Zambia

So far I am digging Zambia, it seems the closer we get to S Africa the better the infrastructure gets. Zambia as a country is huge, allegedly bigger than UK+France and Germany. Small population and the rural areas are not as densely developed as most of the other places we have been. The roads are all paved!!!!. Lusaka is all paved. We have seen the first evidence of chain restaurants in all of Africa (not that this is necessarily good), a Subway in a suburban mall where we ate ice cream plugged into reasonable bandwidth WIFI and went to see Avatar at the cinema. I feel like I have come out of a couple months in the stone ages.
There exists an evident middle class here, people drive cars wear suits and go to regular jobs. An educated workforce is evident. Zambia’s natural resource is Copper and tourism, I suspect most of the wealth and prosperity we see here is product of mineral extraction. Population is about 12M with GDP per capital of about $1200 per person. That is 4x Uganda.
Even the bus station is organized and is a quantum level above some of the other seedier bus stations we have been in. Though there were people camping out for the night in the main kiosk on mats and plastic sheets the entire station sits on a poured concrete pad and the kiosk and bathroom area is covered. This is unheard of for us so far in Africa, most of the bus stations are these swarming dirty, muddy parking lots where we fight off touts and watch our luggage like hawks. Things were a little more subdued here. They had rules and regs for the station and even rules in the bathroom with fines. There was a dude sitting the bathroom enforcing these rules and he was cracking up when I took a photo.

Not sure what a call boy is, but I’m not asking any questions.
Off to Livingstone tonight.