Thursday, 26 June 1986: My Flight to Lusaka Afforded Great Views

Tuesday, August 5, 10:00AM, Hillcrest Community, Halfway House, South Africa

There is no direct rail line between Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe and Lusaka, the capital of Zambia.  The express bus wasn’t running on the day I wanted to travel.  So my choices were a 12+ hour African bus ride with my baggage on the roof and chickens inside the bus or a one-hour plane trip for Z$90 (about US$53).  I elected to splurge on the latter. 

It was perfect flying weather for my short jaunt from Harare and Lusaka and the scenery below was first-rate.

 

While in line to check in my two big bags at the Harare airport, a white Zimbabwean businessman and I struck up a conversation.  As I put my bags on the scale, the businessman said, “I don’t have anything to check so one of those can be mine.”  At first I was confused.  Then I realized I’d spaced out the 20kg (44 pound) baggage limitation on many internal African flights.  South Africa doesn’t have this rule – they limit you to two 70-pound items and one carry-on.  Now I remembered that my friend Charlie Winger and his climbing expedition partners almost had to pay a US$1000 penalty when leaving Kenya for Tanzania a few months ago because of excess baggage weight.  But, I was saved by this friendly guy before I even knew what was happening.  This sort of kindness seems to be a matter of course in Africa.  You’d have to beg someone to do you a little favor like this at a U.S. airport, and I don’t like begging!

There were no metal detectors at the Harare airport so I was frisked like everyone else by a polite African man in a little room.  They had female friskers for the women passengers.  While waiting to get on the plane, the businessman told me he’d been in Zambia since 1970, had his family there, and generally liked the country.  Of course, there were a lot of problems with burglaries.  However, he felt my fears (based on what I’d read in a couple of hippie travel books) about Zambia police harassment of tourists was unfounded.  

The flight turned out better than expected because the big bird was an old Viscount 782 turbo-prop that only got up to 15,000 feet and it was a clear day.  Thus, I got a good look at the countryside.  And I sat in a row with no other passengers so I could move back and forth to either side of the plane once the seat belt light was off. 

Flying over northwestern Zimbabwe, I observed a rolling landscape of mixed cultivated and fallow land.  Perhaps 25% of the area was still forested.  The agricultural plots showed no discernable pattern, nor did the roads.  Winter in this part of Africa is very dry, and this was apparent in the brownness of much of the land below me.  A few fields stood out sharply in contrast as they were irrigated and very green (winter wheat, maybe?)  Some of the fields were rectangular with straight boundaries while others were very irregular.  It appeared that contour plowing was used on some fields. 

This stamp from my collection commemorates the completion of the Kariba Dam in 1959.  The dam supplies 1,626 megawatts of electricity to Zambia and Zimbabwe.  The stamp was issued by the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland which governed Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), and Nyasaland (now Malawi) between 1953 and 1963.

Soon, the huge Kariba Lake appeared on the horizon to the left.  It was created about 25 years ago by damming the mighty Zambezi River, a couple hundred miles downstream of Victoria Falls.  As we approached the Zambezi, the topography became more noticeably dissected by incised streams.  Farms gave way to forest land and folded rock strata and cuestas dominated the landscape.  We crossed the wide, meandering Zambezi near Chirundu about 30 miles northeast (and down river) of the Kariba Dam which wasn’t very visible from the windows on the left side of the plane.  I looked out the right side toward Mana Pools National Park, one of Zimbabwe’s great game reserves.  This was no time for idle conversation with fellow passengers.  Seeing the Zambezi for the first time was a spiritual experience for me – sort of like what my friend, Chris Mohr (a classical music station disc jockey in Denver) would experience while listening to a Mahler symphony. 

The Zambezi winding its way east toward Mozambique and the Indian Ocean.

 

Once across the Zambezi, we were over Zambia, formerly Northern Rhodesia, which gained its independence from the UK in 1964.  The topography on this side of the river was more rugged with dendritic to slightly trellised drainage patterns.  We were about 20 miles into Zambia before we flew over any farmland.  I saw rectangular agricultural plots oriented every which way.  The Zimbabwean businessman pointed out bush fires below.  African farmers clear their land with fire during the dry season.  I’m not convinced of the wisdom of this practice as it depletes the soil of valuable minerals and exacerbates soil erosion.  I could see dozens of bush fires as we made our descent into Lusaka less than an hour after take-off.  The front of one of the fires could have easily been one kilometer long.

 

Mixed forest & agricultural land with Lusaka, the Zambian capital, in the distance. View northwest. 

 

After arriving in Lusaka, the first surprise I encountered in the terminal was a health officer at a counter.  He was checking people’s international vaccination cards.  Shit!  I didn’t have one.  Everything I’d read said you didn’t need one for Zambia unless you were coming from a country where yellow fever or cholera were a problem.  I wasn’t but was nervous since I didn’t know the rules.  Visions of a refused entry danced in my paranoid head, so I discretely ducked around the counter when no one was looking.  By the way, I’d been taking my malaria tablet faithfully every week since arriving in Zimbabwe.

In the customs line, I struck up a conversation with a beautiful 30ish woman with long raven hair.  She was an American named Heather and worked for Save the Children Foundation.  I managed to score a date with her for the following night. 

After getting through immigration and customs, I was met by an African driver carrying a sign which read “Mr. Will Mahoney.”  He had a letter from Abe and Vera Galaun, explaining that they were my hosts for the next few days.  They regretted they couldn’t pick me up but the driver would take me to their home to rest and clean up.

As I rode through the streets of Lusaka, I was feeling higher than an African eagle.  “This is the life!” I mused.  “Being chauffeured around third-world capitals, hosted by well-off people, meeting beautiful women in airports, and living like a king on twelve bucks a day.”