Meet Michelle de Moor and Bram van Veen from Amsterdam in the Netherlands, Guests on the most recent edition of the Chanters Lodge Experience with the Milli Jam Ingredient featuring Jay-Hillz. The Experience is our weekly radio show airing at 20.30 hrs CAT every Sunday night on Zambezi 107.7 fm, Livingstone’s leading local radio station.

Bram and Michelle told listeners that they’d met in Cape Town some seven years ago when they were both on internships at the end of their respective degree courses. At that time people in South Africa told them they should take time to visit other African countries including Zambia, and they had made up their minds there and then one day to do just that and here they were! They revealed that although they’d been together all those seven years and owned property together in Amsterdam. they were not yet married. “What are you waiting for?” We wondered. “Errr um err” said Bram while Michelle just ‘rolled her eyes’!

This lively, funny very Dutch couple explained that Michelle was a social worker and Bram a sales manager, but both had given up their jobs in Holland before setting off on their ‘trip of a lifetime’. They’d been travelling for the past six months and had already visited Tanzania, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, Malawi and Mozambique before arriving in Zambia. They’d been to the Lower Zambezi for a canoeing trip but laughingly told us that within five minutes of boarding their canoe they’d ended up in the Zambezi, soon faced by angry and indignant hippos! What a start! They went on to tell listeners that of all the places they had been in Africa, the Lower Zambezi was probably the most beautiful, and they were both firmly against the establishment of a new copper mine planned for the area. They told Milli Jam that they’d arrived in Livingstone by coach from Lusaka a few days before our show.

The music on the show was good. We opened with tracks from Rixton and Nicole Scherzinger. Jay dropped tracks from Tank and Zambia’s very own K’Millian. ‘For You’ is his latest hit. Milli Jam chose Nicki Minaj and Roberto for his selections. Our oldie of the week was Sinzia by Nameless. We give a prize of a dinner for two at the lodge each week to the first person to text us the name of the artist on our oldie and this week the prize was won by Innocent. My pick of the week was John Legend’s ‘You and I’.

At the end of the show we played Diamonds by Rihanna, a special dedication to Edward Chanter’s late special friend Tanya Johnson who had passed away in England during the week. She had loved Rihanna and we felt this was an appropriate song. She was indeed a ‘diamond’.

While in Livingstone Bram and Michelle had visited the ‘amazing’ Victoria Falls and had loved the cheetah walk at Mukuni Big 5. They told us that from Zambia they would proceed to Namibia where they would hire a car and tour around that country for a while. They had no satisfactory answer when Milli Jam asked them why Holland had (again) been unable to win the World Cup. Bram, an Ajax and Manchester United supporter at this point wanted to start talking about England’s World Cup efforts, but we weren’t having that kind of red herring! Michelle told us her favourite band is The Killers and that they both like rock music.

Asked where they would like to be and what they would like to be doing ten years from now, Bram said he wanted to be in a canoe on the Zambezi, as opposed to being in the water, Michelle wanted to be a mother. Would Bram be the father of her children we wondered, “yes” she said. It doesn’t get much clearer than that!!