Day 40

Day forty
Tuesday - 25th February 2020

Current position
New Fairmount Hotel
84 John Hunt Way
Livingstone
Zambia
S 17°50.58816'
E 25°51.57822'

Another early start as we swept the sleep from our eyes and made our way for breakfast at 7.15am. At eight our cases and us were on the bus for the ten minute drive to the airport.
After checking in and being processed we made our way to the lounge where Ros could not resist an early morning glass of Prosecco I chose a more mundane cup of black coffee.
The nearly empty British Airways plane with only a handful of passengers left half an hour late and about an hour and a half later we stormed into Livingstone named after Doctor Livingstone 'I presume'.
The taxi drivers at the airport told us there were no Uber's in Livingstone however not surprisingly we did not believe them but we had to eat humble pie as they were right. So Ros sprang into action and did a deal for a ride into town. Our hotel is not bad considering that Zambia well at least Livingstone seems to be light years behind the Cities we've seen in South Africa. Once checked in we rested for an hour in our room before venturing out to take a look around. We stopped for afternoon tea and a fake cream doughnut at a small café and then ran the gauntlet down a street of small market stalls all selling exactly the same wooden carvings. We roamed around the town stopping only to buy a local SIM card for my phone. The girl in the shop was very helpful and managed to soft sell me 10 gigabyte of data which will never be used during our five day stay here. We continued our walk round the poor old town. On the outside the shops are grubby and shabby but on the inside they are clean and stuffed full of merchandise. Load shedding is worse here than in South Africa as the power cuts are intermittent without warning and last for twelve hours at a time. Fortunately our hotel has a generator which kicks in so we should not be affected. We also could not fail to notice that most people we passed or followed on the street smell to high Heaven. Even the school kids ronked. It's horrible. Wherever we've travelled before we have not come across this the odd person with body odour yes but not every other person. So it's deep breaths and hold it as long as you can.
Before heading back to the hotel we stopped for a drink at the local pub which was not as we know it but it did sell ice cold lager. We returned to the hotel for another rest before going to the hotel's restaurant for our evening meal. It wasn't a bad choice as the food was good but the wine was awful as it was as sweet as Ribena. The waitress told us that we had to buy a bottle to get the good stuff. She brought us a nice bottle of Merlot which she gently poured for us. The bottle of wine was good as were the poppadoms. It was good to talk to Ashley on whatsApp after our meal in the hotel restaurant as it was the first time we'd spoken to him for over six weeks.