Day 16 – Mfuwe to Lusaka: Plans Are Made to Be Changed

Plans are made to be changed. The original plan was six hundred kilometres of the Great East Road on a local bus, a full day of dust, tarmac and endless African savannah.

That morning we heard that a jackknifed truck was blocking the Great East Road near the Luangwa Bridge, with traffic stopped in both directions and no clear idea of when the road would reopen. Spending the day sitting somewhere between Mfuwe and Lusaka was not quite the overland journey I had in mind. So we changed the plan.

We went to Mfuwe Airport to see if there was another way out and, luckily, Proflight still had two seats to Lusaka. After all my insistence on travelling overland, we were going to fly. I do not really regret trading my principles for an hour in the air, because that hour was one of the more beautiful of the whole trip.

The airport calls itself international and is tiny: no baggage belts, so you walk out and go through the scanner again each time, and after check-in your bags simply sit there in front of you.

Then came a two-hour delay. For once, it was good news: without it, we might not even have reached the airport in time to catch the flight. And while we waited at the gate, a plane landed and the President of Zambia got off. We had been lucky twice.

Hakainde Hichilema, president since 2021, was in the middle of an election campaign; the country would vote on 13 August 2026, less than two weeks later. He came over towards the gate, and I asked him for a photograph, and he could not have been more gracious about it. There was security and a crowd, but the whole thing was startlingly informal: a head of state at a small bush airport posing for a picture with my wife, who gave him her usual smile. He was dressed down, in a sporty gilet, on his way to campaign. His supporters were there at the airport too, in bright red T-shirts with his face across the front. I bought one of those myself, later, in Livingstone.

The flight was about an hour, and though we left late, we came into the capital with the light still good. Low and slow and spectacular, the Luangwa valley unrolling below us, the river bending through it. On board, they offered us tea. We both had a Kawambwa tea, a Zambian one, and agreed it tasted of taleggio.

Lusaka, when we landed, was its own kind of disorientation. We were staying at the StayEasy, inside the EastPark Mall, and stepping into a big, modern shopping centre after weeks of wobbly wooden market tables was genuinely strange. What struck me most was how abrupt the contrast was: a few metres took you from the gleaming mall to the shacks behind it. We took a room on the fifth floor and looked out over the city.

Before dinner we went across to the Intercity Bus Terminus, on Dedan Kimathi Road in Kamwala, just west of the centre, to buy our tickets for the next day’s journey to Livingstone. Around the terminus is one of Lusaka’s oldest and busiest markets, entirely un-touristy, and it was getting dark, and Lorena was frightened. A few people were following us. As far as I could tell they only wanted to give us directions and be tipped a dollar for it, but Lorena was not convinced, and when a kind and helpful young man led me through the maze of the terminal to the right ticket window, I followed him while she was fairly sure he was taking us down an alley to be murdered and robbed. He was not. The company we had asked about repeatedly, and that everyone kept naming, was UBZ, the United Bus of Zambia, and the tickets were 380 kwacha each for a journey that would take the whole of the next day down to Livingstone.

There is also a train to Livingstone, and it tugged at me. After crossing Tanzania and Zambia on the Tazara, the idea of carrying on south almost entirely on the old railways of southern Africa was beautiful. But the passenger service is the weekly Zambia Railways Kitwe–Livingstone run that passes through Lusaka, slow and unreliable, the sort of thing you would take for the sake of the train itself, accepting long delays, not as a way of actually getting somewhere by a particular day. With Victoria Falls, rafting and Chobe all waiting on the far end, the bus was plainly the sensible choice. I gave the train up with some reluctance, and not for the last time on this trip did the railway I loved lose out to the schedule.

We had dinner at the mall, at Hungry Lion, Zambia’s answer to McDonald’s, a fried-chicken chain you find everywhere and which is genuinely decent. I had the fried chicken, and we went back to the fifth floor and the lights of the city, a president photographed and a bus booked, ready for the long road south.

Practical Notes

Where I stayed

StayEasy Lusaka, inside the EastPark Mall, Church Road, Lusaka. https://www.southernsun.com/stayeasy-lusaka
What I paid: $175.50.
My take: Comfortable, modern, and inside a large shopping mall, which is convenient and a slightly surreal contrast after weeks of markets and bush. Upper-floor rooms have city views. Good, safe base for a night in transit.

Where I ate

Hungry Lion, EastPark Mall. Zambia’s big fried-chicken chain, cheap and reliable. Fine for a transit night.

Getting there

Mfuwe to Lusaka by air: Proflight Zambia, MFW–LUN, around one hour. Small aircraft, soft bags. Baggage allowance depends on the fare (on our Classic fare, 23 kg; the cheaper Firecracker was 15 kg, Flexible 30 kg), so check your fare. Spectacular low-level views over the Luangwa valley. Mfuwe airport is small: no baggage belts, re-scan on the way through. We had planned to travel the ~600 km to Lusaka by road, but changed plans after hearing that a jackknifed truck had blocked the Great East Road near the Luangwa Bridge, with no clear indication of when traffic would resume.
Onward to Livingstone (booked for the next day): UBZ (United Bus of Zambia), the company we repeatedly recommended when we asked around; tickets were 380 ZMW per person, bought in person at the Intercity Bus Terminus (Dedan Kimathi Road, Kamwala). The terminus and surrounding market are busy and un-touristy; go before dark if you can, and be ready for people offering to guide you to the ticket windows for a tip.
The train question: a Livingstone train exists via the weekly Zambia Railways Kitwe–Livingstone service through Lusaka, but it is slow, unreliable, and not something to build a fixed itinerary around. Romantic if the train is the point; impractical if you need to arrive on a set day.