see, create a schedule that makes sense and then stick to it. Sometimes there are maps and diagrams and in really extreme cases bound books of information to help me out along the way. I'm a good scheduler so I always try to allow some float in my timetable which allows me to detour in case I want to do something I didn't expect to find, like searching for Roman ruins in Barcelona.

In contrast to one of my usual vacations, I did not plan our Africa trip much at all. We made the decision early on to go with some sort of packaged tour since the area of the globe we were traveling was terra incognito for us. That made things easy. Most of our days were jam packed with stuff to do and see and we barely knew where we were going some days. But we had one day off to ourselves. And that's the day we decided to go to Zambia. And we didn't plan. And it didn't go well. And I should have known better.

Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe where we spent our first two nights in Africa is right on the Zambian border. The Zambezi River which flows over the Falls divides the two countries so considering it's a short trip to the nearby city of Livingstone, Zambia, many travelers to Vic Falls take advantage of the proximity and choose to spend a day north of the Zambezi. We were no exceptions, even planning for a potential day trip by buying a Univisa at immigration when we arrived at the airport. A Univisa purchased at Zimbabwe's port of entry allows you to enter that country, go to Zambia and re-enter Zimbabwe without incurring additional fees. It's made specifically for folks intending to visit both countries in one trip. Like us.

Despite our Univisa purchase, visiting Zambia on this trip was no sure thing. If Victoria Falls turned out to be some sort of paradise where there was all sorts of stuff to do and see 24 hours a day, then we probably would have stayed put. But in our first half day in country we found what we expected and decided to venture across the border and pick up a couple of new passport stamps. Just to be sure we were doing something sensible and fun, we mentioned to two people that we planned a trip north of the border. Both said don't bother. We ignored them. Remember that so you can say they told us so.

So it's now the morning of day two of our trip, we've eaten breakfast in our hotel and we set out on the half mile walk down to the Zimbabwe border. The immigration offices to pass out of one country and into the other are not right next to each other. Each country has its border post firmly on their own side of the Zambezi. So to get to Zambia from Zimbabwe, you have to walk across the Victoria Falls Bridge which links the two countries. I guess it's a no man's land of sorts.

The Victoria Falls Bridge with one (and only one) vehicle crossing it.

The Victoria Falls Bridge opened in 1905 after a 14 month construction period. It spans the approximately 500 foot gap between the two countries about 400 feet over the river below. Getting to the bridge requires another sort of half mile walk downhill through what I just called a no man's land. But it's not literally a no man's land because there are a ton of people between the two immigration points just hanging out. And they all want to sell you something, Now this is OK for the first few feet or so but when a dude follows you all the way to the bridge from the Zimbabwe border asking everything he can ask you about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton before pulling out some jewelry, it gets to be a bit much. By the time we reached the Zambian border and had promised to look for at least three people selling things on the way back, we were good and ready to be left alone. Of course, that didn't happen. It picked right up again on the other side. But hold that thought for a minute.

The walk across the Victoria Falls Bridge is either awesome, a little frightening or both, depending on who you are and how well you deal with heights. And if you intend to bungee jump off the center, I guess (we didn't choose to do that). The drop off the side of this bridge is tall; taller in fact than the Falls because by the time the river gets to the point of the Bridge, the riverbed has dropped a bit. The view off either side is absolutely tremendous. It's just a gorgeous unspoiled gorge with a raging river at the bottom. If you are OK with heights.

The Bridge has stood for 110 years so it's not going anywhere any time soon. But it was clearly built to hold a different kind of traffic load than the buses and cargo trucks which regularly pass over it. The vibrations when a large vehicle is driving over the Bridge are obvious and little unnerving. The signs prohibiting two way traffic and multiple vehicles on the main span at the same time don't make it better. I was glad of the signs. I didn't want to find out what might happen if that rule was broken by some impatient truck driver.

Despite what I wrote earlier about being unprepared for Zambia, we kidded ourselves that we actually were. We knew from reading travel guides and blogs prior to our departure that we should look for light blue cabs immediately after getting our passports stamped. So I was a little thrown by a taxi driver soliciting our business before we passed immigration. He promised he'd take us anywhere we wanted after we were in Zambia. But seeing no light blue cab in his possession and not understanding how he could take us into Zambia from the other side of the border station, we passed and made a beeline for the nearest light blue car we could see. It was easy and relatively painless.

Then came the part we weren't prepared for: where did we want to go? Well, our target was Livingstone, which we imagined as sort of a larger version of Victoria Falls on the other side of the river but beyond that we didn't have any specific destination in mind. So we left it up to the cab driver who was pretty much at a loss.

The view we had for most of our time in Zambia. Yes, our cabbie's a Liverpool fan.

