Sunday 4 July - Mpika to Monze

Another long day in the car.... We are getting accustomed to spending most of our lives in the Jeep now. We know where everything is and we can pack and unpack pretty quickly.

The road improved as we moved south and we arrived in Lusaka shortly after lunch. The Bradt guide told us about two different shopping malls. We chose Arcades and what a pleasant surprise it was! It could be a mall in any suburb in South Africa. Best of all was the fact that it has a Super Spar - just like good old Knowles in Pinetown. We even knew where to find stuff because the layout is similar. We had a delicious sub for lunch and bought samoosas to eat for supper later. Best of all we found an ATM that accepted our cards and we were able to draw Zambian Kwacha and fill up with fuel.

Lusaka is a great city. It's fairly clean and well organised and the streets are very attractive with lots of trees.We had chosen to go to a campsite just north of Lusaka called Cane Break.We followed the road but must have missed the sign - or it has closed down since our Bradt guide was published in 2008. The sun was setting and we had no idea where to go - again! We said a prayer and looked at the Bradt guide again. I turned back a page and we discovered "the best camp site between Lusaka and Livingstone" was about 30km down the road. It's called The Moorings and it's on a beautiful farm. How did we miss that? The phone number didn't work but we drove in and had no trouble getting a place. Wow!

About an hour later two SA vehicles pulling trailers arrived. They are from Gauteng and had gone up to Serengeti in a group of ten vehicles. It sounds as if travelling in a big group has its problems and the group had split up. These two families were heading home via Botswana. They had heard so many stories of corruption at the Zimbabwe border that the decided to take the Bot route. Our own hassles with the Zim border police at Nyamapanda convinced us that we should do the same. Neither of us has been to Botswana and it had been part of our original plan. Mark did some research and discovered that in fact there was only 10km difference between two alternate routes so we're going to go for it.

Tomorrow it's off to Livingstone and then to the ferry across the Zambezi into Botswana on Tuesday. Zambia didn't get off to a great start with us but the roads in the south of the country are a great improvement and we enjoyed our second day.