Camping there wasn’t that bad except for the torrential rain which leaked into the tent a bit and threatened to collapse it all together. We got up extra early, for we needed to get to Mpulungu, the port town on Lake Tanganyika (the deepest lake in the world) by Friday to catch the ferry to Kigoma. The ferry only goes once a week and if you miss it it’s a thirty six hour hell drive overland on the truck. We drove all day and finally arrived in Lusaka at about 4:00 p.m. Boz told us to go out into the city in groups of four or more because it’s so dangerous, but the truck made the miraculous move of parking not fifty yards from the door of the United States Information Agency. You know what that means – NEWSPAPERS! CURRENT EVENTS!
Rich, Tom and I all headed over there and once we were inside it was an information frenzy. Rich grabbed the entire stack of International Herald Tribunes, the most recent being from 26th November (Thanksgiving) and started reading away. The three of us sat there for thirty minutes just sucking up as much information about the world as possible. We moved from the newspapers to the news magazines, but they were all a bit ‘vielle’, so we thought we’d go back to the truck to see if the others were back from food shopping yet.
We turned out to be the last people to arrive back from our “field trip” to the U.S. Embassy extension. We exited downtown Lusaka and ended up camping at this dude’s house in one of the suburbs – nice house but not too much to do but drink and prepare yourself mentally for the next day’s hell-drive. We weren’t sure if we were actually going to make it to Mpulungu in time to catch the boat.