Legal Driving

I thought going to the DMV to register our car in DC was an ordeal.  Well, we did have to wait for hours in freezing temperatures, but at least it was one stop.  Not so here in Zambia.  Last month, I spent time making sure we followed driving laws by registering one of our cars. 

The car registration was supposed to take three hours on a Monday morning.  We get spoiled at the embassy by having local staff members accompanying us and doing all of our paperwork while we do such bureaucratic errands.  It would take unimaginable hours and frustration if I had to do these things on my own.  Painless, right?  I’m sure it would have been if I hadn’t agreed to do it a few days before Independence Day, driving right through the parade route.  Or if they hadn’t been practicing for the parade and closing half of the roads downtown.  I picked up one of our Zambian colleagues at the embassy first thing that morning and he directed me to our first stop: car inspection.

 Did I mention that I was driving the car we just bought that has the steering wheel on the right?  It was my first time driving that car and first time sitting on the right side of the car as a driver.  All sorts of firsts!  I think I scared my passenger a bit when I kept turning on the windshield wipers instead of turning on my turn signal.  At least I warned him that might happen.  Anyway, I followed his directions about two miles before we get stopped in gridlock.  Lusaka is not a huge city and traffic usually moves at a decent pace.  But we were stuck.  I felt the road rage rising in my stomach every time I would let one person in and another one or two cars tried to tuck in as well.  Did they not realize that we should take turns?  They didn’t, so I reminded them with my horn and some aggressive driving skills I picked up in DC.  It took us 45 minutes to go another mile before we were able to escape to an alternate route. 

We eventually made it outside the city, having circumvented the parade practice that was causing our traffic woes and headed south on Kafue Road.  I sailed down the main road at a nice clip until we reached a police checkpoint.  Luckily, with diplomatic plates we often get waved right through so we didn’t have a slow down there.  The potholes took care of that.  The car I was driving is a Toyota Corolla which doesn’t have the best clearance.  It felt like I was in a driving video game as I swerved to avoid foot deep holes every few dozen yards.  Again, I think my passenger questioned my driving abilities. We drove past Lilayi, the lovely lodge and game reserve where we saw all of the animals I wrote about in my “saying yes” post.  The car inspection center was way out past the giraffes and baby elephants.  I would have much rather gone to visit them instead.

We turned off the pot-holed highway onto a dirt road that was covered in rocks large enough to do real damage to low sitting cars.  I slowed to a crawl in an attempt to minimize damage to the undercarriage of the car.  It took us a few more minutes to reach the inspection facility which was a well-maintained large parking lot with shaded benches for car owners to wait.  My escort from the embassy took care of everything.  He showed the inspector our VIN number on the engine and we were on our way.  Back down the dirt road and then north on the pot-holed highway.  Three hours after we left the embassy, we reached our second stop: license plate installation. 

The Zambian government issues license plate numbers but leaves the printing and installation to private businesses.  So we headed to Phil’s License Plates to have our new number affixed to the car.  I think I might be the only white woman to ever visit Phil’s.  At least that’s what it felt like.  All of the men standing around the shop immediately stopped talking and stared at me.  I am very used to that after two years in India so it was not a problem.  It was just a bit odd because I rarely get noticed in Lusaka; people here do not generally stare.  Well, I stared right back at all of them because each and every one of those grown men was drinking a child-sized juice box from a tiny straw.  At Phil’s you get a free juice box with every installation. 

With our new plates we made our final stop at the district police station.  I am not quite sure why we needed to go there because I got to stay in the car.  In fact, I don’t think I really needed to go along on the journey at all except to do the driving.  I didn’t have to sign anything or show any proof of identity.  They just needed me for my windshield-wiping, right hand driving skills. 

We made it back to the embassy five hours after we started and I think both of us were ready for a nap.  Or a beer.  I went for the nap as it was only 2pm.