Experience - Name or title can be very misleading!

When I was volunteering in Zambia my fellow volunteers and I went on a trip from Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, to the Northern province of Zambia. It was in January 2015.

Beside other places, we were planning to go to see Easy Falls which are falling not far from Lake Tanganyika. You can see them on the map. Therefore we went to the small town Mpulungu placed just on the Lake Tanganyika shore. From here it was possible to negotiate a price for the boat and cross the lake. Otherwise, there is no other access. Though, on the map (Google maps), it looks like a tiny piece of the lake, the distance is about 10km and the boat trip took about 1 hour. You can see it in the following picture.

When we were negotiating the price for the boat trip we also agreed on with the boat owner that the trip will be also with the guide who will take us to the falls.

However, when we reached the shore on the other side of the lake the boatman didn’t know about this agreement and didn’t even know where the Easy Falls are.

On this photo you can see the easy falls in the middle of the jungle. - I took it from the boat.

After some negotiating in the local village we got our new guide. Unfortunately, we started our trip around noon, which was already quite late.

It took us about 3.5 or 4 hours of walking in the bush and jungle up and down to decide to turn around without reaching the falls. They were probably not far from us, but we had to be back in that small village where the boatman was waiting for us before sunset.

Although we came late, he was still there waiting for us and took us back on the other side of the lake where we were accommodated.

On this picture, you can see the way to the falls how it should be, more-less, although we didn't reach them.

There were some reasons why we didn’t reach our target:

• We started late – we were expecting short easy walk to Easy Falls, as you can see on one of the photos I didn’t even have proper shoes :-D
• The boat owner didn’t give us the guide as we had agreed on.
• The new “guide” we got in the village wasn’t actually guide and didn’t know the way very well, therefore, we got lost few times and had to return a bit and then continue following a different path. As we found on the way back he had even malaria but apparently it wasn't bordering him very much.

Even though we didn’t reach the falls it was a nice trip and good experience. And what we have learned from this? Don’t trust names and titles; even if they might sound easy the truth might be much more difficult :-D.

If you want some more information, perhaps you are planning to make a trip to Easy Falls, let me know in the comments.

As I said in my first post, I am going to use earned Steem or Steem Power from my posts for the school that I am planning to start with my brother-in-law in Zambia.

I assume, this can be also a great promotion of Steemit in Africa - Steemit helped build a school in Zambia. What do you think?
Please, upvote, share and re-steem.

(All photos in this post are my own photos. Two maps are screenshots from google maps.)