Mchinji to Lilongwe

July 27, Day 46:

Our morning in Mchinji was a bit slow. Eric and I had been forced to share a relatively uncomfortable bed, and Eric had been up much of the night shaking- apparantly sick. I got up early to take care of some business such as finding a way to withdraw money,which turned out to be impossible. There were two banks with ATM's. Only one of them took Visa Cards. It was closed when I arrived so I waited until it opened. The ATM was not working, so I went inside to inquire how to withdraw money. After about an hour of confusing discussions with bank tellers and the manager I still had made no progress; and I simply had to take their word that they could not use either my Mstercard or Visa to take money out. This made paying for the guesthouse a bit awkward. The woman working there had no idea what the exchange rate from Malawi Kwacha to Dollars was, and once she found it out, she had even more trouble doing the mathematics involved in the conversions. Skeptical of my math, she finally decided to call the owner, and after some discussion came up with a dollar amount that was close to correct, so I accepted. It ended up working fine, but reinforced the fact that the education system in much of the regions we had been to needed huge improvements. It was very rare to find someone who could do basic mathematics. Often times even the owners of the local stores would have to whip out a calculator to do very simple addition or subtraction, which must make running a small business difficult.

Once the whole payment process had ended Eric and I set out for the final leg of our journey from Lusaka to Lilongwe. Our maps indicated that it would be around 55 miles, which under normal conditions shouldn't be too difficult. However, we were both extrmely fatigued by this point in the trip, and there was still a headwind. But knowing that there was a city and possile real hotel in sight for us to finally get a real shower and bed, we fought on with renewed vigor.

Anxious to get to Lilongwe, we only took short breaks every ten miles to get a bit of rest and refuel with some energy bars, and then would get right back to the road without dawdling to talk to people. Finally, when we reached the 50 mile mark and the day was drawing to a close, we began to get very excited.

Unfortunately, our excitement quickly turned to disappointment when we got the 55 mile mark and saw no sign of any city. The surroundings had not changed in any noticeable way, and there was no city on the horizon. Frustrated, we kept going...and going... and going. Finally we began to see a bit more activity, and got to a T-junction in the road, the same one on our map that indicated the arrival in Lilongwe. We looked around, and realized that it wasn't that we had not made it to Lilongwe, just that Lilongwe was not a "city" as we had imagined. There is not a single tall building, and it is just a giant sprawl that is indistinguishable from the rural areas save for the density of the homes and the occasional gas station or modern looking building. We followed our map toward the only hotel shown on it which also conveniently happened to be in the city center, where the government buildings were all located. This was critical to us because Eric needed to go to the SA consulate to extend his visa, and we also had to meet with the US embassy.

We finally made it to the hotel as the sun was falling, completely exhausted and disappointed by Lilongwe. There wasn't even a movie theatre... and we had been dreaming about seeing Terminator for the last several weeks. However, the hotel itself was magnificent nicer than anywhere we had yet stayed. It was also a bit out of "Cycle for Understanding" price range so we made some quick calls to our parents who agreed to pay for us to stay there to rest... a very much appreciated gift from them!

The hotel had its own internet cafe (grossly overpriced, but we managed to negotiate some great deals), massage parlor (which we kept wanting to use but never found time for), and a movie channel! We were starving so we made sure to hit up the dinner buffet for everything we could. I had 4 separate plats full of the meats, along with 3 other plates of sides. And for dessert there was flan, which I was quite happy about. After eating nshima 3 meals a day for the past week, I thought the meal was incredible, and Eric was quick to point out that it was OK, and not even close to "incredible" standards as compared to NY. This became a recurring theme during our trip. Me getting excited about meals, and Eric explaining why they were not very good... inevitably leading to half-hour arguments that went in all sorts of interesting directions.

However, on this night the only direction we went was to our beds where we watched some TV, and fell asleep.