Although I woke up when Melanie, Corine and Annelies got up at 5 am, I luckily fell asleep again until later this morning. Even then, I still felt weird about last night. Whatever the truth behind yesterday’s events was, just the possibility that someone could have dropped something into Melanie’s drink made me nervous and realise again how vulnerable I was on this trip. It could have been my glass, too.

Steffi and I had breakfast together and I was happy to share my Nutella chocolate cream with someone who appreciated it as much as I did. (To all my non-German friends: Every kid in Germany grows up with Nutella for breakfast and tasting it again once in a while, evokes these happy, light-hearted childhood memories that only very few souvenirs can bring back.) Together, we took off to the city centre around 9:30 am. Steffi was supposed to meet with someone from her organisation but first we both passed by the main bus station to check out the schedule for my ride to Malawi tomorrow. (Bus stations clearly remain one of the places where you don’t want to go alone if you can avoid it.) It turned out there was only one bus going to Lilongwe and although it was impossible to get some reliable information about its exact departure time, the guy at the ticket boot told me to be at the station around 9 am tomorrow.

After Steffi and I said good-bye, I spent my day at an internet cafe, changing money, and exploring downtown. Lusaka is a surprisingly modern city, at least that’s how I felt it. It has a lot of shops and small businesses everywhere, people are dressed Western style and banks have ATMs. On the downside, there’s a lot of traffic, too. I was so captured by this busy, modern city feeling that I even went for lunch at a fast food pizza place - and I enjoyed it! I must say that I felt relatively safe here, although I was probably the only white person in the streets. Still, I liked Lusaka. Compared to a European city it is probably light-years behind what you would call ‘modern’ and when I said there was “a lot of traffic” I meant with regards to African standards, of course. But it was definitely exceptional compared to most of the places I had seen in the past two months.

I returned to Ku-Omboka around 4 pm and spent a few hours reading. This hostel has – as many others – what you can call an exchange library. It basically means that there is a bunch of books that other travellers left behind after they finished them. So if you have a book that you are done with, you can exchange it against one of the books here. There weren’t many books I was interested in but I had started to read “Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow”, an award-winning thriller by Danish writer Peter Hoeg. You may have seen the 1997 movie starring Julia Ormond. I haven’t seen it and must admit that I wasn’t especially captured by the book neither, but once I start to read something, I want to finish it and I thought I could get through the book before leaving, so I wouldn’t have to carry it with me. Well, that didn’t work quite out in the end but at least, I had a nice relaxing afternoon. Towards the end of the day, Steffi surprised me by coming back to the hostel for another night. It wasn’t planned that way but hey, what’s turning out as planned anyway? We were glad to see each other again and had dinner together. Later that night a friend from Germany called me via the reception’s telephone and it was great great great talking to someone back home - danke Snöjn!

Speaking to my friend, however, also made me feel very weird as soon as our conversation was over. I suddenly realised how much I missed my friends and family and that I was not as happy as I may have thought I was. It totally fit with the somewhat desperate euphoria of meeting Steffi, a person I hardly knew, and yet we were exchanging nostalgic German memories as if this was all there was to cling to. Both of us were relieved to hear from each other that we felt kind of lost sometimes and that this whole Africa thing wasn’t only fun and exciting but also very tiring and exhausting. We shared our impressions of the ‘African way of life’ and how frustrating it was to deal with it sometimes. It was interesting that, although we saw things from two different perspectives, Steffi as a development aid volunteer and me as a traveller, we experienced the same disappointments and setbacks. The constant confrontation with African listlessness, their phlegmatic and often dishonest behaviour, was something our Western mind couldn’t understand and we ended up surrendering to a confusing mixture of powerlessness, disillusion and guilt. It actually felt good to be able to share our frustration and get these things off the chest without being condemned for it. Our conversations and the way I felt tonight, also made me realise that I had reached a crucial point of my trip: Right on the day, it was exactly two months since I left home and I had experienced all sorts of extreme emotions and adventures so far. But suddenly, I wasn’t all that sure anymore why I was doing this. Was this what I had expected? What I really wanted to do? Why was I here at the end of the world and not at home with the people who mean the most to me? What was the purpose of this journey? And was this the dream I had dreamt all my life? Pondering these sorts of questions, I finally fell asleep around 10:30 pm.