Hitching down the Tanzam Highway to Lusaka 1974

From Dar es Salaam I headed inland, hitch-hiking down the newly constructed Tanzam Highway. At the roadside just out of Dar, I teamed up with Sami, a Japanese lad who was heading in the same direction. The first day we got as far as the town of Morogoro where we spent the night in a building under construction. The next day we spent several hours fruitlessly trying to hitch a ride out of Morogoro and it wasn’t until the early afternoon that we were eventually picked up by a large lorry transporting two large cast-iron collars to a copper mine at Ndola in Zambia. It was an interesting ride as Sami and I scrambled into the collar to find ledges and cross-struts which were ideal for us to sit on and watch the passing countryside and the game as we passed through the Mikumi National Park.  At the unusual hilltop town of Iringa our Indian driver and his mate insisted that we saw the Yul Brynner Western ‘Catlow’ with them in the local cinema. That night Sami and I slept on the back of the lorry in one of the collars.  

The lorry developed some mechanical problem, but this was fixed at the town of Mbeya and after crossing into Zambia we drove overnight in pouring rain with Sami and I huddled in the back. It was a hell of a night. My sleeping bag was thoroughly saturated with rain-water, and water thrown up by the lorry’s wheels which splashed through gaps in truck's flatbed.  In the morning the heavy rain eased to heavy showers and I managed to partly dry my sleeping bag. I had bought this very lightweight sleeping bag in London, feeling it would be suitable for Africa. It was not much more than a space blanket (metallised polyethylene terephthalate [MPET]) in a nylon cover. This was then new space-age technology, developed by NASA in the 1960s and designed to prevent body heat loss. Through most of the trip it had been adequate, but this was the first time I found that it didn’t keep out heavy rain – both from above and below!

I rode for around 1500 kms down the Tanzam Highway in the collars on this vehicle

Late that same afternoon we were dropped off at the small town of Kapiri M’Poshi when the driver turned off the main road to Lusaka to head to Ndola. A heavy shower of rain at dusk forced Sami and I to seek refuge in a small roadside building that was under construction. It gave us good shelter but first we had to appease the local watchman who, in a nervous high-pitched voice was screaming ‘Get out! Get out!’ when he first saw our shadowy figures, but his whole demeanour changed when he saw that we were non-African. He was, I noted: ‘a funny little character who prattled on in a mixture of English and Swahili – it didn’t matter to him whether we understood or not.’ He insisted we join him in a supper of ‘mealie-meal’, the staple maize flour of southern Africa, and dried fish cooked on a charcoal burner. It was quite tasty. We slept on the hard, concrete floor and in the morning Sami and I bid our funny friend farewell and hitch-hiked on to Lusaka.

Lusaka, capital of Zambia, was a big modern city and in the crush of the midday crowds I lost sight of Sami as we crossed busy Cairo Road. He just seemed to disappear and I never did see him again. I spent the night at the Lusaka camp ground before hitching south to Livingstone, receiving lifts from interesting ex-pat English residents who had emigrated to Zambia before independence when it was still Northern Rhodesia. That evening I walked along an illuminated path through the forest from the Livingstone camp ground to the mighty Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River. To say I was awe-inspired was an understatement.  The thunderous plunge of the deluge creating wreaths of swirling spray, lit by spotlights gave the entire scene a mystical effect and what was most remarkable is that I was the only person there that night. I was also the only person staying at the Camp ground, sleeping in my sleeping bag under a baobab tree, braving the wandering hippos and elephants. I never saw the campsite sign warning of these dangers until the next morning!

The Victoria Falls from Livingstone, Zambia

© Neil Rawlins  text & photography

Excerpt from the book One Foot in Front of the Other - First Steps now availbale in paperback from Amazon Books