Luckless in Lusaka

We checked out early from our hotel in Livingstone on the 5th and took the bus up to Lusaka with Dee. (Ray had gone a few days earlier with the car). It was an uneventful journey and we got a cab to the backpackers and promptly ordered pizza! We said goodbye to Dee, it had been lovely to see her. I did some washing whcih I hung out on the line in the hostel whereupon several berries fell on it and stained it purple. Rotten luck!

We explored Lusaka. We stood on Cairo road and wondered where it reminded us of. Eventually we decided Lusaka looked like Ulan Bataar with trees. It's full of cracked pavements, dust and big square buildings. However it's got a nicer athmosphere than UB and not so many street kids.

The next few days we hung around and first thing on Monday went into town to the immigration office to extend our visa. Now, they simply refused to do it as it wasn't running out until the 14th, so told us to get it extended in Katete. We asked them to confirm there was an office in Katete and nobody seemed sure. So after a bit of discussion they did tell us that there was definitely an office in Chipata (about 1.5 hours away from Katete), so if all else failed we could do it there. So that was about 2 hours wasted.

We hoped to have better luck then at the BA office to try to change the dates on our tickets, we were due to fly out of Addis on the 30 March and we weren't sure about getting up there overland (not since they invaded Somalia and borders were closed). Anyway since Africa was proving to be very expensive we wanted to head back to London earlier and maybe even manage to fly to Addis from Lusaka (something we'd been assured when we booked the tickets was impossible). If there's one thing we've learned whilst travelling it's that nothing is impossible and with a little patience you'll probably get your way.

The office was in chaos, they were shutting down the travel shop. We finally tracked down a member of staff but it looked so chaotic we just left our itinerary and refused to hand over our paper tickets. It didn't look like we'd have an answer on our tickets anytime soon. Nor, did we think we'd get what we wanted this time.