Put Foot Rally Day 11 - Lusaka and the laws of laundry

Nau Camp, Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe to Senga Bay, Lake Malawi
Distance: 1 300 kilometres

Checkpoint to checkpoint, covering 1 300 kilometres, Day 11 of the rally was set to be a beast of a drive. But first I needed to get the hell out of bed. There’s only one sound more motivating than an alarm clock – the sound of your ride leaving without you. I got my stuff together and made a dash for our taxi. As it turned out we weren’t leaving just yet and I still had a little time, but not enough to remember to pick up my laundry which the staff at Nau Camp had kindly taken in the day before. There you go Bob, you have some (not quite) new clothes, let’s consider it goodwill for my next visit.

We set course for Chipata, the last town in Zambia before the Malawi Border, but first we had to deal with the chaos that is Lusaka. Wedding processions, taxis, motorcycles and goats share lanes while an endless push of pedestrians – loafers, dodgers and dashers – skirt the sidewalk before dicing through traffic. It was like watching a real-life game of Frogger. I absorbed the chaos from the back seat of our taxi, and then joined in with some amatuer drive-by shooting. My apologies for the photos, I was clinging on for dear life as our driver tried to keep the mortality rate at zero.

We got to the Malawi Border at around 23h00. Most of us breezed through the dimly lit immigration office … except for Rally Chief Daryn Hillhouse, who had put his passport through his laundry a few days before the rally started. It hadn’t been a problem until now, but the rotund official was having none of it … at least not until he had a few new t-shirts tucked into his drawer … and so it goes.

We arrived at our camp at 03h00, rather late, or rather early. Even compared to a post-party shwarma, it is by far the most beautiful thing I’ve seen at that time of morning, but more on that in my next post.