Mission Impossible

The quest to find Livingstone’s Mission yesterday proved to be something of a mission itself. First stop was possibly the world’s smallest museum, a one room thatched cottage, with a few exhibits, and not much bigger than a doll’s house, literally in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, it was locked and the museum ‘curator’ nowhere to be found.

From there, we drove to Linyanti, stopping at the Kusherashera Cash & Carry en route, a roadside shop which according to the sign is open 22 hours a day. The girl was just closing up (presumably for the two hours it shuts daily) as we arrived but we managed to get her re-open and sell us two luke warm cokes from her fridge. Ten minutes later, we arrived in Linyanti, which by village standards was more like an urban sprawl. With no map to guide us, we hoped that the locals would be able to direct us to ruined ‘mission’. But this proved fruitless. No-one knew who Livingstone was, while some people thought I was asking about a ‘living stone’. One young chap, eager to help, jumped in the car and directed us to a clearing where he explained that people ‘had once lived’, but he didn’t know when or who. (Caprivians are a very gentle, good natured people always eager to please, even if it means telling you something you want to hear, rather than saying they haven‘t the faintest clue what you‘re talking about!) Hot, tired and dusty, we gave up at this point and decided to return home.

There’s a noticeable moisture in the air and some clouds in the sky today, which means the rains are coming soon, bringing with them, according to Elle, flooding, unbearable humidity and a thousand fold increase in the mosquito population. The upside apparently is that everything looks very green and pretty!