Our trip to Lusaka went well. We took two days going down, but drove it in 12 hours all in one day coming back. The trip itself can be broken up into nice 200 K segments. Each segment is not exactly 200K but it is close to it.
The first leg of the trip is from Mbala, of course, to Kasama. This section of road is not exactly nice, but it is under construction and suppose to be done by the end of October. It has lots of dirt sections. What was amazing is how much was done to the road in the one week while we were gone.
The second leg of the trip is from Kasama to Mpika. This road is very good. We did hit a few pot holes going too fast. Trying to decide if the black marks really mean a pot hole is coming or not was what we needed to figure out. Finally, Steve decided to believe all black marks and slow down. The thing is this section of road is good so you are flying a little faster and have to slow down faster.
The third leg of this trip is 240K from Mpika to Serenje. It is on the Great North Road and I will discuss it further down in this post.
The fourth leg is from Serenje to Kipiri. Again the road isn’t too bad. You can cruise along at 120 K per hour or faster for those with a lead foot. You do have to stop for police checks.
The fifth leg takes us from Kipiri to Lusaka. On this section of road is all of the speed bumps I mentioned in an earlier post. We kind of forgot all about them, so the first one was quite the experience. I am a back seat driver I will admit. I spend most of my time working at keeping my mouth shut. I find it easier to read a book so I just cannot see what is going on. But here in Africa, Steve drives and watches the road. I do watch the road, but I am also watching for signs that he is missing – like the speed bump signs.
The wild life that we got to enjoy while we are driving or should I say that we hit the brakes for so as we don’t hit them: goats and lots of them, sheep, chickens, dogs, and cows. It seems that if a car is coming the goats all want to cross the road in front of you. Chickens can never make up their minds which way they want to run. Sorry but that is all we have seen so far.
OK for the third leg of the trip. I got out a notepad and took notes. We counted pot holes. Steve helped, but don’t hold us to the number. We counted 210 potholes in this 240K stretch. We also counted what we labeled bad sections of the road. This might have been one big pot hole, or one side of the car was off the road to get around it, or there was more than 5 pot holes clumped together. There were 23 of these. Then there were 7 sections that we totally had to go off of the road. Then there were 4 sections of totally off the road we went but they were really looong sections.
So that was our driving trip, pictures to come in the next post.
God bless,
Rita
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