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Published: October 13th 2009
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The Lilongwe-Blantyre run is clearly the flagship bus route in all of Africa, as I pay $20 for a journey that's not even 4.5 hours - more noteworthy and incongruous is that the bus has AC and a toilet. For free, we get views of various inselbergs rising out of the green countryside. The landscape here really doesn't end with Lake Malawi.
Blantyre is as lacking in cheap accommodation as Lilongwe, and I gravitate to the only place anyone ever mentions - Doogles. The staff are unfriendly and the rooms are poor value for money, but its proximity to the bus station is a powerful attraction.
My first trot around the city centre reveals it to be grotty and overrun with beggars. I am approached by a Congolese man offering me precious stones - just the sort of purchase I'm likely to make from a random guy on the street. A couple of hours later I meet him again but this time he simply wants MK50.
I finally figure out why Malawian women have odd-shaped breasts, when I see a woman in Shoprite fiddle around in her bra and produce a roll of MK500 notes. This certainly beats
Detail
Church opposite Saint Michael and All Angels Church the condom-in-the-arse trick that I've been using, and causes less consternation in the check-out queue.
The search for a Portuguese dictionary, which started over 1500km away in Dar es Salaam, continues in Blantyre and will necessarily end here. I travel to Central Bookshop in a modern shopping mall with high hopes, as this is supposedly the best bookshop in Malawi and we are less than 100km from Mozambique. Situated in a country whose neighbours only speak English or Portuguese as ex-colonial languages, it sure has a lot of French dictionaries. And no Portuguese ones.
It's Saturday night and Doogles has something of a reputation for weekend bonhomie. There's certainly a large contingent of foul-mouthed South Africans, foul both because of their language and their smoking. I wind up next to a couple of Irish medical students, freshly arrived in Blantyre after several weeks at a rural mission hospital near Mzuzu. Their Blantyre initiation has involved someone rifling through one of their handbags, and an attempt at overcharging on a minibus. This is in stark contrast to the great respect they were accorded in the north. They're glad that they'll only be here for a few days as they
don't want their accumulated store of good memories to be displaced by more recent bad ones. Malawi's cities certainly aren't its selling point.
I do a short hiking trip on the Mulanje Massif (blogged separately) before diarrhoea and a lack of money forces a return to Blantyre rather than my intended onward progress to Mozambique. A couple of days later, freed from the tyranny of repeated toilet visits, I break for the border.
Dull but possibly useful info i. I took an AXA bus from Lilongwe to Blantyre at 7AM (though we left 25 minutes late), costing MK3,000, and taking 4 hours 20 minutes. It was assigned seating and had a toilet and AC.
ii. I stayed at Doogles, paying MK3,450 for a double room. There was no towel. You need to flick the power switch outside the front door to get hot water. There are limited food options but the bar plays excellent cheesy music - it's extremely popular, mainly with expats, most of whom appear to be South African. A Green is MK180, soft drinks MK80 (but DC MK100). Internet is MK350 per hour and there is an annoying ban on (I'm guessing) image intensive sites
such as Flickr, microstock sites, etc. Laundry is MK90 for trousers, MK60 for T-shirts, MK40 for anything smaller.
iii. There is cheaper Internet in town but the speed is extremely variable.
iv. The Tourist Information office as described in the WLP appears to have moved but is also now closed.
v. It costs MK50 in a minibus to get to either the Shoprite shopping centre or Limbe.
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Re: The advertisement, in the first photo of your blog - I'd sooner be interested in bestowing curses, I hope they offer that, too! :D