Malawi Wowee!

Honestly, that's the best title I could come up with. The trip from Zanzibar was rocky, as I was hungover and the seas were rough, but it was apparent that I was up for a return to travel. Deciding that Dar es Salaam qualified as "extremely dull" I decided to quickly move on. First, however, I met a nice Canadian who had been working in Zambia. We shared a hotel room (making it cheaperz) and got our obligatory Chinese food (don't worry, the update is coming sooooooon). The next afternoon after a traditional French Breakfast (sans porc) at a tourist place I was off on a 24-hour train ride across the country that would wind up taking 29 hours due to breakdowns and "wet tracks" (ominous, eh?). There was no food, no water (which meant no flushing toilets) and not much doing as far as amenities (there was a bar, but I did not use it). The saving grace was my company. Two hilarious Zambians named Uliya and Twiza. They had an additional 24 hours of training to get to Zambia, but for my leg of the ride we shouted at people out the windows, talked about how annoying it was to learn Swahili and about how odd it was that the Chinese built everything on the TAZARA railway. We scrounged for food by buying fried something or others through the windows, getting chips (crisps!) from the bar and eating some atrocious coctail of wannabe sardines and chili sauce. In the end, good times were had and I bid the Zambians adieu at Mbeya, Tanzania.

At the station I met a group of three UKers (who were actually from Kenya and Zimbabwe) and we were off to find a hotel. Despite Mbeya's appearance as a sleeping little town, a group of Swiss tourists had apparently booked the whole town so we went through 8 hotels (and one punctured tire) before settling at the Princess View Inn at around 8:30 PM. The rooms were lovely, some with Superman sheets, others with odd posters of blonde, white people in swimsuits, but most importantly the showers were hot (a must after 29 hours of transit + 2 hours of hotel hopping).

The next day we hopped a mini-bus with some Germans to a village near the border, grabbed some bicycle taxis to immigration, exchanged Tanzanian Shillings to Malawian Kwacha, and went on our way.

A note: NEW MOST WORTHLESS PIECE OF CURRENCY!!!! One Malawian Tambala. One hundred Tambala make one Kwacha and one hundred and forty Kwacha is one US dollar. Math time.

1 Tambala=.001 Kwacha=.0000714 USD. 1/14,000th of a dollar. Jeebus.

Anyhow, after securing a cheap taxi to Karonga (a road dotted with Police checkpoints where officers would usher us out of the car, dance with us to the music on the radio and tell us to have a nice trip) we were off to Chitemba. A lovely lunch was had a local resto owned by "King Elijah", who was probably the first
real Rastafarian I'd met so far in Africa ("no scissors, no brush, no meat, no drink, no smoke unless it's the herb, no violence") and a lovely evening was spent on the beach trying to make our own constellations in the sky (lots of stars, like whoa).

Then it was off to Mzuzu where we stayed at Mozoozoozoo, a place owned by some friends of the UKers' parents. A huge poker game was had (the pot: 5,000 Tambala) thrice and sleep was enjoyed in the chilly/rainy/greyness that is Mzuzu (are we still in Africa? We don't need sweaters in Africa!). From there it was a night of insanity in Nkhata Bay, two nights with the UKers, cake, and my Israeli friend Gur (met in Zanzibar) in Kande Beach and then it was off to Lilongwe (the capitol).

Although Gur has left early to head home to Israel (:sad face:), Lilongwe has been essentially comprised of the consumption of baked goods (i.e.: cake, croissants, eclairs, cream puffs, etc), wandering, eating Chinese food (!!!) and sleeping in the dirty, pest-infested office of a local dive bar-resto called Annie's. It's much more fun than it sounds like it is. That being said, it is an excellent description of what there is to do in Malawi if you don't have a job: nothing. You can do nothing on the beach, do nothing looking at animals in a park, do nothing in the village and do nothing in the cities. Chilled out. Anyhow, I'm off to Blantyre tomorrow-ish (it's the commercial capitol in the southern tip of Malawi), and then back to Nkhata Bay with some lovely new UKers I've met who are based in Lilongwe (Old UKers: Ryan, Lucy and Emilie, New UKers: Jess, Cassie).

So there it is. I'll be in Malawi until around August 24th-ish, then a few nights in Dar, then a few more in Nairobi, then I'm home. 19 days till I'm on a plane, 20 until I land.

Chinese update coming soon. (ANTICIPATION!!!!!!)

Cheers,

-Dave