The official game drives in the park were not hugely successful, but our close encounters at the camp site were to continue. This time Janet decided to have a couple of hours reading by the banks of the Luangwa river, in the shade of one of the trees which happened to be laden with a fruit the locals call “elephant cake”

I am sure you can guess where this is going but as Janet was engrossed in a Sherlock Holmes mystery a large male elephant approached softly but rather quickly. I was sitting in the van and saw it when it was about 30feet from Janet and shouted a warning. Janet moved faster than I thought she was capable of, and the elephant knocked her chair over perused a couple of pages of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, remembered he’d read it, pulled a few branches off the tree and moved on leaving Janet shaking.

Although it seems a bit daft our plan was to drive 1000k south to Livingstone and the Victoria Falls, and then unlike most overlanders who would cross into Botswana and then Namibia and South Africa, we were to drive back via Lake Kariba and the famous Dam, and re-enter Malawi, and then into Mozambique

Off we set on unpredictable roads to Lusaka (which has little to commend it) and from there down to Livingstone. It took around 3 days, but Livingstone and the Victoria Falls were worth the trip.

Purely by chance we came upon the Livingstone Safari Hotel and Camp, which was run by a hugely amusing and eccentric Dane called Tjiss. It was also the centre of the local ex patriate drinking club, and we became honorary members simply by buying them all a drink. The nightly scene at the bar was like something out of Casablanca, and the characters could easily fit in to an English Soap. There was Leonard, ex South African Air Force Pilot now flying helicopters through the Vic Falls Gorge. His safety maxim for pilots was  “ No drinking within 30 feet of the helicopter, and no smoking for 24 hours before a flight”. There was Tony the local computer man and his girlfriend who was a professional smuggler, and Trevor the resident Alan Quartermain. They were a great bunch and we had to experience the helicopter trip with a drunken pilot, and even bought a computer from Tony. This as well as a Sunset Cruise on the Zambesi.

The most memorable incident occurred however as we went to visit The Victoria Falls.

We were told you can get very close to the falls and were bound to get very wet, so put cameras into something waterproof.

We decided a supermarket bag would be ideal and as Janet stepped out of the van to start a 1 kilometre walk to the falls, she was attacked and her supermarket bag snatched with our two cameras in it. All hell broke loose, as the culprit vaulted an 8 feet high fence, and sat on the ground examining the spoils. It was of course a baboon and it had genuinely fooled Janet as it was as she said incredibly strong, and she had thought it was a man that had snatched the bags.

The locals advised Janet to stop screaming at the baboon since as soon as he realised there was no food he would lose interest. We watched with bated breath as he examined and smelled each camera and finally left them on he ground and ran off. A local then recovered them for us.

We abandoned the idea of a plastic bag and set off for the Falls, which were truly spectacular. It used to be possible to see the Falls on a day pass into Zimbabwe, and people say this is even more spectacular, but the sight from the Zambian side was good enough for us (and David Livingstone)

The next day we had 18 holes at the Royal Livingstone and Victoria Falls Golf Course, and Janet is definitely getting better. Some spectacular holes as the name would indicate, but we only lost a few balls in the Zambesi.

The Kariba dam was not up to much, mainly because an error in navigation placed us about 200k away from where we wanted to be. Getting to the Dam would have involved another 300k on bad roads so we called it quits.

Our general impression of Zambia was that it could be an extremely prosperous country, with minerals and agriculture but things have gone seriously wrong, and there are really too many poor people here than there needs to be.

Apart from the Victoria Falls there was really not much to see. We arrived back in Lilongwe to find Malawi is without diesel. We may have to buy some on the black market to be sure we have enough to get to Mozambique,but nothing will stop us from another round on our favourite golf course. They may even have got hold of a few more left handed clubs.