“Too often. . .I would hear men boast of the miles covered that day, rarely of what they had seen.”
– Louis L’Amour
Well, these last few blogs pretty well give you an overview of the Livingstone Project. I'm sure there are probably many, many stories I could have mentioned or which have just slipped my mind at the moment of writing, but you get the main gist of the projects. It was busy, busy, but there was also plenty of time to take in the sight and sounds of Livingstone and do some of the ore 'tourist' things. So let's move on to some of the tales of those experiences!
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| tourist map of Livingstone |
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| Backpackers is that a way......... even with these huge drainage ditches, the roads would flood during the downpours. |
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| gated front entrance |
If your ever in Livingstone and looking for an inexpensive place to stay, then Backpackers could be for you. I didn't see in any of the backpackers rooms, but understand, you could rent a bunk, sharing, or rent the room by paying for all the beds, which, really was not all that expensive (I think a single bunk was $8.00 per night). It's a well maintained compound, fully enclosed, secure, gated with guards at the gates. http://livingstonebackpackers.com/
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relaxing area with giant TV outside reception
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where we had to do our own laundry (just our under clothes and socks)
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| above - staff meeting one morning on the steps.....the lovely pool located in the gardens |
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| The volunteer house within the Backpackers compound |
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| our outdoor eating area |
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There was lots of fun on many evenings when screaming girls would come looking for me to remove bugs, mainly Praying Mantis, geckos and a few other creepy crawlies....not sure why they didn't call the boys, but you know I'm always interested in all kinds of wildlife, so was interested to see what the hoop-a-la would be about. Most things that creep along, don't bother me at all (just those darn slithery things), so I was happy to oblige. My gecko friends were numerous and liked to hang out around the lights at night...good pickings, I suppose. One evening was particularly wild and funny when the girls found a toad in their toilet!
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see...he's actually smiling at you!
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this fairly large moth was pretty awesome.
He looked like a camouflage stealth bomber from the top!
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looking across the street, the ShopRite grocery is on the right and then we'd walk down past the taxi's, hanging a left go a few yards and were back at the Backpackers.
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Travelling around town was an experience. Imagine the largest speed bumps you have ever run across and that is basically the main road through downtown! It perhaps has something to do with the sandy soil and they may have never laid a proper foundation for the highway, so rains and then the colder winters probably erode the under part of the roads till it looks and feels like a carnival ride. No low-riders here! It may be considered a tourist town, but you certainly get the true ambiance of African infrastructure.
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Cafe Zambezi is where we ate dinner a few times, just across from the mall, and where those brave souls ate the Mopane worms!
Unfortunately, garbage is still a huge problem, with no proper sanitation pick-up, which I hope the business owners will one day see as a benefit to the their tourist trade, to make a pact with other business owners to pay to have proper pick-up and trash barrels, as I know the trash bothered me terribly, especially all the plastic bottles and bags. It's such a shame in such a beautiful country, to see this.
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And of course the markets for the locals and the few brave tourists that would surely get lost in the warrens of stalls in these huge local markets.
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There's an entrepreneur on every corner, it seems and every district has an area little shops, many, many homes have little stands out front selling different items, from home grown fruits and veggies, to pre-bought items for re-sale
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| hand made furniture |
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| where we expect to see a Starbucks on every corner, here it's either a car wash or a barber shop/beauty salon |
One of the sadder things we witnessed EVERY day, as we would drive past the 2 locals cemeteries,would be the huge funerals taking place. The first few times we came across them, there were actual convoys of vehicles, trucks, and I mean like big dump trucks, filled with people in the backs, sitting of the edges, even on the back bumpers, carloads of folks, people walking along the roads, with their ever present umbrellas (for the sun), that at first I thought we were running into some sort of traffic jam, which of course in a way they were. Lines and lines of vehicles, sometimes on our way out and another on our way home, and who knows how many in between.I thought perhaps, seeing the first, that it must be a very important person, but came to realize, after seeing them day after day, that this was the norm.
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