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Kate and I have had major adjustments over the past week and have narrowed it down to two factors: Malawi is much more difficult travel than our hand-holding overland tour and 'easy to get around' South Africa; and after having been with a group of 20 people for three weeks, we are now on our own.
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October 13 - Laura -- Blantyre, Malawi
Lasulo2006-01-06 17:50:30
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Kate and I have had major adjustments over the past week and have narrowed it down to two factors: Malawi is much more difficult travel than our hand-holding overland tour and 'easy to get around' South Africa; and after having been with a group of 20 people for three weeks, we are now on our own.
Malawi has been a full-on assault on our travel egos making us adjust to many new and exciting areas like cockroaches on an eight hour bus ride which was also replete with breast-feeding woman (it seems the only way to pacify the kids here) and many stops to be made to get off the bus and wash our hands (foot and mouth disease). One stop came after I just devoured an extremely greasy chicken and chips lunch, so that was fortuituous. However, last night takes the absolute award for the most hideous, absolutely unbelievable, could have been much, much worse award for almost all of my travels. It goes something like this:
We took a minibus to Mulanje, a small mountain town about two hours away from Blantyre. Not a bad ride and, finally, we were seeing some green countryside. It is the end of the dry season in southern Africa and after the desert in Namibia and no rain for three months, brown is the ruling color. It's weird how comforting and nourishing and sense-quenching it is to finally see green. We arrived and walked around the little town, well, like museum pieces. Everyone just stopped and stared at us. Obviously, we were the only white people in town. Friendly smiles and waves made us feel welcome by all and a group of kids followed us to the only two places in town to stay. The first smelled like the rooms had not been opened in weeks, so we tried the second. It looked modern and clean from the outside and proved to be less so on the inside, but acceptable since we had no alternatives.
Starving, we threw down our backpacks and went right to the 'restaurant' for the obligatory
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See photographs from:
Malawi Gallery
