In a good rainy season the Barotse Flood Plain swells with water as the Zambezi River and its tributaries break their banks. Just west of Mongu, the largest town in Barotseland and the capital of Zambia's Western Province, the Barotse stretches wide and flat into the horizon, where the Ku'omboka Ceremony takes place here. Meaning "to move to dry land", the ceremony marks the Lozi king's move from his dry-season palace at Leealui, near Mongu, to the drier highlands at Limulunga.
One of the last surviving great African rites, the ceremony was cancelled last year due to low water levels. With less rainfall over the past years, the Big Man can stay where he is. And at this time of year the Plains are drier still, with the harbour in Mongu little more than a dry dock.
We need to cross the Barotse to get to the HIV/Aids billboard in Kalabo, and most people tell us we can't do it without a four-wheel drive vehicle. Our truck, they say, won't cut it. Being cocky guys we only need one person a fish-peddler and hustler named Joe, to tell us the opposite and we're on our way.
It's only 65 kilometres to Kalabo, the road flat, rough and choked with sand. Along the road grassland colours the yellow-brown earth, grazing land for fat, beautiful long-horned cattle. A pale blue sky is peppered with flocks of gulls and other birds, fowls, herons, and lone soaring eagles. Tiny settlements of huts built of reed grass straddle the few high grounds. And at intervals the shimmering, meandering canals and streams that ferry passengers in log canoes far more smoothly than we are travelling.
Bwalya says that the man first contracted to build this road squandered vast sums of government money without much to show for the cash. The highway was so poorly made that over the years the road has vanished as if swallowed by the Plain, leaving little more than a slumping, abandoned bridge and a rough line of where the route used to be. A Kuwaiti construction firm is at work slowly rebuilding the highway, but we have to make due with what's left of the old road.
Within a short while we hit a deep sandy stretch which seems to gulp down the truck. We dig out and get on our way again but it's not the first time we get stuck. In a major oversight Bwalya's forgotten the tow-rope, and we're left with only our own man-power to push free of the sand. I'm trying to keep track of how many times we're stuck, but do I could each episode or only the ones where we've moved more than a few metres before getting stuck again?
Mid-way we reach the Zambezi River and a laughably derelict pontoon-boat ferry, with two 55hp outboard engines that power the creaky thing over the narrow crossing. In the shallows two fisherman in a dugout canoe stand upright as they paddle out to pull in their nets, the water just inches from flowing over the keel.
At Kalabo the billboard takes little time to fix, and Bwalya and I debate what to do next. It's just before 3pm, and the ferry stops running at 5. Should we make a run for it, taking the risk that we won't make it and will have to spend the night without food, water or toilets, sleeping upright and three abreast in the truck? Or should we stay and make an early start in the morning. For once my opinion is firm. We'll stay.
At the guesthouse in Kalabo a toddler freaks out when he sees me, breaking into tears and trying to hide in the folds of his mother's skirt. It must be me, since white faces aren't so rare in this area, or Western Province in general. In Kaoma, a town some 200 km east of Mongu, I saw seven different white people going about their business, and talked to two; one a Greek man from Montreal sourcing African masks for sale in the US; the other an Irish teacher spending her summer vacation volunteering at a local orphanage.
In three months in Africa I've spoken to only a handful of westerners, none of them in Lusaka. In the city foreigners generally keep to themselves, replicating the pattern of (anti) social behaviour common with expats around the world; generally ignoring each other.
Things are a little different in the rural areas. Along with the two muzungus I spoke to in Kaoma there were the white Zimbabwean farmers I met at the boat launch in Samfya. Having relocated their beef and tobacco business to Zambia after the land reform debacle in Zimbabwe, the two were looking for a boat to hire for some fishing on Lake Bangwelu. That night at the guesthouse in Samfya I met three western women on a week-long survey of educational projects coordinated by an international development agency.
Now in Kalabo Bwalya tells me there are more than a few whites around, running a safari company by the river at the edge of Liuwa Plain National Park. I have visions of deeply sun-tanned safari guides telling hair-raising stories to tourist around a bonfire at the lodge. And I wish it to be so. At the end of that sandpit road to Kalabo I'd like nothing more than to find some fellow muzungus.
Not that I'm hurting for a social outlet. I have friends and family here, and regularly meet people in Lusaka. But in those few conversations with fellow expats I found a common world view, a capacity to relate and share similar experiences and notions that are different from the average Zambian. They understood my accent, even if mistaking my nationality (the Irish teacher thought I was American, though I mistook her for Scottish).
White Zambians are harder to relate to though, probably because I've only observed and have hardly spoken to them. And while better educated and well-positioned black Zambians treat whites as equals their average counterparts have more complicated reactions to muzungus.
At best, people want to talk, to show off their English, are merely curious. Like a handful of other whites in Lusaka I take the local transportation, and the guys who run the mini-bus stop where I catch a ride home know me now, shake my hand and seem happy to see me. At worst some people are looking for an easy mark. In the city by myself I walk brusquely and with as much purpose as I can summon. After three months I'm learning how to negotiate life in Zambia as a white rather than a Zambian.
As much as I carry the passport I'm not a Zambian, I'm a foreigner, a reality I was used to and enjoyed in Korea, but which means something very different here. In Africa, by virtue of my skin-colour I'm seen as privileged. Maybe that's why white Zambians seem more aloof than the expats. It may not be an explicit racist attitude but rather more like the relations between people and their domestic servants; on the one side suspicious, on the other envious; co-dependant and intrinsically unequal.
Perhaps that's why I'm looking on expectantly when I see a tourist or development worker, because I want to be equal, to not have to think about my own skin. With them I don't wonder why they're talking to me.
In Kalabo I walk down to the riverfront with a local man who's asked for a lift back to Mongu. The white sand beach is clean and cool in the waning light. A family awaits the tow-rope ferry boat slowly crossing the narrow waterway. My guide points out the muzungu settlement some distance away; not a safari lodge as Bwalya claimed but a camp of miners prospecting the area for minerals.
As much as I'd wished to find a reserve of muzungus, a Thai-style grouping of expats running amok in remote Africa, it's not to be and I'm not too disappointed. It was a pipe-dream anyway, a romantic and rather ridiculous way to pass time on the road.
Coming back from the riverfront I welcome a lift from the local chief of police. How often is it you get a free ride from the cops?! And while the road back to the guesthouse isn't long it's choked with deep sand. Walking on it is like ambling on the moon. If only the sand were easier to drive on we'd have had an simpler time the next day.
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