The last stop on our Grand tour is Florence, where our old university friend Debbie has lived since 1983! We only have two nights and one full day, with an afternoon and a morning on either side. Our fast train from Venice to Florence delivers us safely and we find the left luggage lockers before we sprint down to our rendezvous with Debbie, who has volunteered to whizz us round the Uffizi. On the way she poses with Hil outside one of her former employer’s buildings, Ferragamo!
The mini bus ride to Venice is pretty straightforward and only Euros 30 (aside from a terrible accident which slows us up as soon as wee arrived in Italy|) – hop on, hop off! We are deposited in Tronchetto and find a vaporetto that takes us to San Marco, where it is a short walk to the delightful Hotel Flora. Down a side street, it was a former palazzo and is set around a leafy courtyard where we breakfast each morning. Our room is tiny (servants’ quarters we guess) but it is ‘location, location, location’. After a couple of yummy Venetian G & Ts we set off for dinner via La Fenice, where there are elegantly clad ladies and gents enjoying some sort of performance, taking a breath in the interval, to the restaurant Ai Mercanti, which I strongly recommend.
The ‘Boys’ – four men in their late sixties – are off on their travels again. This time they are walking the Juliana Trail in Slovenia. So two of us ‘girls’ decide to come along for part of the ride – to Ljubljana and Bled, before going off on our version of the Grand Tour, to Venice and Florence.
This is our fifth time on this magnificent boat. We are thrilled to be going with co-owners Simon and Eira Day and some friends of theirs, Julian and Leah, making up a good British contingent. In fact we are lucky in that the majority of our fellow passengers are delightful and fun; we are specially thrilled to be with Janusz and Alicja Draminski, renowned underwater photographers, despite being in their 80s!
Down the 200 steps for the last time! We are reunited with Mr Gali, the driver, and set off with Gerry our guide for the next five days, for the four-hour drive to Beristagi. Initially we retrace our steps to Medan before turning off. We drive through miles and miles of palm oil with villages lining the road. It is Friday and there are men begging, using butterfly-style nets to catch the donations. People here are generous to the poor – these men are are unemployed, although with all these plantations around the rates ought to be low.
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View from our tent showing the very low level of the Zambezi, normally flowing freely here
After months of planning, we gather in York Lodge. Taking inspiration from a bus we drove past in Harare, I have named the new service, Vicky’s Logistics – as it really has been quite an operation! The dream team consisting of John and Hil, Fi and Richard and our beloved Rick set off from Charles Prince, with a hitch-hiker on board, none other than Nick Murray, owner of Vundu Camp and advisor on Attenborough’s episode on the wild dogs.
How to get to Lamboara school…
On day two we have two schools to visit. To reach Ankotapiky we drive though spiny forest (euphorbia), mangrove swamps, and arid plains. In the rainy season there’s lots of flooding on this road rendering it impassable so people are cut off.
So here we are on our way to visit eight schools, the training centre and a local hub in three days! For the first 130 kms we whizz along on the best road we’ve seen, built by the Chinese. We pass a repair gang with its Chinese supervisor in his blue Mao suit. Once we leave this anomaly, we enter the world of truly awful roads – nothing we have experienced so far compares to this. A mixture of sand, rocks, ruts, 4WD-compulsory for the next three days. Progress is agonisingly slow. There is no other traffic apart from ox-carts and a mini bus once or twice a day. It’s too difficult for bicycles, and motorbikes are challenging – a dim European employed by UWS bought one and got horribly lost and had to be rescued. Of course there are no road signs!
We leave early, driving through the flood plain again. The paddy is interrupted by what can only be described as brick kilns in factory proportions. We have seen these earlier on the roads, huge stacks of bricks, with room for wood to fire them. The practice is to sacrifice some of the clay in the paddy field to make bricks, either for personal use or for sale. It’s a big decision – eat or diversify. Here we see all family members working together on both activities!
vickygoestravelling 