After breakfast and saying good-bye to Steffi (for the second time), I took a taxi to the bus station. There was no way I would carry my luggage around this town again! I arrived at the station a quarter past nine and bought my ticket to Lilongwe. The bus wasn’t there yet but the guy at the ticket counter assured me that it was about to arrive “just now”. Interpreting that as “in a little while from now” I took off my backpack and looked for a place to sit down. There was only one small bench which was already taken by other waiting passengers. It was pretty cold – and when I say ‘pretty’, I mean I was freezing – but I thought, whatever, it’s not going to take long and I’ll be out of here. Well, yeah, that was around 9:30 am. After about an hour, I understand from conversations of the other people around me that the bus has a problem and will be late. Great, I’m thinking, another break-down. The guy who sold me my ticket comes to tell me that a tree is blocking the road somewhere and that the bus is stuck but that it will be coming as soon as the road has been cleared. Okay, it’s not their fault then, how nice he even cares to inform me. So far, no hard feelings on my side – until a lady who sits close by tells me a little later that she heard what he was telling me and that it wasn’t true: the bus has a technical problem and broke down in a town two hours from here. She claims she actually knows because that’s where she comes from and she just called her husband who told her that the bus is still there, waiting to be repaired. Wow, if the bus is stuck two hours away from here and still needs to be fixed, it means that it’ll take quite some time before we will be picked up! I have no idea why the guy didn’t tell me the truth but instead, all passengers were assured that the bus was “on its way”.

I was almost ready to return to the Ku-Omboka, where at least I would have been able to wait in the warmth of the common room, but I didn’t have enough Zambian Kwacha anymore (= local currency) to pay for another taxi ride. So I thought, okay, what a nice opportunity to exercise my patience. Three more hours, the heck with it, in the end it doesn’t really matter. And I continued reading “Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow”. By the time I finished the book, it was passed noon and I realised that I was not only cold but also getting hungry. Still no sign of the bus and all that the people in the ticket boot kept saying was that it was coming. Well, it had been “coming” for quite some time now without ever arriving and by now, I wasn’t even sure if I could believe them anymore. Time passed by and in the late afternoon, passengers started to get annoyed. Some wanted to return their tickets and get their money back but the people in the ticket boot refused to do that, saying that the bus would be here any minute. Well, I am going to make a long story short by telling you that by 6 pm, it got dark but there was still no bus. In addition to freezing my ass off and my stomach screaming for food, by now I also had to go to the bathroom. Not that easy, when you cannot leave your luggage unattended and hope for the bus to finally show up “any minute”. In the end, I had to take the risk and asked two ladies to watch my big backpack while I took my smaller bag to the restrooms with me. Luckily, I still had enough money to pay for using the bathroom but as soon as I entered, I seriously asked myself for what this money was used – clearly not for keeping this place clean! It was not quite as disgusting as Ethiopian or Egyptian toilets but definitely third in the dubious ranking of Africa’s most horrific public bathrooms... There was no way I could put my bag on the floor, nor let my pants or anything else touch the ground while doing my business. Wearing as many clothes as I did because of the cold, plus the bag and my determination not to touch the toilet seat neither, kind of made my bathroom experience quite a challenge in this tiny toilet cabin and I would have been proud of myself for managing it, if I hadn’t been so disgusted by the circumstances.

Seriously thinking about what I would do now if I my big backpack was gone, I was extremely grateful to find it untouched upon my return to the bus stop. In the meantime, people started to camp on the ground and mothers tried to keep their babies warm by wrapping them in all sorts of covers or blankets. I couldn’t believe that the ticket guys still had the nerves to say that the bus was “coming right now” each time someone would go and ask them how long it still takes. If there had been any other way to get to Malawi, I swear now was the time I would have done anything to put an end to this waiting. I was cold, I was hungry and I was exhausted from not knowing how this day would end. The last thing I wanted was to spent the night at this bus station! More and more passengers argued with the ticket people, so in the end, they just left their boot unattended to avoid more stress and questions. Well, I think you got a pretty good picture of the situation and I am not going to bore you with more details about my glorious experience of waiting for the bus at Lusaka’s main station. To sum it all up in four words: it sucked big time.

