Brenda & John Jepson – Silver Surfers, World Travellers!

Meet Brenda and John Jepson (above), the most recent Chanters Lodge Guests to appear on our weekly Sunday night radio show, The Chanters Lodge Experience with the Milly Jam Ingredient, featuring George da Soulchild Kaufela. The show airs on Zambezi 107.7 fm, Livingstone’s leading local radio station, every Sunday at 20.30 hrs and streams live on the net. Brenda and John, world travellers and silver surfers! How do we know? Well, in answer to Milli Jam’s first question “how did you find out about Chanters Lodge” the reply was “we googled ‘accommodation Livingstone’ checked out the lodge on Trip Advisor, quickly realizing that Richard couldn’t have written all those good review himself!” World travellers? Brenda and John make about 4 long haul trips every year.
The Jepsons said they had spent nearly two very enjoyable weeks in South Africa, including nine days in the Kruger National Park, before coming to Zambia. They were accompanied by daughter Anna, in South Africa to compete in the Comrades Marathon in Durban but unable too run, due to a last minute thigh strain. Anna is a chartered accountant working in Sydney, Australia and son Colin is a banker, also on a four year contract ‘down under’. Married 42 years, John and Brenda live north of Dundee in Scotland but originally hail from the midlands of England. They are both retired having worked for many years in local government.

The music on the show was great. We opened with Gary Barlow’s number one UK jubilee hit ‘Sing’ back to back with Usher’s latest ‘Scream’, also charting in UK. George’s local selections were Slap Dee’s ‘Kuichayila’ coupled with ‘Chipolopolo Unlimited’ by Pompi and many others. ‘Chipolopolo’ means copper bullets and is the nickname for the Zambia national football team. Zambia has been even more football crazy than usual since the country won the Africa Cup earlier this year. People were happy that the team had beaten Ghana the day before the show in a world cup qualifier. Milli Jam dropped ‘Take Care’ by Drake featuring Rihanna and Mi Casa’s ‘Heavenly Sent’ – a South African smash.
Each week on the show we give away a dinner for two at the lodge to the first person to text us telling us who’s singing our ‘oldie of the week’ but the prize was not won on this show – the track was Alan Jackson’s ‘www.memory’ but listeners could remember! One up to Richard!
John and Brenda told listeners they had much enjoyed the activities they had done while they were in Livingstone. The highlight had been their helicopter flight over the Falls – they had been the only passengers in the chopper and the pilot had spun them three times over and around the Falls! Great bird fanciers – (but not ‘twitchers’ – they said), they had been delighted to see an African Finfoot during their river safari – a rare species and one they had wanted to spot for a long time.

Asked where they would like to be and what they would like to be doing in 10 years’ time, this lovely couple who had met all those years ago on a blind date, said they would love to still be travelling, possibly living in Australia and maybe cuddling their grandchildren. I wouldn’t bet against it!

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