In the morning a boat passed by, and I negotiated a fare back to Mpulungu. No disasters this time and I arrived without incident two hours later. From here I needed urgently to get to the border with Malawi, because I’d recently noticed that when I’d entered Zambia, I’d stated that I would be in the country for ‘about three weeks’, but my visa had been stamped valid for exactly three weeks. I needed to get out of Zambia by sunset if I didn’t want to outstay my visa. I wasn’t to make it, though – all the buses to the border leave early in the morning, and it was already 10am by the time I reached Mpulungu. Disconsolately I got a bus to Mbala, just to feel that I’d at least made an effort. There was not much happening in Mbala, but I was most impressed to find that the New Grasshopper Inn had a huge bathtub and plenty of hot water. A long, long bath and a good night’s sleep left me prepared to face the border guards with an expired visa stamp the next day. The first thing to do was work out which border I actually [...]

In the evening I sat on a rock at the edge of the bay and watched the village fishermen bringing in the day’s catch as the sun set. It was a timeless scene, with an amazing amount of activity and commotion considering the tranquillity of the day. As I sat on the rocks, locals who weren’t occupied with the fishing came over and chatted, wondering what I was doing in their part of the world. After the catch had been brought in and night had fallen I went and ate dinner with the builders. They insisted that I share their food, and so I had a good meal of nshima with tiny little fresh fish called capenta and some dried fish with an extremely strong flavour called bamba. We talked for a while before I turned in.

The next morning I had a fantastic awakening to the sounds of the lake lapping on the beach, and emerged from my tent to find the beautiful lake stretching away in to the hazy distance across to the mountainous shore on the Congo side. I thought my clock was wrong as it said it was 5.30am, and I’d been used to it getting light much later, but I eventually realised that all of Zambia runs on the same time but from east to west it’s about a time zone and a half wide. I’d covered a lot of ground over the past few days. Today I planned to go to the Kalambo Falls, the second highest in Africa. Thomas, one of the builders, arranged for a couple of local children to show me the way and at 7.30am we set off. For the first half an hour it was very hard going as we climbed up the Rift Valley escarpment. Once we were at the top the way on was pretty flat, and the view over the lake was stunning. The walk took us through some beautiful scenery, with lots of baboons and colourful birds around, and after an hour [...]

I got out of the Despot B&B as quickly as I could the next morning and headed north. After their four day weekend it seemed that everyone was easing back into things gently, and though I got on a bus to Mpulungu straight away, the Zambian hour and a half lasted three hours and included a trip to the shops. But wow, what a journey once we were underway. It was a fairly nondescript run to Mbala, with the usual Zambian scenery, but after Mbala we left the high plateau which makes up almost all of Zambia and dropped down into the East African Rift Valley to Mpulungu. Lake Tanganyika, Africa’s second biggest lake, was glittering beneath us in the hot sun, and it was extremely beautiful. And it was hot down there, steamy and sweaty. Up on the plateau it had been very chilly at night and in the mornings, and got to the high twenties at best by the mid afternoon, but down here in the valley it must have been well into the thirties. I wandered around trying to find where I could get a boat out onto the lake from, and a very friendly guy wandered [...]

It was now time to complete our loop around western Zambia by returning to Lusaka. We had hoped to get the train, but it had a reputation for woeful reliability which it certainly deserved. It turned out to have an unspecified mechanical problem and would not be leaving until the next day. So we went to the bus station and found a ‘Super Luxury’ bus leaving for Lusaka at 1pm. We had about an hour so we did a rapid shop before grabbing our stuff and rushing back to the bus station for quarter to, only to find that the Super Luxury bus was full. We watched helplessly as luxury rolled off into the distance, and with great regret spoke to the grinning minibus tout who we’d earlier spurned. We waited on board the minibus for an hour and a half before we set off for Lusaka. It was a long slow journey, frequently interrupted by diversions for roadworks, and we closed our loop and arrived in Lusaka at 11.30pm. We got a taxi to the backpackers hostel and set up camp. We were going to leave very early the next morning, and for the sake of three hours sleep [...]

The next morning we got up at 5.30am, and headed out to the falls with Susan and Remco. We arrived just after 6am, with the stars still out and the coming day just a glow over the eastern horizon. It was a chilly wait for sunrise, but when it came it was worth it. We watched the first rainbow of the day appear as the delicate golden light of morning lit up the falls, before setting off for a more comprehensive explore than yesterday. The light coming from a different direction made a big difference to the falls, with parts previously hidden by spray now visible. We took many of the same photos we’d taken the day before, but then explored new parts, walking down to the river edge at the Boiling Pot, where the river swirls around a tight bend from the first gorge into the second. We walked along to the bridge, and upstream a little way, and saw the falls from all the possible angles on the Zambian side. By 10am we felt we’d seen it all and could do with some breakfast, and so we returned to Livingstone. In the afternoon we went on a game [...]

