MARTINA'S WORLD TRIP

MALAWI: June 27 - July 15, 2004
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Tuesday, July 6th, 2004 - Blantyre
I got up early today, so I would be able to get cash first thing in the morning and then join Emily for the bus ride towards Zomba and the lake. Unfortunately, my guidebook didn’t give any indications how long this would take and although it didn’t look that far on the map, I heard from other travellers that I better plan a whole day to reach Cape Maclear. I knew I had to switch minibus several times on the way and the thing is that you never know if you get a connection or how long you will have to wait for the next bus to pass by. As I still was no fan of African public transport, I preferred to share at least a bit of my route with Emily. What I didn’t know, however, and only found out when I was standing in front of the closed exchange bureau again, was that today was a bank holiday in Malawi and that I wouldn’t get any money nowhere today! That really sucked and I had a hard time not to get upset... what that have been good for? It didn’t change the situation and I had to live with it either way. So I’d rather live with it peacefully.

Back at Doogles, I told Emily that I couldn’t leave today, so she took off by herself and I faced one more “day lost”. The weather was pretty bad, it was raining and got stormy later during the day, which did not exactly encourage me to spend time sightseeing outside. It had been drizzling and foggy yesterday but today was definitely an indoors day. Luckily, I was not the only traveller “captured” at Doogles, so I spent most of my time hanging out with Rhian, an English student in his early 20s who travelled on his own. He fulfilled the classic stereotype of a rebellious slob, dressed in grunge and constantly on the edge between looking obscenely good or point-blank filthy. His short blond hair was permanently tousled and I wondered when it was the last time it had seen a hair brush. When I first saw him, I did not especially like him and Emily kept saying that he looked like he was on dope, but on a useless day like this you basically settle for the company you can get... and you know what? It turned out to be real fun! We played cards and he rehashed my rudimentary knowledge of chess. I am actually quite proud to say that, although I had never played an entire party of chess before, I lost the first game in only 12 minutes but then won the second after more than an hour interesting play time! Even Rhian was impressed and I realised how good it felt to confront my brain with an intellectual challenge – for a change.

In addition to the weather and my general ‘lousy day’ feeling, the internet connection at Doogles was very unreliable today. They said it was because of the storm, so I couldn’t even write emails. Therefore, besides reading, playing games with Rhian and chatting with other travellers, there was not much to do today. Rhian and I went to a nearby “restaurant” for lunch and I had rice with vegetables. In Malawi everything on the menu is rice with something. Therefore, we had the entertaining idea to try and order pizza for dinner. I had seen some pizza delivery advertisement on the info board but it turned out that the number on the poster was out of date. So I did some research on the internet (when it happened to work for a few minutes) and found another number. Luckily, I had bought a local phone card for my mobile and so I tried to call the place. After having called twice, speaking to two different people who replied a drawling “yeees” to all my questions - and to everything else I said, I asked one of the night watchmen at Doogles to make the phone call for me. He obviously spoke the local language but it turned out that even that did not help much. In the end, we had to assume that this was not even a pizza delivery place. Too bad, for an instant it had looked promising and by now, I was craving for pizza...

37 more nights before going home.
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