One of the places I really wished to visit in Zambia, was South Luangwa National Park, which is in the southeast of the country. It was some distance from Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, literally a 12-hour drive on some not-so-good road. Flying there was also expensive as the local airport, Mfuwe, was only serviced by small airlines most flying bush planes. So, after going to and fro, I decided the best option was to drive across the border from Malawi. I had organized with the Avis office in Lilongwe to take the rental car across the border, and they provided what I hoped was the paperwork we needed, which included an Interpol report, a letter from Avis Malawi giving us permission to take the car into Zambia and a copy of the vehicle logbook.

It was about a 90-minute drive to the Mchinji border post. Everything, like most everywhere else, at the border post was chaotic, to say the least. We parked up outside what appeared to be the Malawian border control, and no sooner had we gotten out of the car than we were swarmed by people trying to sell us SIM cards, exchange money and goodness knows what else! Eventually, we managed to ward off most of the swarm, but there were two or three who continued to follow us. They promised a ‘one-stop’ shop, but it was not quite so simple. The first part was easy, going through immigration – our passports were stamped and that was done. Next, we had to do all the formalities to take the car across the border. I guess the trafficking of stolen cars is a big issue! There was another one of those large books we had seen across Africa to record things into – I assume this is a by-product of these countries’ colonial past. We had to enter all our info and then everything about the car, including the chassis number, gross weight and engine size. Then we got a form from the officer on the desk to complete, with exactly the same info – this time we had to estimate the value of the vehicle. Of course, we had no idea of the costs of vehicles in Malawi, so we made it up! We handed the completed form in, so the officer disappeared with it and typed the details into a computer. Then she sent us across to the cashier to pay our 20,000 Malawian kwachas. We then came back with the receipt of payment, gave this to the officer who disappeared again, did some jiggery-pokery on the computer and came back with a stamped form. This somehow all took about 1-hour.

We were now free to leave Malawi – so we could drive a 100-yards down the road to the Zambian immigration post. Our three friends followed us – one of them had been helpful in guiding us through the formalities in the Malawian post. Before we went anywhere, we had to go through the health checkpoint, and show our covid vaccine records. There was a bit of a kafuffle over our CDC records card, the lady insisted we had something with a barcode on. Luckily, I had registered on the African CDC site which gave us a QR code – but she never checked the barcode or even asked to see our passports to see that the vaccine card matched our ID. What the heck! From there, our new friends guided us into another building where we got our visas authenticated and passports stamped.

So far, so good! Then we had to go through the formalities of getting our vehicle approved for importation – more large books to handwrite all the information into and more forms to complete. It seemed to take forever. Once this was done, all we had to do was get car insurance for Zambia and pay for the carbon tax.

This is when we discovered that the most helpful of the men who had been helping was actually an insurance salesman! He took across to a small office to do all the necessary paperwork, followed by the other two men. The cost of the insurance and carbon tax was $68 USD, but we had to pay this in Zambian kwacha. There was an ATM, but we were told this was not working (I am not sure this was actually true – I would normally have tried to find out but by this time I was overwhelmed by the whole process). The other two men turned out to be money changers, so we changed some US dollars into Zambian kwacha (probably getting a lousy deal) and paid our fees. We went outside and our insurance man friend stuck a new sticker on the windscreen of the car, but we were not done yet. We had to complete the vehicle immigration process, which meant standing in line to see a different agent, who I am not what his exact role was. Our man paid him the money for a carbon tax. This agent then said there was a problem with our paperwork, we didn’t have the original vehicle logbook. Of course, no rental vehicle has the original logbook, but the rental company should have stamped and signed the logbook copy. So, we had to walk back to the Malawian side to the makeshift police station. Our insurance man friend seemed to know the officers here, and after a bit of chit chat one man, who seemed to be quite senior, disappeared off with our logbook copy (I hate letting people wander off with our official documents) and a few minutes later he reappeared with it signed. Now back to the Zambian border post. We returned to see our agent friend, who seemed busy not doing much apart from tapping away at a computer. So, we sat down and waited. Luckily, there was a TV in the room showing an English Premier League match (there always seems to be football on a screen in the border posts in Africa). Eventually, the agent got around to us – and we were given a document to use on our return and a handwritten slip of paper, which we had to give to the man at the gate to let us into Zambia. Two and a half hours after we arrived, we were finally on the road in Zambia.

The rest of the journey was straightforward. We stopped off en route to get a SIM, which with all the registration, took around half an hour. So, it was late afternoon before we arrived at our home for the next 3-nights, Track and Trail River Camp, which is close to the entrance of the South Luangwa National Park. On arrival, we were met by the owners, who gave us a tour of our bungalow, which overlooked the Luangwa River. It was amazing. The bungalow was huge with a large bed, a small sitting area and a huge shower with a clawfoot bath. Not only was the bungalow enormous it was beautifully decorated with unique furnishing and wall ornaments (mostly interesting shaped natural wood hung on the wall – which was better than it sounds!)

With no activities planned, we had the chance to relax. We went down to dinner early, to enjoy the view of the sun setting over the river, which was heavily populated with hippos and crocs. As we were sitting there enjoying a beer, we noticed a group of elephants on the far bank. Two of the younger males got into a tussle. It was fascinating to watch at they clashed tusks and pushed each other around. After a while the rest of the herd came into sight, and after a few minutes of grazing they crossed the river, which is wide, but very shallow this time of year. Having got our wildlife fix we settled down for dinner. The dinner they served us was incredible – and completely vegan.