Monday, April 6, 2009

Zambia, Day Five - THE BUS TRIP

We slept late on Day 5 in Zambia and went to the "tourist" market later in the morning. Every Sunday in the capitol city, all the vendors get together at a big strip mall and set all of their things in the parking lot. I had a great time looking around and getting some souvenirs for my friends! We enjoyed some Zambian pizza for lunch. I'm not a big pizza fan in the States, but I LOVE the pizza in Zambia! It's less greasy and yummy in my opinion! (My sister, a huge Papa John's fan, thinks I'm crazy!) Anyway, we got peri-peri chicken flavor and it was delicious!!

At 3, it was time to head to the bus station. We were riding a bus about 12 hours north to visit my sister in Northern Zambia. Gas is really expensive in Zambia so we figured we could save them some money by just hopping on a bus. We didn't realize, however, that the bus traveled ALL NIGHT long. We were supposed to leave at 4pm and arrive at 4am. This REALLY worried us, because we never traveled at night in Zambia. There are people on the roads, potholes, trucks broken down, and it's just not safe. So we were gonna get on a bus and travel all night!! (The reason they do this is so that they can arrive at the Tanzania border at 6am when it opens.)

We got to the bus station, got all of our luggage together along with Baby Cason in his car seat, and headed to find our bus. We were quickly surrounded by Zambians trying to help us for a tip. People were swarming me and Blu was yelling "get back from the lady! Give the lady and baby some room!" It was a VERY stressful situation (and it was raining!) We finally found our bus and they gave us a seat in the next to last row. People kept coming onto the bus to sell their products, but we finally decided that more were coming than normal becasue they wanted to see the white people (and maybe the white woman nursing!) on the bus!! We finally pulled out around 5:30 with a FULL bus. It was pretty cramped, and we had decided to take Cason's car seat on the bus thinking there would be room to store it or something...nope. So we either put it under our feet with our knees up to our chins or we finally just put Cason in it and held it on our laps. It was so uncomfortable!

Once we got on the road, we noticed that our seats were broken! They both leaned into the aisle and the cushions slid off of them. One seat was a little better than the other so we made a deal that whoever was holding Cason got to sit in the semi-good seat! So we were sitting there trying to hold ourselves up straight in our seats!! We stopped a couple of times to get more passengers and we ate the sandwiches we had packed. Oh!! They were showing Nigerian movies while we drove, and the plots and acting were SOOOO hilarious!! So everyone on the bus was all into this movie (a murder drama) and Blu and I were just laughing! People were looking at us like "that wasn't a funny part!"

Basically, we felt safe on the bus even though we were uncomfortable. We felt the bus swerve a couple of times and when Blu looked forward he could see us passing on curves, so I made him stop looking. :) We dozed a little and around 2, we woke up and got ready, because we were told the bus would arrive between 3 and 4am and we were afraid we would miss where we were supposed to get off. 3 comes, 4 comes, 4:30 comes....we finally arrive in Isoka at 5am. The bus driver yelled "Isoka!" and we grab all of our stuff and rush to the front. People mumbled "muzungu" (white person) as we walked up the rows of the bus. I was SOOOO relieved to look out the window and see a tall, bald, white guy - my brother-in-law Blake!! He had been chasing buses since 3am trying to figure out which one we were on...yeah...we got on the wrong bus. Apparently, there is a nicer bus line that arrives sooner and would have been much more comfortable. Oh well...we might have missed the adventure then. :)

Stay tuned tomorrow for pics of my time in Isoka with my sister and her family, and more pics than you'll probably want to see :)

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