into Zambia....and Zimbabwe

We left Malawi and crossed the border into Zambia heading in the dark for a small town called Chipata to our campsite for the night. Typically, the boys spent the night in the bar in front of the world cup while the girls sat around the fire with bottles of wine. The weather is getting colder now and the fires are less of a luxury and more of a necessity. Our trip through Zambia was, at this time, a thorough-fare to get to Zimbabwe and so we headed off at some abysmal hour of the morning to cross the border into Zim - the longest border crossing yet at around 4 or so hours (go figure) - bound for Lusaka. We were due to board the houseboats for a couple of days but unfortunately (!), Zim is out of diesel which meant they were not running so no houseboats. Unfortunately, the truck also needed a little diesel but as it is hard to come by we had to visit several petrol stations in order to spend our odd US$2,000 (and the odd 40 minutes it takes with 4 pumps) on filling up. Zim was so far just like much of the rest of Africa that we have seen - plenty of land and green vegetation - although much of the farm land sits empty and certainly not live with crops and livestock. We were on a huge drive week (the worst so far I would say...most have been huge drive days...) which meant that we racked up the kms on the truck and had consistently numb bums from the truck seats. Leaving Lusaka, we headed to Kariba and then onto our ultimate destination, Gweru, to visit the fantastic Antelope Park.