Week II

Once showered, fed and relaxed (i.e. the day after we came off the mountain) we had a full day in Tanzania (because we had descended a day early). Most the morning was spent sorting out our rented equipment and swimming in the pool (so nice!), after which we met with our guide, cook, ‘waiter’ and porters to go for beers in town. This was Rob’s idea and ended up being a really good one as our tour staff seemed to really enjoy it and we got a taste of local Tanzanian life. We found out that our (very young looking) tour guides actually ranged in age from 17 to 40, ranged in faith (Christian and Muslim), and in the late afternoon we got to visit our guide Freddy’s home and family. His house was quite close to the downtown and was decorated with wedding pictures/momentos, stuffed animals (much to my delight) and pretty high tech (a huge television in the small living room). It was really nice spending the afternoon there talking to his wife, looking at their various photo albums and playing with our guide’s son and nephew.

Once we got back to our hotel my mom was just arriving from her various safaris (she had a great time!) and we all had dinner together in town. The next day we headed back to Zzzzambia!

For the next week I toured Rob around UNZA (my workplace), introduced him to some of my friends (we had a fun dinner night out), bought some curios at the Sunday market, took him to the hot and chaotic city market and even squeezed in a little viewing of the local soccer teams (they were an intense bunch!).

As you can see from the pictures we also managed to fit in a little trip to Livingstone… Because of the floods the roads were pretty bad between Lusaka (i.e. L-sack) and Livingstone (L-stone) and the bus took forever (plus it left late), so we were pretty tired when we arrived in town. However, we mustered up some energy to enjoy our swanky hotel, check out the falls, go for a swim and have a very romantic dinner (!). Very nice.

The next day we went on safari at the small national park nearby and saw a whole bunch of animals: zebras, giraffes, a hippo, impala (which Rob happily ate for dinner the day before! Shocking!) and the ever elusive white rhino. An excellent safari, followed by an excellent bus ride back to the L-sack. Actually, the bus ride wasn’t so bad because we had top notch Nigerian (?) videos playing much of the time. Of particular amusement were the cheesey endings (i.e. a man kneeling in the ocean, screaming/crying, waving his fists in anger because his girlfriend has died/disappeared – sort of hard to describe) and our favourite film entitled ‘Butterfly’ – a film about a man (formerly a bit of a ‘player’) who met a woman ONCE, decided he wanted to settle down and make this woman his wife and therefore spent the whole movie ‘pulling the moves/wooing/convincing her’ despite her clear and consistent rejection of him. ‘Stalker’ would have been a better title. It was pretty hilarious. Of course, in the end he won her over…

The rest of the visit was pretty low key. We drank a lot of local beer, watched Eastern Promises (excellent movie! 4 thumbs up!) and enjoyed the sunshine. And now Rob is back in chilly freezing Canada. Yuck!

Oh and for all of you who have asked when exactly I will return: It’ll be March 14th… but I’ll be pretty MIA until March 21st due to school stuff. I’m looking forward to being home!