Tuesday, May 13, 2003 (Border crossing – Zambia/Tanzania)
Too late, border closed. A late(?) start to the
day. Those bloody corrupt guards and their check-points.
Day 62 (yesterday’s log). I waited until
this morning to write this next log entry. We arrived too late to pass through
the Zambia/Tanzania border last night and had to park the truck in town right
next to a nightclub with lots of shady characters loitering around. More about
that later.
So, to continue with a
recap of yesterday’s events, then, we got up to a late start with a
four-thirty rise. I hope I never, ever have to work in a situation where
four-thirty is considered a late start. Since the driver wanted to make good
time, there was no time to make a fire to heat anything up for breakfast so we
had to make do with sandwiches using the break and meat (well, meat’ish
substance would be more accurate) that we had purchased at a supermarket on the
way, yesterday. I thought we were roughing it when we were on the truck doing
the overland tour from Cape Town to Victoria Falls but this journey is proving
to take things to the next level.
It
was an arduous drive for most of the day and we spent over fourteen hours on the
road altogether. We would have reach and passed the border crossing if it were
not for the numerous traffic stops with armed guards desperately trying to find
some ridiculous infraction that they could use to try to extort money from the
driver. During one hour alone, we were stopped nine times over a distance of
about fifty kilometres. At one particular control point, one of the guards came
into the truck and asked us for our passports. He didn’t even bother to
disguise his request for money and blatantly came out and asked us if we had any
dollars for him.
At another
check-point, the driver needed to pay some money for road insurance or some such
thing and had to borrow $60 from our own emergency fund to pay for it as they
did not accept English Pounds, which is the only currency that the driver was
given to make this transit journey
with.
When we finally reached the
border, it was closed for the night so we had to park the truck until the
following morning. Since Sandy needed to use the toilet, the driver drove us a
couple of kilometres out of town so that she could use the ‘bush
toilet’. It was too shady and considered too risky to do otherwise and
none of us wanted to walk into any of the
nightclubs.
We settled in for the
night with the drive in the cab and the courier in the back with us. There was
no way that we could have put up a tent so we just had to make do with a few
camping mattresses and a couple of sleeping bags. We had to ‘make a
plan’, as they say here, meaning that we had to just figure something out
and improvise. With a lot of hustle and bustle all around the truck, it was a
long night.
Posted: Tue - May 13, 2003 at 08:14 AM