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Flag of Zambia Zambia
Language: English
Capital: Lusaka
Population: 13,000,000
Currency: Zambian kwacha
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Hitchhiking is common in Zambia. However, as a white foreigner you might be expected to pay for rides. Hitchhiking for locals works along the following unwritten rules. Touts stand around truck lay-bys finding passengers for passing trucks and cars. It's an unofficial job for them, and they can get a little rowdy and disagreeable when looking for passengers and negotiating the fees. They negotiate a fee with the passenger based on the destination, and then the truck / car driver who stops pays the tout the fee he agreed with the passenger. The driver will then charge the passenger a fee which will cover what he paid the tout and add on an extra amount for himself.

From the conversations I had with truck drivers in Zambia, they earn roughly between $150 to $180 per month. Sometimes their wages are even less than $150 per month, as they get paid more when carrying a load i.e. busy transporting and not waiting at the depot. I'm not sure whether this is the general way truckers are paid, or if it was just the norm for the companies that employed the drivers that gave me lifts. At any rate, this is what they must support their families on, and as one confided to me, this is why they all supplement their income by charging hitchhiking passengers. A lot of this money gets taken away from them by the police who extract a "fee" at check-points along the road, knowing that the truckers are carrying these extra passengers, and therefore extra cash too.

If your personal hitch-hiking philosophy means not paying the truckers this fee, be prepared to stand on the side of the road and wait, sometimes up to 3 hours or more for a ride that will accept you. The companies the truckers work for already pay the fuel costs, so in theory it doesn't cost them to give you a ride. They will try to get $10 out you on average for distances greater or less than 500km.