Journey Part 4: Kitwe to Chingola

Kitwe turns out to be a bustling town of over 300,000 with a large open-air market, plenty of shops -- and legitimate currency exchange outlets on practically every corner (or so it seems). As I leave the bus, I am greeted by familiar cries: “Boss, hey boss!” “Taxi?” “Where you from?” Several arms reach into the bus and grab me and my tent (which I carry like a briefcase), pulling me out of the bus and into a jumble of bodies. It’s shocking, but it’s not so bad: I make clear that I don’t want a taxi or anything else, and the crowd loses interest quickly.

I have lunch, (a delicious chicken “pie“ for $1.20), duck into an Internet café (where it takes nearly 10 minutes to load the front page of the New York Times), and take a long walk through the town. Here's the only monument in town:
Satisfied with my sightseeing and weary from travel and now walking with a heavy pack, I ask for the bus to Chingola, the jumping-off point for the Congo. I am told it is somewhere on the other side of the market, so I decide to walk right on through.

The market is much bigger than I had thought. After rows of fruit and vegetables, there is clothing of every imaginable variety -- coats, hats, belts, shirts, underwear, Obama shirts, wrestling shirts, suits, shoes, and on and on -- and electronics, and crafts, and then more clothing. It’s a labyrinth, and I find myself turning randomly down ever-darker alleys in search of the back of the market. I turn down help from several hawkers (“Boss, hey boss!”), but one -- a tall teenager with what seems to be bright yellow paint on one of his top front teeth -- is persistent, and begins following me.

I tell my new guide I can find the bus stop on my own. How hard can it be? I stress that I won’t pay him. But he keeps following me. We go through more dark, sparsely populated sections of the market, finally emerging in what looks like... the back of a market. It’s dusty, there’s trash everywhere, a man is urinating nearby, and some kids are playing soccer on a dirt field. My guide walks on with purpose, and suddenly I am very happy to have him. We pass some menacing-looking characters, several of whom my guide greets by name. Wait, am I happy to have him? After a few more blocks, we are at the bus stop, which is a mass of vehicles, people, and products. We wind through moving and parked cars, fend off hawkers, turn a few corners, and arrive at a minibus going to Chingola, about 60 km away. I hop on, it fills up in a few minutes, and I’m on my way with about 20 new travel companions.

Chingola is smaller, and, by all appearances, far more prosperous than most other Zambian cities. Located in the middle of the “copper belt” in northern Zambia, it has some of the nicest houses I have seen in Zambia.

On the minibus, I sit next to Amos, who looks to be about 20 years old and just received his license to drive heavy trucks. He will mostly drive short distances, from near Chingola to Kitwe, but he is looking forward to driving loads of copper down to South Africa. He tells stories of Congolese officials extracting bribes from truck drivers (100 U.S. dollars for not carrying the right number of spare tires, for example), and explains that he’d rather drive south than north. At the bus stop, Amos and I get off together -- and I receive a mere three offers for taxi services and nobody even tries to grab my luggage. Amos shows me which bus I should take in the morning, and then he walks half a kilometer out of his way to drop me at a "guest house." Along the way, a teenager demands money from me (“Come on, boss, give me 5,000 kwacha”), but he disappears after a few sharp words from Amos.

After a long day of travel, I treat myself and stay in a room with a bed (as opposed to a tent, my default accommodation over the past month) for about $20. After a quick bite to eat, I fall right to sleep for 12 hours.