A weekend away

So yes, as Paul said we finally managed to get away for a weekend. We stayed at a little lodge on the shores of a lake in the middle of nowhere (though still with the sound of screaming children, it seems you can never get away from that no matter how far you travel) called Village Point. We were welcomed by the guy who owns it, an English guy called Jamie who was the most friendly easy going bloke I think I’ve ever met. Nothing was too much trouble to him and he went out of his way the whole weekend to make sure our time away was exactly how we wanted it ( I mean I know that’s his job as a host to paying guests but he just so genuinely wanted us to have a lovely time).

Our chalet was a two storey building with the open fronted bedroom on the first floor overlooking the lake and distant hills, twas lovely to lie in bed at night and look out at the night sky. Downstairs there was a lovely open air bathroom, walled on all sides but with no ceiling. The shower was all built of local stone, heated by a wood burning stove, and was a little pipe that poured the water onto a series of stones to make a waterfall to shower under! At the front outside we had a little veranda and an outdoor bath which unfortunately we didn’t get a chance to use apart from dangling our feet in.

We had the entire place to ourselves Saturday afternoon and so spent the whole time in the wonderful pool and relaxing on the deck with a beer. In the evening they set us up our own private romantic dining area (being valentine’s day and all) and after some entertainment in the form of music and dancing from a local band we had a lovely dinner, all freshly home made, before heading to bed accompanied by the sound of grazing hippos. Was lovely to get away and have the luxury of being waited upon in such a peaceful spot – and al for the price of an ordinary UK B&B!

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.