Last but not least, the bus showed up at 9 pm - 12 hours later than expected! You may think ‘congratulations, finally this terrible day is over’ but no, believe it or not, the horror continued: As soon as the bus pulled up in the station, I was surprised to see that it looked pretty full and hardly no one seemed to get off! It didn’t take long for all the people who had been waiting with me to realise the same thing and all of a sudden, everybody started rushing and pushing, just to make sure he would still get a seat. I couldn’t believe it: After all we had been through today, the bus company even dared to overbook and sold more tickets than there were seats on this damned bus! And I had seen them selling tickets all afternoon, never mentioning the unknown departure time of the bus nor that it might be full by the time it finally arrives!!! Welcome to Africa...

To be honest, I didn’t have the strength to go and fight for a seat. At this point, I almost didn’t care anymore. If I had to go back to Ku-Omboka, fine, I had no more Zambian money but I would find a way to get out of here and make it to Malawi somehow. Therefore, I didn’t join the bulk of fighting passengers but for whatever reason, the guy who was in charge of admitting people on the bus came over and pulled me through the crowd of angry pushing people. He got me on the bus and found me a seat and I didn’t know if I should be happy and thankful or feel guilty about it. Somehow, I couldn’t help but think he did this only because I was white. I told him to give my seat to one of the women who were travelling with their crying babies but he didn’t even listen to me. The chaos inside and around this bus is hard to describe but I was so exhausted and apathetic at this point that in the end I gave in and just stayed put in my seat. Even if I had wanted to move, it would have been very difficult and became increasingly impossible as the bus filled up. People squeezed in the narrow seats and the walkway, clinging to their bags and babies. Children got handed over people’s heads and found a place on someone’s lap. In the end, I had the impression people were piled up in the corridor and yet more passengers tried to get onboard. I don’t know if ultimately anyone was left behind or not because I had closed my eyes and tried to mentally escape from this place, until we were finally on the road.

I can tell you that my understanding of a “packed” bus took on a totally new meaning after this experience. My big backpack had gone in the luggage compartment but I still had my smaller backpack on my lap. As the seat rows were very narrow, I basically couldn’t move my legs at all. Besides, the lady who sat next to me was one of these huge matrons that are best described as the classic picture of a big black African Mama who took half of my seat space in addition to hers – the fact that the woman next to her was of the same size, did not help to allocate their tremendous volume without squeezing me in. Seeing the other passengers though, especially those standing crammed in the walkway, I felt bad to even complain about my relatively comfortable position. And yet, I spent the following hours on the most horrible bus ride I experienced on my Africa tour – or in my whole life! Since we only left Lusaka at 9:30 pm, we ended up driving over night but if you think it was possible to get some sleep, you are wrong: The bus radio was turned on all night and played on full blast. The music was more than terrible and I swear it sounded like crying cats howling at the moon. After a while I used my earplugs but the music was so loud, I could still hear it. The air inside the bus was awful, too – no wonder with a bunch of sweating people crammed together in an overloaded vehicle. Without wanting to be impolite but - it really stank. Plus, I saw some cockroaches and other weird bugs crawling on the seats in front of me. Since I couldn’t move my legs, at least I tried to pull my socks over my trousers’ legs, so nothing could climb up on me... We drove almost non-stop but that didn’t help to make it a less unpleasant ride. Apart from the poking and pushing when someone tried to make his way from the back of the bus towards the only door at the front in order to get off at one of the few stops, I kept thinking of the frequent reports about overcrowded African buses involved in deadly accidents. For sure, no one would survive if this bus had an accident – which at the speed we were going, wouldn’t have come as a surprise. Honestly, I think the only reason I managed not to lose my sanity during this ride was that I pretended I wasn’t there and that all this was actually happening to someone else who accidentally looked like me.

After this day’s events, leaving Zambia was more of a relief than something to regret.

P.S.: You may actually wonder why I didn’t stay longer in Zambia. Well, basically it all comes down to two restricting factors: time and money. Although I was not in a hurry or had any tight schedule to comply with, I had made up my mind that I wanted to be back home for my father’s 60th birthday in mid-August. Thus having some sort of a deadline, I needed to be careful with where I was going to spend my remaining time. Plus, Zambia is a country whose main attractions are its National Parks. After having experienced an unbeatable Serengeti, I didn’t want to spend another 500 dollars on a safari. I was interested in visiting Livingstone and seeing the mighty Victoria Falls but I planned to do that when I was in Zimbabwe from the other side of the falls. So in the end, I decided to save both, time and money, and simply get through Zambia without any further activity.