Traveling on Zambian Buses

The morning after I arrived in Lusaka, I headed down to Livingstone (home of Victoria Falls) for the long weekend (Monday was African Independence Day or something). I figured spending 7 hours on a bus would help me adjust to culture shock. One the way down our only big adventures were stopping for a few cows to cross the highway & driving through a small wildfire.

The ride back wasn’t quite so pleasant. The bus we took back assigned seat numbers & the people a row into front of us got into an argument with some other Zambians about whether they were in the correct seats. As the discussion continued, it spread toward the back of the bus where a man started going off in Nyanja about how it must be the wazungu’s (white people’s) fault because we didn’t know how to ride African buses (even though we were in the middle of the disputed section so either the people in front or the people behind were the ones whom had made the mistake…) This prompted my office mate, who has been living in Africa for the past 8 months, to start yelling at him about the numbering system & how race had nothing to do with one’s ability to read numbers. The bus employee seemed completely clueless, but eventually we all moved back a row only to discover several hours later we’d been right originally.

Before we even got moving a preacher got up & started evangelizing. After pointing out multiple times that he did not ask for money on the bus, he gave an almost interesting discourse on living water. He concluded by telling us we were all born in sin & going to hell. I personally didn’t think his strategy of trapping people on a bus to make them listen to him was going to win him many converts, but apparently this is a common occurrence on Zambian buses.

Our bus driver seemed to think that the horn was a way to say hello to every vehicle, person, or animal that we passed, which made sleeping virtually impossible. As the day went on the bus became increasingly crowded. This lead to our being rather squashed & to a growing fragrance that slowly permeated everything on the bus. Lovely. We were actually quite lucky to make it both ways without breaking down. Another office mate of mine came home on a later bus, which broke down after an hour and was eventually fixed with a tin can & a ball of rusty wire. Yeah, traveling in Africa is kinda awesome.