Blogs... They're back so enjoy the rest of the journey! (blog included)

We apologize for the delay, our lives have been kind of hectic since we got back from Africa but we have readjusted and will be complete our trip's blog within the next couple days. Here are a few already completed posts:

Lilongwe, Malawi

July 28th and 29th, Days 48 and 49:

After one of the more exhausting weeks of my life, it was nice to finally wake up in an actual bed with a mattress and pillows. We decided to treat ourselves to a relatively nice hotel since we had spent little to no money for a week and slept outside almost every night. The Capital Hotel was also the first hotel we saw in Lilongwe, and we did not feel like biking around and finding somewhere else to stay. Lilongwe also happened to be a pretty bland capital city that seemed to only really have government buildings, embassies, and consulates.  When I think of capital cities, I think of huge buildings, lots of people, and things to do; Gaborone and Lusaka had been fairly large cities with a lot going on, so I just assumed Lilongwe would be fairly similar. It was evident that not all capital cities are alike when we could not see Lilongwe the night before from about five kilometers away, and I was worrying that maybe we had taken a wrong turn somewhere and ended somewhere else in Malawi. Luckily, Lilongwe did eventually appear, just not as big as I imagined but that didn’t really matter to me, being here was good enough and getting a day off to recuperate. I also wasn’t really concerned about the size of Lilongwe, because had everything I needed: a bed, a TV, and a decent Internet connection. Throw in an awesome buffet breakfast and a nice exchange rate and things certainly were looking up.

We almost missed the breakfast in the morning, but managed to run over there before they closed the buffet. The dinner buffet the night before had been underwhelming, but this morning’s buffet more than made up for it. Eggs, toast, croissants, bacon, yogurt, fruit, and of course lots of rooibus tea definitely made me forget about all the N’shima I had eaten during the last week and that I hoped I would not have to eat for a while.

The plan for the day was as follows: find an ATM to get money, find an internet café, and go to the South African consulate because my student visa was about to expire and I wasn’t sure if I would be able to get back into the country after our trip was done. If someone looked at that list and guessed which item would be the easiest to accomplish, most people I would assume would choose getting money out of the ATM. Wrong! That was by far the most difficult task to complete; it seems there are only two, I repeat, two ATMs in Lilongwe that accept Visa or MasterCard and one of the machines happened to not be working on this day. After looking around for about an hour and asking various people, I was able to find the other ATM on the other side of the city. The problem was I clearly wasn’t the only person with a Visa or MC because there were about forty people lined up around the block just waiting to use the one ATM outside of the Standard Bank. So after waiting for an hour or so, watching people take money out and others struggle to figure out the ATM machine, I finally made my withdrawal.

Next on the list was finding the South African consulate before 1pm when it closed. It was about 1230 so I had to book it back to the city center and find the consulate. Usually embassies and consulates are a pain to deal with, but on this occasion I was in the consulate for about thirty seconds, because I did not need to be there at all actually. It turns out you can visit South Africa for up to 3 months without needing a visa so it was inconsequential that my student visa had expired and I would only be going back to Cape Town for a few days when after finished our journey.

Last but definitely not least, the Internet… What would I do without the Internet? What did people do before the Internet? Well I hadn’t seen a computer in more than a week so I was pretty happy when I was directed to the John F. Kennedy American Library, part of the American Embassy’s mission in Malawi. I just get a great feeling whenever I go into any American building abroad; it just gives me a sense of pride and appreciation of my country when I pull out my U.S. passport and hand it to the security officer. Anyway, as I would expect from the American Library, they had a great Internet connection with multiple computer at my disposal. I immediately phoned Aaron to tell him of my discovery and told him to come join me. The problem with not being at a computer for a while is that there are just so many things to check: email accounts, espn.com, NYTimes.com, and of course Facebook. Before you know it, three hours have gone by, and it hasn’t even crossed my mind that I should be writing a blog post. I also happened to be joined in the library by a journalist for a national Malawian newspaper, who was very interested in what we were doing and wanted to write a story about us. So when the library closed at 430pm, I had written about half a blog post. Shucks.

We walked back to the hotel after finishing up at the library; the librarian there, whose name I cannot remember off the top of my head, was extremely kind and even paid for our Internet usage for the few hours we were there. Thank you. We laid around for a while, watching TV until it was time for dinner; we didn’t feel like venturing outside of the hotel grounds again so we settled with the dinner buffet again, and it was once again not very good. I might be a little picky about my food, but that is just because I am from New York and we New Yorkers like our food fresh and tasty, the buffet didn’t cut it in either category. Aaron gobbled it down because it seemed to enjoy it but I stuck to some bread rolls and chicken.

One of the major disappointments with the Lilongwe that I forgot to mention is that there was not one single movie theater! Not one in the whole capital city! This was highly depressing; for some reason we both look forward the next major city because there were a bunch of movies we really wanted to see. We were able to see Transformers 2 in Gaborone, which was awesome, and ever since that is one of my first questions to local people when we get to large cities. Fortunately though, there were some decent movies on MM1, similar to HBO, and that was partially able to make up for the lack of a movie theater in Lilongwe.

The next morning we were supposed to be leaving Lilongwe and heading towards Lake Malawi, but we got an unexpected call from the U.S. Embassy with the potential to meet the ambassador! We weighed the pros and cons for a while until deciding that it would be pretty cool to meet an ambassador and we stuck around for a few hours writing some blog posts and waiting for our meeting at 3pm.

To our dismay, the ambassador’s assistant contacted us and said the ambassador would be unable to meet us today and that we would have to settle for the DCM, Deputy Chief of Mission, Kevin Sullivan. Although we were disappointed that we would be unable to meet with the ambassador, it was still exciting to be guests of the embassy and sit down with the DCM, who was actually a pretty nice guy and wished us well on the rest of our journey.

It was already 4pm by the time we got out of the embassy and it wasn’t really worth it to bicycle for two hours and camp in the middle of nowhere. The Regional Security Officer, Jeff Monroe, was nice enough to offer us a meal and a place to stay for the night. It would have been pretty hard to resist a home-cooked meal so we obliged and joined him at his complex.

We had a great meal with Jeff and his wife, followed by some tasty homemade ice cream before crashing on their couches for the night. The plan was to wake up around 6am and start biking towards the M5, which is the main road that goes up the coast of Lake Malawi. We would be following this road until we Tanzania so I was hoping for a nicely paved road as I dosed off to sleep.

-Eric

(Lilongwe)

Okay so when I was studying abroad in Cape Town, we had a security guard for our house, whose name was Lambart. Lambart is a great guy and we still exchange emails on the regular. Anyway, He told me he's from Lilongwe and said his family still lives there so he gave me his brother's number and I met up with his brother, Joe, and sister, Pauline.

Pauline and Joe