Lusaka, Zambia - centre of the universe (really?)

Arrive Lusaka International Airport on South African Airways after the monstrous Emirates and Kenyan Airways Airbus flights have arrived, and you're up the creek as far as leaving the Arrivals hall in under an hour and a half (if like me, you don't have a SADC (Southern African Development Community) passport or a work permit) and have to buy a visa on arrival. Arrive on a later flight, and you can be out through Immigration, Customs and baggage pickup and arranging your taxi in under ten minutes. Things like this matter to the fly in - fly out Lusaka traveller, since it's a quintessential administrative capital.

I made you a panorama of the view from one of the main hotels there looking southeast(ish) towards the city centre. Interestingly, although I usually have a good sense of direction, I struggle to know which way I'm facing in Lusaka. Go figure.

The building with the blue roof on the left houses local offices of development finance organisations like the World Bank and the African Development Bank. As you can see, the city has a lot of trees, mainly indigenous hardwoods and some alien imports like jacarandas. They are beautiful and give a peaceful feel to the city. From hotel room level. The traffic at ground level gives a different feel.

A vista, because who doesn't need more sky in their lives?

Lusaka does tend to offer spectacular sunrises and sunsets. This was taken in April last year.

Confession time

You'd think I would have a treasure trove of photos of Lusaka, Zambia's capital, given I've been travelling there regularly since 1989. Twenty-eight years! And yet I had more photos of rural Tunisia, which I visited for a day, than a city I've worked in off and on for nearly three decades. It's one of those odd cities where people don't tend to take touristy photos, given it's an administrative capital and visitors to Zambia go to places like Victoria Falls (in the town of Livingstone on the Zambia side, Vic Falls on the Zimbabwe side) as soon as (or even if) they've arrived through Lusaka.

Okay, I do have a lot of photos of Victoria Falls as well as Kariba Dam as I've had the real privilege of going there many times - yup, mostly for business; once to Livingstone and the Falls for a Valentine's Day weekend. That's more like it! The thing is, those photos are all printed because they were taken on film (for younger readers: "a thin flexible strip of plastic or other material coated with light-sensitive emulsion for exposure in a camera, used to produce photographs or motion pictures." 😘).

That's my confession/excuse, and I'm sticking to it. I don't want to give you stock pictures of Lusaka, because that would feel like cheating. I'd rather give you word pictures instead.

A typical Lusaka business visitor's day

You're there to work, to go to meetings, maybe have a dinner meeting, then fly out again. So the routine tends to be arrive, chat with taxi driver about whatever the President is up to now, check into hotel, have first meeting, go to dinner; gym in the morning, followed by breakfast (maybe a breakfast meeting), then meetings the rest of the day. Make sure you have enough kwacha (the local currency) for the taxis, and maybe pick a driver to take you for the whole day. You'll exchange cell numbers, but chances are the next time you visit Lusaka he won't be there, so you start over with another driver.

Different story if you have an office there, zowie! A driver will pick you up at the airport and probably drive you to all of your meetings. You might not even have to change money, since you can now buy lunch at any one of the insane multiplicity of malls which have sprung up in the last five years using your credit card. Pretty soon we should be able to pay in SBD, like @shla-rafia told us about in his post earlier today about paying a bar tab in SBD in the Azores (https://steemit.com/sbd-accepted/@shla-rafia/it-s-official-i-just-paid-with-steem-dollar-at-the-marisqueira-jacob-in-mosteiros-sao-miguel-azores-portugal-and-so-can-you).

For such a big city, Lusaka is a really small place. You'll see someone you know somewhere who you perhaps haven't seen for a few years, and have a beer with them in one of the hotel bars.

An aside - Fred, the total exception in the driver world

Fred was the most amazing driver, not just because he was a part time rally driver, which made his city driving interesting, to say the least, but also because he has stayed in touch with me for more than two decades. I won't share too much about his life, but let me tell you this is one of the most enterprising people I have ever come across. He would call and message me internationally before such communication was commonplace. A couple of years ago, he friended me on Facebook. He's a cool guy.

Centre of the universe stuff

Good ol' me, I head off to the gym in my hotel one early Saturday morning sometime on a three-week visit during the 1990s, and what happens? I'm alone in the gym (I said Saturday morning, right?) and this woman walks in with a baby on her shoulder. Our jaws race each other to drop the fastest. We had been in civil engineering in McGill University together in the 1980s. She asked, "What are you doing here?", and I said managing a technical assistance project funded by the Canadian government. I asked her, "What are you doing here? I thought you were from the Caribbean." She replied - I teach aerobics here. Oh yeah, it also turns out she, her husband and brother-in-law, all McGill alumni, run (and still do, as far as I know) a consulting engineering company there.

The thing is, that sort of experience isn't that uncommon in Lusaka. It's a pretty small, but extremely diverse, universe of people who do go there.

The end, for now

I hope you've enjoyed this "helicopter" experience of Lusaka. Blogging on Steemit is encouraging me to be more useful in taking photos (as in taking them, instead of not bothering), so perhaps I'll be able to share more detail in future posts and give you a more granular view. For now, this has been my introduction to you of an unexpected centre of my universe.