What we expected here was that there was some logical tourist-y part of Livingstone that he could take us to, drop us off and where after a couple of hours of shopping and maybe some lunch we could catch a cab back to the border. There isn't such a spot. It was all imagined. So what we were basically doing was asking a cabbie to take us to a place of his choosing in a city of 70,000 people and leave us there. That's like getting in a cab outside my condo building and asking to be taken into D.C. and then being disappointed when you end up downtown rather than at the National Mall. What on Earth were we thinking?

Now in our defense, we hadn't quite figured out yet that the part of Africa that we were in catered to tourists on a sort of organized activities basis. The way it works is you pay someone to come pick you up at your hotel (could be a safari, a cruise on the river, a walk with lions or whatever); they take you to where you have paid to go; you have the experience; and they take you back to your hotel. You don't just wander around a city. We didn't know this yet.

So we are in the cab with our driver taking us nowhere in specific and we try to make some conversation. So we ask him about the guy that offered us a ride just before we passed through immigration. Yep, just as we suspected he told us we were better off with the light blue cabs because sometimes the guys who offer you rides across the border are engaged in drug smuggling or human trafficking. 

What?!?!? Go back a second. The last thing I want to hear when a cab driver is driving me somewhere random in a land I don't understand is him making a reference to human trafficking. Especially right before he pulled off the road unexpectedly without our asking (he wanted to show us the river). Thankfully, our driver was fine and that was the last we heard or suspected of anything like we were going to be sold into slavery. Although he did at one time on the ride dedicate a song on the radio to us and it happened to be Elton John's "Sacrifice." Take that as you will.

Livingstone, Zambia's second class market. From the back seat of our cab.

So what did we actually do in Zambia? Well for one thing, hardly got out of the cab. We toured through the second class (according to our driver) market where as far as we could tell from the cab's back seat they primarily sold fruits and vegetables. We managed to take in some local atmosphere there and avoid a guy banging on the cab who (again, according to our driver) wanted us to get on a bus to Lusaka, which is the capital of Zambia. Why we would want to go on a bus to a city that is according to Google Maps a six and half hour bus ride away is beyond me. But maybe folks like me want to do that all the time. Who knows? Maybe he was a slaver?

After our very brief tour of the second class market, we drove through the first class market (auto repair shops seemed to be common here) and then headed out of town at my desperate suggestion towards the river in hopeful search for a tourist resort or something like that. Who knows, maybe we would find a spot for some lunch with plenty of cabs waiting before we headed back to the relative calm and comfort of Zimbabwe. We did find some lodges out there that had some great views of the water and some boats. The problem? It was about 10:30 in the morning.

So after checking out the not yet opened bars at two resorts; looking into the Zambezi to see if we could determine if we were seeing a crocodile or a log (later that day we would find out this was called a log-odile); and declining an offer to go see rhinos that a friend or cousin or friend's cousin or something like that of our driver could take us on, we decided to call it quits and head back home. A seven mile cab ride from the Zambian border is about $10. We got a ride there and back plus a trip out to the river and back and paid $50. Maybe that was too much. But we made it back in one piece to the border no worse for our efforts. I won't forget the lesson I learned in Zambia: don't go anywhere unprepared ever again. I'm glad I went but I'm sure it could have been so much more.

The view of the Zambezi on our way back from Zambia.

But that's not the end of the story.

Of course once we pass through the Zambian border we are not back home. We still have to make the trip back over the Victoria Falls Bridge and fend off the guys selling wooden animals, jewelry and bowls in addition to the potential (thanks to our cab driver) drug smugglers and white slavers. Not looking forward to that especially.

Luckily we found a solution that not only got us over the bridge relatively unbothered but that also provided the title of this blog post. Coming out of immigration we spotted a group of about seven white people ahead of us about to pass over the border. Most of these people were wearing almost identical t-shirts with a map of Africa on the back and a tour company's name with the slogan "Safari, so good!" These people had to be Americans! We caught up with them so we could use them as some sorts of human shields against the folks we thought would bother us all the way across the bridge.

And it totally worked. We hung at the back of the group with our new friend Bill from Kansas and all his fellow travelers leading the pack got accosted for money for things they likely didn't need and wouldn't ever use. It was perfect. And of course along the way we chatted with Bill and found out a little bit about his history traveling the world and the safari company that had brought him to Africa not only in 2015, but as his shirt attested, in 2010. And we had to ask Bill about his shirt.

I already mentioned that the t-shirts Bill and his companions were wearing were almost identical. Besides being of various colors, the shirts had a different words in them towards the top of the African continent. Bill's shirt read "bwana kileo." 

Apparently their primary guide on this trip (who was not with the group when we tagged along) spoke Swahili and had assigned each person in the party a Swahili name which was printed on their shirts. Bill's name (bwana kileo) means "man who likes to drink alcohol" which as it turns out is perfect because that's my Swahili name too! We looked it up on Google Translate when we got back to the hotel which yielded an even better translation: alcohol maestro. Thanks, Bill. You just made my trip to Zambia worthwhile. Next time you see me, just greet me as bwana kileo. Or alcohol maestro if you prefer not to speak Swahili.