Boat safari

Again the fuse of the brake lights burns out, on the way to the Lower Zambezi National Park. A difficult problem, just see the cause. Countless options, often in unreachable places. Onno makes an attempt and unscrews what is stuck. In the meantime I activate the brake lights. Hoping that the fuse blows, with the finger in the right place. The auxiliary troops Frank and Luc think from the Netherlands. You can't break that fuse. Whatever we do. We give it up, see it later. After all, we are here for nature.

Choices
Loom we consider the different options to view the National Park. Self-driving, an organized game drive in the morning or afternoon or a boat trip on the adjacent Zambezi river that runs along the vast park. Enough choices. Meanwhile, fellow campers are back from the morning game drive with guide. Nothing worth mentioning. The desire to drive through the landscape is rapidly declining. And replacing fuses is also not a hobby.

Like a spear
Today, the heat more than exceeds the maximum temperature of a fever meter. We throw liters of cool Coca Cola Zero and cold water in the battle to cool down. A boat safari is attractive. A luxury boat with mate for a whole day on the river. If we do it, we will do it well. We negotiate lunch and drink with it. The sandbanks in the wide Zambezi are full of hippos. We can admire them up close. But not too close, then they dive under water. The hippos are full of surprises, they can come up everywhere again. One hippo does that while our boat sails above him. We hear a loud thump and our barge tilts. The big mammal shoots at the walkant with enormous speed. Leaving us bewildered.
We eat lunch ashore in the park. On a low bank where many wild animals come to drink. Only not in the middle of the day, too hot. We have the empire alone unintentionally.

Elephants and monkeys
Later in the day we moor at the campsite for a longer break. An elephant is waiting for us at the quay. We are safely led away to our car, against which another elephant is leaning. The campsite staff member carefully waits next to us until the elephant runs away. Approaching an elephant can be fatal. Unfortunately, the employee knows this from his own experience, when a tourist at the campsite could not restrain himself from photographing an elephant up close.
From a distance we can already see that the roof tent looks strange. The tent cloth hangs down in rags. The monkeys have kept home. The zippers are open, but the mosquito net prevented access to the tent. Fortunately everything is still whole, only the material has become dirty.

Soaking wet
At the end of the day we go out on the water with our private boat for a sundowner trip. The bright sun-drenched days are over, the clouds have gained a lot of ground. The rainy season is coming. Unfortunately, the sun is disappearing today, glorious and colorless. But that doesn't make the trip any less fun, because it is wonderfully cooling on the river. Back at the campsite, our care taker has the campfire red hot. For the BBQ and to keep the elephants at a distance. It feels strange to sit by a campfire in the heat. It hardly cools down that night. We are soaking wet in the roof tent without a breath of wind. Waiting for a new warm day.

Search
From the park the road leads back to Lusaka. We come home again in the garden of Harry and Geke, where we stayed earlier. We still have a job to do, find the cause of the electrical failure. The doom image emerges of a fully opened car that is parked for days in a garage with mechanics who also have no punch. We are looking for an experienced electrical specialist who makes a good analysis in advance. We find this at a garage of a German who repairs Mercedes trucks. Step by step, the specialist checks all possible causes together with Onno. Apart from a mouse fleeing from beneath the bottom protection plate of the G, they find no clearly identifiable defect. That is also an answer, but not a guarantee for a trouble-free future. We get a fuse with a switch that can be put on again indefinitely. A workable African solution, we are happy with it.