Thursday, April 26, 2012

Trip preparation

One word: “craziness”. That is the best word to describe the lead up to and preparation for the trip which we are about to embark on.

The last couple of months of volunteering are usually spent winding down, however for Mike and I it was the complete opposite with moving houses and cities, for me a change in volunteering roles, for Mike implementation of an internet based system and just a scale up in work for both of us.

All of this has meant that the preparation and research that most people do before a big trip like ours has been left to the last few weeks of our time in Zambia; all the while trying to still parts of Zambia we have yet to visit! So I guess you could say we are now multi-tasking, travelling around Zambia and squeezing in errands and preparation in between.

The biggest piece of preparation we still have is finalising paperwork for the car “Ruth”, as well as a few “tweaks” mechanically to make sure she will get us all the  to Ethiopia”. In a developed country this would be somewhat time consuming, but in Zambia it can be a bit of a nightmare. Finding the right people to speak to and finding the right parts can be extremely difficult and requires travelling all over town.

We have still to arrange shipping for a few of our things back to Australia. We have been in Zambia for 18 months and even in that time have acquired a number of things that I would like to keep.

For our trip we still need a few items to make camping more comfortable, we need to arrange at least one visa for Ghana (we will be flying there from Ethiopia and can’t enter without the visa being prearranged), need to finalise things with VSO Zambia and still have quite a bit of research to do for the countries we want to drive through.

While this is going on we had pre-planned trips to Kaufe National Park as well as a final trip to Livingstone. A visit to South Luangwa National Park is also on the cards as we head out of Zambia to Malawi.

So I think “craziness” is a good description of our lives at the moment.

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