Up until now we’ve been travelling largely without any specific plans and without booking accommodation. This wasn’t really a problem until we got to Lilongwe, Malawi where many places were fully booked. The situation was worse in Lusaka. There are very few budget places and the ones we did manage to stay in rarely had hot water, if any water at all. You can imagine the state of the Western style toilets.

After two nights in our first hostel, we were kicked out because our room had been pre-booked (who are these pesky planners??) and tried our luck at the other budget places. Our only option was to stay in a tent belonging to Chachacha backpackers, in the grounds of the hostel. When our host showed us to the tiny, beaten up and broken North Face tent, we sighed, and took this photo, thinking “well at least it’s only for one or two nights”.

Deciding that we should really book our next place in advance, we tried to call the hotels in Livingstone. You can’t imagine the frustration we endured in trying to make a reservation. We couldn’t get through to any of the hotels on our Zambian mobile due to a number of factors including: changes to area codes, Celtel only allowing calls within the city you’re already in and landlines at the hotels being down When our hotel receptionist finally got through on her landline, she found there was ‘no room at the inn’.

What to do? We really wanted to visit Livingstone and Victoria Falls. Despite the very cold nights in Zambia, there was only really one thing for it; buy a tent. All of the places there have room for campers (with the added advantage that it’s much cheaper than staying in a room). We were about to set off to the mall to do some tent shopping, when the hostel owner mentioned he’d bought a tent off someone for $5 and we could buy it off him for the same price. Excited, we followed him to the garden to check it out. You can guess which tent he was talking about……..

(DaveB edits: Of course, the tent came with no pegs and so we’re using BBQ skewers. And nowhere here has a padded Karrimat to sell us and so we’re sleeping on picnic-chair covers…)

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