Zambian Roads
Zambian roads have been a whole new experience. We have travelled the length of the country, over 2,000km, the vast majority of which has been amazingly good tarmac, but when it isn’t good, it really is bad.
Start with the good. These are generally long stretches of arrow straight roads, sometimes 20km or more, connecting the occasional bend. Zambia appears to have two asphalt contractors, Mr Smooth and Mr Bobbly. One is flat as an ironing board, the other seems to have been laid to emulate a good gravel road. Mr Smooth seems to have won 80% of the contracts. There’s no traffic.
However, we came across two sections of 50km or more where the tarmac emanated from the days of Corporal Jones and his butchers van and clearly was not up to modern day 38 tonne artics. Potholes! By the thousand. Every shape, size and frequency. Even drive-in potholes. Looks like the road has been hit by a meteor shower. Suddenly a good journey at 100kph becomes a 20kph flog. All the roads have very few vehicles, but the few you see on these potholed sections weave constantly to find the path of least bumps. They look out of control – mad car disease. Some of these sections have reverted back to sand, but sand of the worst kind, rutted, potholed, lumpy. People sometimes carve their own sand track beside the road and this is often faster than the road itself, but it doesn’t last long. Come back Mr Bobbly all is forgiven.
The other bizarre road deformation was in the tarmac north of Lusaka. Bolling alley tar. This stretch of the Great North Road is very heavily trafficked mainly with HGVs. Where they go slow or stop, their weight squidges the tarmac, softened by the sun, out from under the tyres, so in the towns, villages or check points there are two distinct tracks about a foot wide bounded by ridges of banked up tar about 4 inches high. Lethal if your trying to get out to overtake or back in after. In terms of traffic, that section north of Lusaka was an exception.
Most of the roads are virtually empty of vehicles, but with an almost constant flow of pedestrians and a few push bikes. There are little villages or settlements every few km and these locals are just going about their daily life. What that is though is difficult to say. Probably subsistence farming, maybe charcoal making, but little of anything is visible. Numerous little “stalls” exist along the roadside that might have a bunch of bananas or a small pile of tomatoes for sale. The homesteads are of either thatched rondevals or some mud brick and corrugated iron, but a lot of people were smartly dressed, in bright colours, and those that weren’t looked like they were in work clothes not destitute rags.
Driving on the Saturday afternoon was interesting. Everyone seemed to be dressed up and walking to their local village for a night out. Is Saturday night the same the world over? Pretty much all of these villages had a Primary School and there are occasional Secondary Schools. These are usually the smartest and most substantial building in town and its really good to see that the country is trying to better itself. What is also good is that every one is protected with a speed limit and speed bumps, so speeds are a lot lower (60kph) where the greatest number of people are. Nonetheless kids of pre-school age still play by the road, but all looked pretty car savvy.
Talking to people after we left Zambia they all said that the country has been a success story after its basket case period in the 90’s.
Back to roads. The final new Zambian experience has been a two and a half hour 29km journey from the previous night’s camp to the shore of Lake Tanganyika. 15km was barely wide enough for the car, was just rock of all shapes up to breeze block size where we were in 1st crawling at tick over speed, namely walking pace. Our reward at the end of, though, it is a magical white sands beach with thatched luxury villa and a beautiful restaurant/bar…….all to ourselves. A swim in the lake, a sunbathe, fish and chips for lunch – heaven. We have noticed that every time we endure something, the reward at the end of it as even more surprising than we could have hoped for.
Generally, throughout Zambia there are a lot of broken-down lorries. While they put out red warning triangles, custom also seems to require several bits of tree branch to be laid on the road. At least you can’t miss it. A lot of the lorries look visibly overloaded with massive humps of goods spilling over the sides and piled high. Obviously very slow up the hills. And slow descending them if they use engine breaking. If they don’t they end up in a heap at the bottom and we saw quite a number of lorries that had obviously run out of control and crashed. Most extraordinary though were the lorries shipping copper slabs out of the Copper Belt. They didn’t look to be carrying very much, but boy were they struggling. Copper must be a be nearly as heavy as lead. Many of the flat bed trailers of the artics were bowed under the weight and looked ready to snap in half. They would be doing mile after mile at walking pace. Easy to over take mind you.