Zen and the Art of Pajero Maintenance

Last Saturday morning I left for Kawambwa, a town in Northern Zambia, 1200km from Lusaka. Eighteen hours, 150km in the wrong direction, 1 dead pig and 4 breakdowns later, I finally arrived.

The first mishap was erroneously passing a key turnoff by a mere 150km. To make matters more interesting, by the time we realized we had been going the wrong way for over an hour, we were also running out of gas. Fortunately for us, there were a friendly group of truckers in the town of Chilonga who were able to point us back in the right direction, sell us some diesel to get us there, and share their nshima with us!

We arrived in the town of Mansa as the sun was setting, and our battery decided that the onset of darkness would be the perfect time to stop working. We pushed the car into a petrol station, where a man offered to remove the battery from his car and put it in ours to get us going. It worked, and we headed off on the three hour journey to Kawambwa in the dark. Paul, who works for Right to Play and who I studied with in the UK, was on the first night shift, which ended shortly after he managed to collide with a suicidal pig. I was asleep and only felt the thump. I was too tired to get out, so I watched from the back as Paul and Fred, who works for Right to Play in Kawambwa, inspected the vehicle and a large crowd of Zambians who had gathered inspected them. The pig was the only party to suffer any injuries, fortunately.

I was on the next shift, which was when the headlights started to dim. Or at least I thought they did, but Paul and Fred seemed to disagree. I kept driving and wondering if I was crazy until, at a turn, I went to use the indicator only to find it wasn’t working, a moment which Paul later defined as “the moment when I knew we were really in trouble.” I soon gave up trying to drive in the dark with virtually no headlights, and passed the wheel to Fred. He got about 20 minutes down the road before the battery died again.

I’ll admit, I was a bit freaked. Breaking down on the side of a highway in Zambia in the middle of the night wasn’t exactly my idea of a good time. Fortunately, my male counterparts were much more calm. Fred promptly announced he was going to smoke a cigarette and think, and Paul had the reflective warning triangle out on the road in a flash. Meanwhile, I sat and let my mind race through our options, which were frighteningly few.

Before Fred could even finish his cigarette, headlights came shining over the bend. On a road where a car passes approximately once and hour, this was a miracle. We flagged them down to help us, but ‘help’ doesn’t even begin to describe what rolled along in that Ministry of Education truck with one headlight. Two men hopped out, inspected the engine and after using a piece of wire to repair the battery contacts, gave us a jump to get us going. Then they insisted on driving with us the rest of the way to make sure we made it safely. They must have known… We got about 10 minutes down the road before the battery konked out for a third time. This time they got serious, brought out their tools, and spent half an hour tightening various belts and doing god knows what else. I watched tensely, along with the group of Zambian men that appeared out of the bush to see what was going on, and tried to let the sounds drumming and singing in the distance soothe my nerves. This time our two friends, Paul and all the onlookers pushed the car down the road for Fred to get the engine running. I felt a bit left out, having been left standing in the road to watch, but in the end I actually quite enjoyed the site of seeing our car being pushed down a dark highway in Zambia by a bunch of friendly strangers.

Their miraculous mechanics worked like magic and we made it all the way to the Kawambwa junction with no trouble. So, after thanking them profusely we confidently headed off on the last 30km stretch of our journey. Half way there, however, the battery died yet again. Fortunately, one of our Ministry of Education friends had hopped onto a truck that was headed for Kawambwa and they were already behind us when we climbed out with even more dejected looks on our exhausted faces. We had managed to break down on a hill, so they decided it was just easier to tow us the rest of the way. So, when we finally reached Fred’s house at 11:30pm, it was being towed behind a large truck full of Zambian men drinking chibuku.

It didn’t actually feel like such a long trip, but Paul rightly pointed out that the fact that we played the celebrity name game for three straight hours before turning to ‘count the Kingdom Halls’ was a good indication of how long a journey it had been.

It was well worth it though. Not only because it was an opportunity to see the true colours of Zambians shine like never before, but because the three days we spent in Kawambwa were absolutely fabulous. On Sunday we splashed around in some of the most beautiful waterfalls I have ever seen, on Monday morning we toured the Congolese refugee camp where Fred works and played with all sorts of young Congolese children screaming ‘maaaaazuuuuunguuuuu!’ like I’ve never heard it screamed before, on Monday afternoon we swam at another beautiful waterfall, on Tuesday morning we were back at the camp visiting schools, the hospital, and the fish ponds and crop fields, and on Tuesday afternoon we went to Kashi Kishi, on the edge of Lake Mweru, and played cricket on the beach. We finished off our stay with a night of karaoke and dancing.

Paul and I left on Wednesday morning, thanks to a mechanic named Smart who had managed to get us operational again. We took two days to get back to Lusaka. It was nice to cover the whole distance in the daylight and see all the incredible landscapes, that changed constantly. We passed fields of never ending termite mounds, forests of trees whose leaves are now all bright red, orange, yellow and green, beaches of the whitest sand I’ve ever seen, floodplains with men in canoes navigating through tall green grass…. We camped overnight at a small lake called Waka Waka, about 40km from the highway. Despite being in the middle of nowhere and being the only people at the camp, the camp attendants made sure that when we came back from our walk there was a gorgeous campfire and a bucket of deliciously warm water in the washing hut awaiting us. It was a beautifully peaceful night, complete with roasted marshmallows and stargazing.

We awoke and got on the road, because we wanted to stop at another waterfall on the way and get back to Lusaka fairly early. We made it to the Kundalila Falls after a couple of hours of driving through stunning scenery. After an hour or so at the falls taking in the incredible views and having breakfast, we headed back to the car. I climbed into the passenger seat and started munching on a biscuit as I waited for Paul to start the car. Except that Paul couldn’t start the car. The battery, which had worked perfectly the previous day and all morning, had died again. So there we sat, alone, 15km from the highway, at the bottom of a hill, in a car that wouldn’t start. I laughed, but was conscious that very shortly the situation was going to cease to be amusing. We tried to push the car uphill far enough that we could roll it down to get the engine going, but despite our goliath strength, we couldn’t manage. I decided to head up the road and see if I could find any big strong men to help us. Unfortunately, there were none, so I returned with the next best thing – a gaggle of small children, who followed me back to the car as though I were the Pied Piper. I hopped in to steer, and through the windshield watched as a shirtless Paul surrounded by about a dozen children, one of whom had fit himself right in between Paul’s long white arms, pushed us uphill. I was so nervous about the car starting when they began to push back down that I failed to notice that it had actually worked! We quickly thanked our new friends and sped off towards civilization as quickly as possible.

When we reached the next sizeable town and had to stop for gas, we were well aware that we may not get the car started again. We weren’t aware however, that it would take us 2 hours to manage to do so. I shouldn’t complain, though – it took a while, but our roadside mechanic, Shek, loaded our batteries on the back of a bicycle and came back an hour later with tools and charged batteries in hand and managed to fix our loose belt permanently enough that the battery hasn’t died since.

I learned a lot on my trip to Kawambwa. I learned how to start a car when your battery dies. I learned that good company on a road trip is priceless. I learned that karaoke can be fun. I learned that there are more Jehovah’s Witnesses per capita in Zambia than anywhere else in the world. I learned how to play Backgammon. I learned that I am terrible at cricket. I learned that Zambia has as many incredible landscapes as it does warm hearts and friendly smiles. I learned that an empty dirt road is enough to bring about that evasive feeling of really seeing the world. And I learned that the best adventures in life happen when you least expect them.