Guest blogger....

This week I've had my first visitor from home, and this post comes courtesy of the lovely Luxmy!

My challenge is to summarise my experience of Zambia within a few words and even fewer minutes, so here goes...

A highlight was microlighting over Victoria Falls, which was like hang-gliding but with an engine. It was an enjoyable experience, considering the helmet was 3 sizes too big, so the fierce wind kept buffetting it against my head, and my hair almost got tangled up in the engine (the pilot didn't seem too worried), and I got incredibly airsick. My advice to you all: don't go for half an hour of microlighting when 15 minutes will do.

Safariing was amazing, with three leopard sightings and an even rarer sighting of a Luxmy at a campsite. The sounds of the lions and hyenas at night almost made up for the lack of amenities, such as running water. As further consolation, my second night of the Botswana safari trip was at a lodge where elephants come to drink outside your bedroom window. To make up for my lack of actual lion sightings, I went for a walk with lions back in Zambia, and lived to tell the tale and even get my hair braided.

Encountering the lions was less scary than the gorge swing, which Emily and I very sensibly chickened out of. It involves being thrown off a cliff attached to a rope – rather like bungee-jumping, but less controlled and with a higher risk of slamming your body to smithereens against the rock face. Instead, we went for the flying fox (you get to breeze across the gorge a la Peter Pan) and abseiling (Emily even did it backwards a la Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, while I ended up looking like a confused spider dangling in pain).

We enjoyed cocktails at sunset, as well as the most sumptuous high tea we've ever not eaten (we only managed 5 plates of cakes between us, and the plates were the size of buttons). Our walks around the Falls were beautiful, but also reminded me to work on my fitness on my return to the U.K.

I managed to dip a toe into Emily's real Zambian life by hanging out with her VSO colleagues and participating in a march against child labour (it involved a military band, waiting for speeches and a bit of marching).

Whilst I can't do justice to the Livingstone experience in my current state of sleepiness, my lasting impression will be Emily's surreal world of two halves: of an austere VSO existence against an exotic holiday backdrop.
(And, wow, this post avoided a single mention of the World Cup. Except that one.)

Finally, thank you to Emily for admitting some Luxmy chaos into her Livingstone lifestyle.