There are good reasons to stay. It’s almost 6:00 in the evening, and it will be dark within an hour. I need to eat dinner. The place I’m going has no food, so I need to buy food and bring it along. Plus, I don’t know exactly where I’m going. After scouring the Internet, I have a scrap of paper with the following written on it: “Chimfunshi Chimpanzee sanctuary / orphanage. 60 km west of Chingola. Solwezi road. Campsite.”
On the other hand, there are reasons to go. I’ve stayed in Chingola before, and it’s fine but hardly exciting. It’s also expensive: I haven’t located a campsite in town, so I would probably have to stay in a guesthouse. And anyway, I want to keep moving.
At a taxi stand, I ask a few cab drivers how much to Chimfunshi. One hundred dollars, says one. That settles it, I think to myself. I’m going tomorrow.
Just then, another young man comes up and says “I will take you for 100,000 kwacha.” That’s about $20. I am skeptical, so I ask some of the men I have been chatting with, and they all agree that the guy is legitimate and that he knows where Chimfunshi is. So I go for it.
I scarf down some dinner, buy some bananas, bread, beans and water, and hop into my chariot. It’s a “combi” -- a medium-sized blue van -- and I’m the only passenger.
I sense that this is no ordinary combi. (Or maybe it’s a perfectly ordinary combi…)
When I try to put my bag and tent in the back seat, the driver runs over and says he will open the sliding door for me. He grabs it with two hands (one on the handle, the other through an open window) and lifts it clear away from the van. As I load my bags, the driver stands a few paces back, holding the sliding door in his arms.
I settle into the front seat. My seat has no cushion, so I sit on springs and metal bars. The back of the seat seems about to fall off; it leans all the way into the second row, the right side sagging lower than the left. The windshield is cracked. That’s normal, actually, but this one is really cracked -- with spider webs of cracks radiating from multiple centers. There’s a hole where a radio once might have been. My window doesn’t roll up.
As I’m trying to get comfortable, the driver -- a cheerful Zambian in his 20s -- tells me: “We are just waiting for the conductor.”
Hmm, I think. What’s the conductor for?
Soon, I find out. Another young man arrives with several containers of fluid. He shoos me out of my seat, lifts it up, and pours a liter of I-don’t-know-what down there. He hops into the second row of seats, unscrews a cap near the floor, and pours another liter down there. I think that one’s gas. Or water. The rest of the fluids he brought must be reserves.
Then, the conductor really goes to work. He gets behind the van and starts pushing. We gain a little speed and he shouts at the driver, who tries the ignition -- but the car shudders and stops in its tracks; the engine won’t turn over.
They repeat the procedure and get the same result. I get out and help push, but we still can’t start the combi. Finally, on the fifth try, the engine starts. We run alongside the moving van and jump in -- the conductor uses my door to avoid the detachable sliding door.
We are on our way. The combi runs better than it looks, I think.
Within minutes, I spot a few more issues with our vehicle. Most urgently, I notice that the car is filled with fumes. Intermittent coughs and sneezes are the soundtrack for the ride. I also notice some temperature issues. Specifically, my bottom is very hot -- and the rest of me is very cold. It’s dark outside, the middle of the Zambian winter, and both of the combi’s front windows are wide open. This is necessary for ventilation -- and I spend much of the ride with my head out the window gasping for fresh air -- but it’s freezing. Meanwhile, something’s happening under my seat, because it’s scorching down there. I feel like a corndog after a while in a weak microwave: icy on one side, burned on the other.
We drive through the darkness on a tar road littered with potholes, weaving back and forth across the center line to avoid the biggest ones. The engine roars and seems fairly healthy, but our top speed can’t be much more than 50 km per hour. Our van communicates with oncoming vehicles in a cryptic language I cannot grasp -- both sides employ blinkers, flashers, and headlight signals, but I have no idea what it all means.
Twice during the ride’s first hour, the engine seems to kick into turbo mode. The conductor screams at the driver in another language, and we quickly we pull off the road. I abandon the van and run some distance away as the conductor races to replace fluids under my seat and in the second row. We can’t stop the car while in a ditch -- if we do, we’ll never be able to start it again -- so I keep far away, convinced there’s a nontrivial chance the van will ignite during the emergency procedure.
Twenty kilometers from Chimfunshi, we stop at a convenience store to buy more fluids. I vacate the van and stare in wonderment at the clouds of blue smoke billowing from the exhaust pipe. Soon, we’re back on the road for what I think it the final stretch.
The driver pulls a Mosi -- a Zambian beer -- out of the bag, pops the top, and takes a swig.
By the time we arrive at the sign for Chimfunshi, the driver is on his third beer. I am thrilled that we made it. I almost suggest that they can drop me by the sign, but I recall hearing that Zambia is the Black Mamba capital of the world, so I let them take me along the narrow dirt road.
Good thing I did. We bump and weave along slowly for a few kilometers, and I realize this could be a long road.
Suddenly, the headlights go out. We are driving in total blackness.
Instead of stopping, the driver turns on his flashers and keeps plowing forward. I search my bag for a light. The conductor hops into the front seat next to me and fishes in the front panel, messing with a fuse box while drinking a Mosi of his own.
After a few minutes, the conductor manages to turn the headlights back on. But they’re out again within 15 seconds. A few more attempts meet the same fate. The conductor spends the remainder of the 12-kilometer ride leaning into the front panel and holding the fuse in place.
At long last, we arrive at a campsite. A man comes over and asks if I have an appointment. I say no. He says that I have to drive another 6 kilometers to some other site; this is the volunteer site. As we are talking, I see in the glow of the headlights that our van has bathed the campsite (and a lone volunteer sitting by a fire) in thick, suffocating exhaust fumes. There is no way in hell I am getting back in that van.
The man walks away, appeals to his boss, and gets the ok -- I can stay.
Thanks for the ride, guys.
Welcome to Chimfunshi -- the world’s largest chimpanzee sanctuary and orphanage.
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