We spend a few days longer than we’d planned in Livingstone. Not exactly recovering from the New Years festivities, more taking a few days to do nothing and hide from the rain in a better than standard (for us) guest house.

When we finally hauled ourselves back onto the road, the scenery started like Botswana. Only with much lower chance of finding an elephant hiding in the bush. And we’ve stopped looking out for lions, or anything more exotic.

The road has a pretty good shoulder most of the way. And a pretty good surface, except for a short (maybe 20km) section just before Mazabuka. Luckily it does, and gives us enough space to cycle relatively safely, because the road also has lots of trucks hauling everything (including lots of cows, pipes, construction material, Ammonium Nitrate, Sulphur, and more than one truck cab that had been rolled).

The roadside scenery has become less interesting as we’ve gone northeast. Small scale farming interspersed with grassland and wilderness has given way to commercial farms as we approached Lusaka. A lot more people living along the road in Zambia compared to what we’ve recently seen (although Botswana and Namibia are exceptionally sparsely populated so unfair to compare with). The people are invariably smiling and waving or shouting to get our attention – so they can wave to us. Only a few have demanded ‘money, money’ but they’re not serious about it (as we imagine they will be further north).

Botswana felt like it was flat, but it was clear how flat it was when we started getting a few rolling hills again. This road in Zambia is also not very hilly, but we have been through a few valleys now that remind us of what hills are. More to come in Malawe.

We have managed to dodge the worst of the rain. We’ve been told that the rain should come in the afternoon in a dump that's so heavy, you can’t drive (you can't see through the windshield). We’ve only had that once (while we were between a supermarket and a restaurant). Most of the time it has rained (sometimes quite hard) at night, and we’ve abandoned the tent for now given the guest houses are not terribly expensive and we’ve had enough of waking up in a puddle. The forecast on the day we spent in Choma was for a horribly wet day, so we sat that one out – the forecast was reasonably accurate – hard rain in the morning and at night. We’re not in a huge hurry here, and we got to see more of Choma than we expected, including a local lunch (with a handful of maize porridge) and a couple of mangos.

I think everyone is hoping for rain. The crops need it. The (hydro?) electric system is clearly struggling – there can be up to 24 hours without power in the smaller towns. The better guest houses have a generator, but they’re not really set up for constant operation, and fuel is expensive (roughly AUD2/litre or USD4.65/gallon - absolutely more expensive than AUS/US and horribly so when the average income here is vastly lower). Seems to be much better here in Lusaka – we were able to run the fan all night last night. This makes sleeping behind a mosquito net more pleasant.

Photos to come (no wifi in this guest house and the mobile phone data is not great)