The Great Africa Traverse: The Complete Journey
Twenty-two days, six countries and thousands of kilometres later, The Great Africa Traverse is now complete. What began as an independent journey from the Indian Ocean to the Zambezi became a collection of stories, photographs, sounds and videos, following old railway lines, explorers’ routes and, above all, what happened between one [...]
Day 22 – Livingstone: Where the Lines End
The last morning began quietly at Jollyboys, bags half-packed, with the feeling that something was closing. One thing remained to do in Livingstone, and I had saved it for the end on purpose. Before the airport, the Livingstone Museum. It is the oldest and largest museum in Zambia, and most of it has nothing to do with the man [...]
Day 21 – Chobe: When the Wonderful Becomes Ordinary
By the twenty-first day, something had happened to the way we looked at animals. Four game drives in South Luangwa had done it. Zebras, impala, the endless antelope: Lorena and I had started calling them, between ourselves, la paranza. In Italian, a paranza is the catch of small, cheap fish that comes up in a trawler’s [...]
Day 20 – The Zambezi: The Same River, Twice
The deal was simple. Lorena would come white-water rafting if I would come on the sunset cruise. Neither of us wanted the other’s half of the day, which is exactly why we agreed. Lorena was terrified. She had rafted once before, years ago, and the headteacher at her school had gone over the side into the water to general terror and [...]
Day 19 – Victoria Falls: Where the Lines Meet
Livingstone got there first, and in bronze he is still watching. His statue stands on the Zambian side, looking out over the water he reached in 1855 and named for a queen who never saw it, and we came up to the falls just below him with two rainbows standing in the spray and the sky clear behind them. I had crossed a good part of a [...]
Day 18 – Lusaka to Livingstone: The Slow Way South
A woman on the bus couldn’t understand why we weren’t on a plane. I told her I had come to see the country between the places, not just the places, and to follow the old lines across it by land. She looked at me as if I were simply slow, and decided I was mad. She may have had a point. The bus was the UBZ, the one everyone [...]
Day 17 – Lusaka: A Guest in the City
Our taxi driver would not go to the market on his own. The reception had told us not to go alone either, so Bwembya drove us and came with us, and somewhere in the first ten minutes he admitted that he himself rarely comes here, because he finds it dangerous. We had hired a guide to the market who was as wary of it as we were. Soweto [...]