Bad Boys, Bad Boys, Whatca Gonna Do When They Come From You

Police Stop
Lusaka
March 28th, 2009

After a “restful” stay at ChaChaCha Backpackers (a complete hole- we don’t recommend to anyone) where Karel awoke to hear an ex-pat lovers quarrel (kissing followed by ‘no Murray, no, don’t hit him!’) we ran some errands around Lusaka. Once achieving our objective of obtaining our African yellow card for inclusive third party insurance for East Africa we headed for the hills. Unfortunately before we could successfully leave the city limits we were pulled over by a traditional built Beyonce haired (well not exactly as glamorous, actually it’s probably completely unfair to mention the two in the same sentence, perhaps a “badly wigged braided blonde and red haired extravaganza” is more appropriate) police woman.

We pulled off the main road to the appropriately directed position and waited to hear the news. There was a speed gun on the main road so needless to say I was thinking about what was coming. As we waited Karel was already in the pooper, another bloody speeding fine. The woman approached us and asked for Karel’s liscence and wrote down all our details. Handing over the documents she said something like “Did you know you were speeding? You were doing 72 in a 65 zone. What do you have to say for yourself?”. Karel responded by saying he wasn’t sure how fast he was going, which he didn’t. The police woman replied by saying that we have a fine of 540,000 Kwacha (about $100 US) payable now and that she has a receipt book. I said we don’t have that much money, that’s too much money to carry, and was wondering if I might be able to negotiate us out of this. She immediately dropped the fine to 270,000 Kwacha. Karel and I knew then that something didn’t add up. We said we didn’t have any money, but we would happily go to the police station and pay there. The police woman was stuck explaining that as she has the receipt book the police station wouldn’t be able to accept any money. She then asked us what money we had. Nothing we said. She looked us up and down, wandered around the car and told us we could go, but “next time carry more money, the next police officer won’t be as nice”.