The size of things

We managed to get away for the weekend a little while ago, just for one night, to Lake Kariba, a country-sized (Switzerland-sized to be precise) reservoir in the Zambezi valley. To get there we drove for four hours, two and a half on pencil straight roads obviously conceived and constructed when natural barriers posed little problem for mans’ technological might, and the final hour and a half on rougher stuff, dirt tracks that weaved through villages of mud and thatch.

Our journey, monotonous and perilous in more or less equal measure, took almost as long as it would take to drive to the Lake District from Cambridge. And yet it was not until we returned that we even considered that we had spent rather a long time staring through a windscreen for just one night away. Perhaps having gone the equivalent of London to Istanbul and back by public transport at Christmas we are accustomed to the idea that there is just a little more space over here, that you have to go a little bit farther if you want to get anywhere.

It’s not just the distances that are baffling (to someone from a rather crowded little island at least). Lake Kariba, on whose shores we sought refuge for twenty-four hours from the din and dirt of Lusaka (I’ll leave Rachel to fill you in on the details of where we stayed and the like), was created by the construction of what was at the time the largest dam in the world (the time being the late 1950s). I could share with you lots of numbers that do something to convey the size of the dam - how high, how wide, how thick, how much it cost, how many kilowatts of power the hydro-electric generators produce - but I think the following is the most indicative statistic of the scale of the thing: eighty-six workers died during its construction, eighteen of whom are entombed within the dam’s million cubic metres of cement. Or maybe that says more about health and safety in Africa.