We passed through Kafue National Park and stopped at the only gas station between there & Mongu and guess what? There wasn’t any gas!
The truck was apparently on it’s way to fill the holding tanks.
While Frederick was speaking with the owner of the filling station a large white flat bed truck with sides like a fence on the bed pulled in. It was full of ladies with red dresses and white scarves on their heads. I had seen many such trucks last year and always missed taking their picture. There must have been 30 women sitting in the back of this truck.
I took this opportunity and jumped out of the car and asked them if they would sing and I would video tape them. They smiled and started singing. In my haste I forgot to open the dust cover on the camera. This happened many times on our journey as Carl, being the more experienced camera man, always shut the dust cover. Me being the ,don’t want to miss the shot, kind of person never shut the dust cover. So I only got their voices. It was the first time I had used the video camera on this trip and I couldn’t figure out why the screen was all black and didn’t want to miss anything just in case it really was recording. Live and learn. Lol.
It is really quite a sight to see & hear. Sorry you missed the visual but have a listen.
As you can hear I was holding up traffic as now the whole gas station was packed with cars trying to get gas and drive past me.
After I jumped back into the car, we headed on our way hoping to make it to Mongu before we ran out of gas.
No such luck!
Frederick called his friend in Mongu and asked him to bring us some gas. He would start on his way from Mongu and we would continue toward Mongu and hopefully we would meet. Worse case, he would see us on the side of the road out of gas. Luckily Frederick’s friend found us and we had enough gas to get to Mongu. I gave him one of the oranges from the big bag I had brought as a thank you. They only grow oranges in South Africa so they are hard to get and expensive in Western Province.
We made it to Mongu around 4pm and had to make it to the Zambezi River before the last pontoon boat at 6pm. I was getting nervous as the sun goes down around 6pm as well and it is not fun driving on these roads in the dark. Actually I had never driven on them in the dark as I was warned that it was not a good idea.
We ended up staying over night in Mongu and left at 6am the next day.
We filled up with gas in Mongu and were on our way. This gas would have to get us to Kalabo and back to Mongu as there are no filling stations in Kalabo. I couldn’t remember exactly from 2011, but I think we were looking at about 2-2.5 hrs of driving just to Kalabo. Boy was I wrong!
Now the fun starts!