The security guard at the Red Cross woke us early the next day. He was very much the worse for wear, having clearly been drinking all night, and slurred at us that we should get out, that the place next door was much better, that we were being ripped off here, and quite a lot more that I couldn’t understand. We gathered our stuff and managed to check in at the Jolly Boys hostel next door. We spent the morning there doing washing, shopping, and relaxing, before finally working up the energy to go and see Livingstone’s raison d’etre: Victoria Falls The Victoria Falls are Southern Africa’s greatest tourist attraction. The sluggish Zambezi, over a mile wide, thick and green, has its tranquillity interrupted by a cliff, one hundred metres high, which it plunges over. Downstream, the river is squeezed into a succession of gorges no more than fifty metres wide, churning along in a mass of white water for many miles. Touted as one of the great natural wonders of the world, it draws some 150,000 visitors each year. And it’s incredible: the vast, never-ending wall of water can’t fail to impress. But after the isolation and remoteness of [...]

We made an early start the next day, all four of us hoping to be 250 miles away in Livingstone by the evening. We walked the long walk back to the road, arriving not long after nine. As we knew it would be, the road was absolutely quiet, so we sat down with our bags and taught Susan and Remco to play Shithead, the greatest card game of all time. After nearly an hour, we heard a vehicle in the distance and leapt up. We were in luck – it stopped for us, and asked where we going. We were in enormous luck – it was going all the way to Livingstone. We negotiated our fare and jumped in the back. It was a truck, in untypically good condition, and the only snag was that the back was very small, and already contained fifteen pumpkins and three sacks of maize. With a very tight squeeze we fitted four people and four backpacks in with them, and we were off. Three of us could lean against the back of the cab, but I was the unlucky one who had to sit on the back of the truck. The road was bumpy [...]

We got up before sunrise the next morning, packed up all our stuff, re-stoked the fire for a quick breakfast and got on the way at 8am. Sioma was really not very far away, and the turn-off for the falls was just a little further, so by 10am we were being dropped off by the roadside and watching the truck disappear off into the dusty distance. We were about an hour’s walk from Maziba Bay, where the hitherto very reliable Bradt guide to Zambia said there was a lodge, from where you could easily walk to the falls, and also for very agreeable prices it was possible to hire boats and even microlights to see the falls. We set off eagerly through the bush, passing snakes warming themselves in the morning sun. It was eerily quiet when we arrived at Maziba. We dropped our bags and had a look around, and there were certainly buildings, but no people to be seen. Eventually someone appeared, and we asked if we could stay. We certainly could, he said, but only to camp. And there was no hot water as the pipe had broken. We asked if he might have any cold drinks, [...]

If we hadn’t got out of Lukulu the next day I would have snapped, but our luck returned to us in spades on Monday morning. We walked out of the resthouse at 7.30am to find two people outside who we’d spoken to briefly the previous day. They had a very comfortable-looking 4-wheel drive, and they were going to Kaoma. I almost laughed hysterically. And they left almost straight away, defying the normally very reliable ‘Zambian hour and a half’ rule of how the time people tell you you’ll leave relates to the time you actually leave. The journey to Kaoma was long and tiring. The six hours down the sandy road to Kaoma became indistinct, the monotony interrupted only at a town called Nkulo, where the villagers had a roadblock, and extracted a toll from any Zambezi fish traders passing through. At 2pm we arrived in Kaoma, and drank Coke for the first time since Zambezi. I had become horribly addicted to the stuff – there was no coffee to be had at all in western Zambia, so coke was my only caffeine fix. After a couple of hours, the Mongu bus came along, and on we got. There were [...]

Lukulu was pleasant enough at first, though still far enough off the beaten path that we attracted a lot of attention. Oliver, the hotel owner’s brother, spent most of his time in our room, asking us about our backgrounds and sharing his with us. But Lukulu is just a dusty town at the end of a dusty road and we were keen to get on the way. We had thought that there’d be less transport north of Lukulu than south of it, and we’d come from the north with no trouble at all, so we were keen to get on the way. Oliver seemed to think we’d be able to get a lift the next day, and said he’d come with us in search of vehicles. So we went for a wander around town the next day. We lacked the sense of urgency that we were to acquire over the next couple of days, and so we walked through the grounds of the Sancta Maria mission, overlooking the river, much broader here than before. We stopped off at a bar for a coke, or at least tried to. Lukulu is at the end of a very, very bad road, and [...]

