WAITING FOR THE SHADOW

SOLAR AND LUNAR ECLIPSE OBSERVING

REPORTS AND OBSERVATIONS - ZAMBIA 2001

 ABOUT

 CONTACT

PAST ECLIPSES

 FUTURE ECLIPSES

 OTHER EVENTS

 ECLIPSE PRIMER

 ECLIPSES AUSTRALIA

 LINKS

The Kapini village project- saving their sight


Introduction
As my flight touched down in Lusaka, I wasn't sure what to expect. The consular warnings for Zambia were grim yet in my experience, these warnings are seldom a true reflection of conditions for travellers in any country but rather an overstatement by diplomatic service staff zealously covering all bases.

I spent the flight chatting with a German traveller sitting next to me. We decided to share a taxi in to town. As we passed a police checkpoint, a policewoman asked the driver for a lift to town. We proceeded a short distance when another taxi with a badly shattered windscreen overtook us on the road verge. The policewoman tried to open the window. The winder was broken so she opened the door and shouted to the other driver to pull over. He didn't at first. She reached for the gun her holster and realised she'd left it at the checkpoint. She continued shouting out the open door of the taxi as we sped along the road. The driver finally did pull over. As she got out of the car he sped off weaving and dodging through the traffic and almost running her over in the process. She muttered a few words to the driver in Lenge, the local language, then began walking back to the checkpoint to retrieve her gun.

This incident was a dramatic but by no means typical introduction to Zambia but did serve as a warning to exercise care with personal safety. With the exception of a bit of pick pocketing in Lusaka and some skirmishes with foreign rebels near the borders of Angola and Congo, Zambia is a very safe and relatively easy country for tourists to travel around. In six weeks of travel around Zambia, I didn't experience anything worse than a little verbal abuse by drunk men on the street and one salesman who tried to spray a bottle of after shave in my face during a sales pitch. I knocked the bottle from his hand and it smashed - a precaution in case it was some sort of knockout spray. I had already told him a dozen times I didn't want to buy any and I wasn't going to let him spray me in the face even if it was only after shave. I later discovered that use of knockout spray is unheard of in Zambia. Two men tried to pick pocket Bengt Alfredson in downtown Lusaka.

The neighbouring countries were a totally different story. Christian Fritzkowski was poisoned and robbed in neighbouring Malawi after the eclipse. He spent a couple of days unconscious in hospital. I met two different travellers with shaved patches and heavily stitched gashes on the side of their heads. In Nairobi, Kenya, robbers clubbed each of them into a coma before taking everything.

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