Getting Around Northern Province

On this particular trip to Northern Province, I went along with another Canadian volunteer who had arrived in Luanshya, Zambia one year after I did. He was a secondary school teacher who wanted to visit some of the others from his 'batch' who had been posted to Mbala, about 550 miles away at the southern end of Lake Tanganyika.

We made it as far as Mpika on the first day, via the paved Great North Road and about half-way between Kabwe and the Tanzanian border, where we stayed in a government-run Rest House. The next day we veered almost due-north onto typical unpaved Zambian bush highways. Here, we are barrelling along the 130-mile road between Mpika and our next stop at Kasama.

These highways were usually in quite good condition, but you had to be careful if it had been raining. When wet, these typical red roads became very muddy and slick, almost like driving on ice in Canada! The past practise came in handy a few times! You could never be totally sure of the gasoline situation, so it was always best to fill-up while you could in any of the larger villages that had a petrol station open for business.