On the Great North Road

6:30 am came quickly. We groggily dragged our bags out to the Cruiser and loaded up. There was a minute for a slice of toast and a cup of a tropical juice and yogurt drink, popular in Zambia, before we loaded in. Our trip will be a long one and we are hoping to make it all the way Kasempa in the daylight. The city turned from a series of walled properties with fairly modern buildings into clusters of mud block houses with a range of roofs types from plastic to metal to thatch. Our view for a good portion of the trip was the back of a packed minibus, one of the main modes of transportation for Zambians on the go.
Ashlee filled us on the joys of riding these buses. First, the have do a scheduled departure time, but typically the bus driver will hang around for the bus to fill up so that he can maximize his profit. She said that this has been up to five hours in her experience. She also said that many women traveling with small children have no problem plopping a toddler on your lap which is bad enough, but they do not use diapers. Gross! She has gotten wise to the gig and now refuses. It is just one of the reasons they often end up hitch hiking. There were many interesting sites along the road side: bicycles loaded win ways that defy the laws of physics, a woman wrapped in kitenge (brightly printed fabric) with a baby slung around her in another kitenge covered with a fleece blanket and a 3' basket on her head full of her latest crop and groups of kids from age 3 or so on up lounging along side the highway nearly the entire stretch.
And some more disturbing sites: the raping of the landscape by the huge copper mines, piles upon piles of trash due to a total lack of trash service and the newly paved roads that are already full of huge potholes because they are so poorly built, 1-2" of asphalt over dirt, by the Chinese because they know the roads will be repaved by them when they fail if they know the right palms to grease.
It made for a headache for Andy along the way as he zigged and zagged his way around the pits in the road.
A storm was on the horizon as we got closer to Solwezi, a very strange thing for this time of year in Zambia, when typically they will go months with absolutely no rain. It was getting dark because of the storm and with sunset just a few hours away Andy decided it was best to spend the night and go the rest of the way in the morning. So we booked a couple of rooms at the Royal Solwezi, a very modern lodge built on the hillside by a British couple. Then we loaded back into the Cruiser to visit the provincial house where Andy and Ashlee spend a lot of their off time. Below is a mural Andy painted in the hallway during one of their stays. Then we went for our first taste of the Zambian market. That proved to be a test for a few of us. The odor was overwhelming when we first entered through the dried fish portion of the market. There were rows and rows of ladies behind large piles of various types of dried tiny fish. I think I may have threw up a little in my mouth... but I sucked it up as we made our way through trash filled aisles of shops with people shouting out for us to visit their stands. We moved into the vegetable portion of the market and Ashlee purchased some rape, a favorite African green, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, onions, and some bologna-like substance made from nuts for our meal the following evening.
We ate dinner at the restaurant in the Royal Solwezi, where there was a broad offering of options. The power went in and out several times throughout the evening which was giving Ashlee fits and did limit the menu that was available. The lights and televisions kept going out, but there were several of the main lights on the generator which would kick in when the power would go out. I thought it set a relaxing mood for dinner and I rather enjoyed it myself. There were again mosquito nets on the beds, but in a more elegant fashion and we cranked up the air and slept soundly through the night.