Hanging on with Hannington
My Pretoria to Kampala Road Trip ravelling from Pretoria to Kampala over five days was a beautiful expedition albeit very dangerous, tiresome and requiring immense preparation for any first-timer. A colleague and I filtered through Martins Drift which is the SA Botswana border post and had a flawless drive through the narrow roads that led to the Zambian border. Unfortunately we arrived shortly after the 6 p.m. cut off time and had to join the border post community for the night. There were over 100 loaded trucks waiting to cross over into Zambia. I wondered how much in contraband goods they contained destined for places as far as Uganda. Border posts are special. There are wiry, mean-looking men hanging around shops and night clubs as their wives tend cooking pots in make shift tents. One trucker told me it is easy to spend a week there before being cleared. The following morning we boarded a ferry that was meant to take us into Zambia in thirty minutes. However, we spent over three hours as the old thing malfunctioned along the way. Panic-stricken, we found ourselves stuck on the water with rain pouring down as we waited for mechanics to sort out the fault. Finally we drove onto the land of the mighty Chipolopolo. It is a country with a quiet demeanour, open smiles and an astonishingly
Istockphoto
beautiful landscape. I noted a street named after a former president of Uganda, Milton Obote. Once in Lusaka, I found an internet cafĂŠ in which I updated my Facebook status: “1800kms down, plenty more to go!â€? Zambian girls are pretty and dress conservatively. I quickly stopped one pretending to ask for directions. We asked her to get into the car to take us to a mall where we could have fun in the hope that we could trick her into joining us for the night. She joined us but after a few hours she abandoned us after probably smelling a rat. After a lonely night, we left for the Tanzanian border. After about fifty kilometres, I realized that I had left my phone at the hotel and we had to do a U-turn and was ecstatic to find that it had not been stolen. Later that day we got to the ZambiaTanzania border post of Tunduma which is infested with thieves who lay in wait for unsuspecting victims. As soon as we left customs, we were tailed by unmistakable thugs for several kilometres
but were fortunate to shake them off. I suspect that the thugs are part of a syndicate involving both custom officials and hotel owners. The displeasure of being in Tanzania is compounded by the fact that this section of the country is scorching hot, rugged and hardly any Tanzanians we met could understand English. It took us two whole days to cut across this heated part of the country and we finally arrived at the Mutukula Ugandan border post. Finally things were familiar. Finally, I was home. Hannington Kasirye