Tired but happy, we rose early the next morning to make our exit from Zambezi and get on with the trip. We walked to the bus station and found the Solwezi bus loading up. We planned to get this bus to a town called Mumbeji, from where we would hitch a lift to Lukulu, further downriver, but the bus looked like it was going nowhere fast. We asked the driver when it would be leaving. “Oh, about 10.30 I think”, he replied. It was nearly 11am already. We gave up on the bus and decided to start hitching, asking the bus to pick us up if we hadn’t got a lift when it passed by. To our shame it passed by only about 20 minutes later, and we were off. I was thankful, so thankful that unlike Martin and many others on the bus, we had only two hours until Mumbeji. The journey went OK, with a minor interruption when a goat which had been on the roof fell off and ran into the bush. John was particularly startled by this as it fell past his window. All the passengers trooped off to search for the hapless creature, recovering it [...]

Eclipse day. During the night, I had a succession of horrible dreams in which I was in Cornwall again, watching the clouds cover up the crescent sun, or I was waking up in Zambia to find that it was cloudy. And when I woke some time before sunrise I thought my worst nightmares were coming true. I looked out the window to see dull grey skies casting a lifeless light over the land, and my heart leapt into my mouth. Surely this was all wrong! It took a while to realise that this was just the very early pre-dawn light making things look odd, and as the sky tinged blue with the oncoming day I relaxed, just a little bit. We got up and went down to the river to watch the sun rise. Two years earlier I’d watched the Sun rise over pools of mist from a Cornish hilltop, and I’d listened to Mute by Porcupine Tree. I did the same here on the banks of the Zambezi as I watched the sun sliding inexorably towards its rendezvous with the moon, lurking unseen next to it in the sky. There was not even a hint of a cloud in [...]

Day 7. One day before eclipse day. We were recovered enough to contemplate travel, and we decided we would go to Chinyingi. It seemed amazing to me that between source and sea there were just four bridges across the Zambezi. Chinyingi was the uppermost of them. We headed to the bus station to see if by some miracle there was a bus heading in that direction, but there wasn’t. Instead of a bus, we found Catherine, a bank worker who we had met in Solwezi. She had thought she wouldn’t be able to get time off work to come and see the eclipse, but it turned out she had managed it, and so here she was in the path of totality. Like us, she could not believe what an experience the journey to here had been. Unlike us, poor woman, she would be returning the same way after the eclipse. Catherine wanted to head to Chavuma, to meet up with Rune, and as Chinyingi is on the way to there, we invited her along with us. In the absence of buses, hitching is the way to head north from Zambezi, but hitching in Zambia always involves a contribution to petrol [...]

I could have slept for at least a week, but we were woken early by Martin, who was keen for us to see the sights. And oh, what a sight when we pulled back the curtains to see the river winding towards us from Angola, dazzling under the bright sun. Though we were weary and battered, we managed to get up and go for a stagger around Zambezi. The town stood on thick sand, the northern fringes of the Kalahari desert, so walking around was hard work, but we managed it. Soon enough we found our way to a bar, and decided to stop for a while. It was the Riverside Club, which as we were to discover over the next few days, is one of the best places in the world to spend an evening. Still shellshocked from our overnight odyssey, we sat there for some time, drinking cold drinks and watching the river go by. Rune, who had travelled with us from Solwezi, was intending to go on to Chavuma, right up on the border with Angola, so after a bone-soothing few hours at the Riverside, we wandered off with him to find out about transport in that [...]

The semi-mythical bus from here to Zambezi turned out to be a real thing, which left at 9am on Monday morning, so we spent the weekend in Solwezi. On Friday night we went into town, and discovered nshima, the staple food of Southern Africa. It’s a kind of maize porridge, served with either meat, chicken or fish, and you eat it with your fingers. We also discovered how overwhelmingly friendly Zambians are, and being typically restrained Englishmen, I think we came across as slightly unfriendly. ‘Are you scared of me?’ asked one very drunk guy in the bar. During the weekend we met many local people. Joe and Chris, who owned the motel we were staying in, turned out to be grandsons of the local chief. We met many members of their family, and we were invited to go to visit the chief with them. But sadly their Saturday evening lasted most of Sunday as well, and they were in no fit state to visit royalty, so we had to give it a miss. We also met Daniel and Clifford, two eccentric characters with a hand puppet, who demanded that we take photographs of them, before accompanying us into town [...]

The story of this trip really begins on August 11th 1999. There was a total solar eclipse of the sun happening, and the track was to cross the United Kingdom. I’d been looking forward to this for years, and on the morning of the eclipse I was in position to see it. The weather was clear and sunny, and anticipation was high. Sadly, though, as the morning progressed, the cloud thickened, and the sun slowly disappeared from view. When totality began the much-hyped wonders of the Bailie’s Beads, diamond ring and corona came and went unseen. Later that evening, as the world began to wobble a bit through the bottom of my whiskey glass, I said to those around me ‘Well, I’m just going to have to go to Africa for the next one’. At least, I tried to say that. I may not have succeeded. But the fact remained that the next chance I would have to see a total solar eclipse would be in southern Africa on June 21st, 2001. Some research revealed that west was best, with a longer eclipse and better weather, but west meant war as well, as the eclipse touched Africa first in conflict-ridden [...]