No this isn’t Zambia. What gave you that idea? No, this is the car park of the Premier Inn at Dubai airport. It has a palm tree and everything! Even at 7.30 this morning it was furiously hot and the air was heavy with desert dust. P and I sprang up to the roof this morning to look across the city in the hopes of seeing the Burj Kalifa dwarfing everything around it. Biut it was invisible in the haze and even if we’d been able to see it, the moment we left our air conditioned cocoon our camera lenses blurred with condensation. Back inside to the cool, and a magnificent breakfast.

Dubai is our staging post; a way only of avoiding a night flight to get to Lusaka and what a friendly bunch these Emiraties are. If that is even a word. The guy at the front desk couldn’t have been more friendly; teasing a bemused Tom that he looked like Harry Potter in his passport photo. Mind you I doubt if he’d ever seen Harry Potter’s passport. It was a good stay, even if P and I spent some time mentally devising imaginative, and probably illegal ways to shut the kids up who thought repeatedly banging their room door at midnight was a fun way to get attention. Eventually, with the full impact of Angry Middle Aged Male In Pyjamas, I went into the corridor and they were Told.

So, as we sit in the marble desert which is Dubai Airport, we are contemplating Zambia. We are picking up a Toyota 4×4 with tents on the roof tomorrow, and then taking off into the bush. It will be a circular route through three national parks, one of which we were thrilled to learn gets only a few hundred visitors a year. There will be camping. There will be canoeing. There will be animals and once in a while, there will be blogging.