San Francisco to Llongwe, Malawi

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Geo: -13.2543, 34.3015

Every year Robert does a tremendous amount of research to plan our trip to Africa and beyond. Besides figuring the best airline deal we can get, he also researches the availibility of campsites at Kruger, and if we are going somewhere after Africa, how best to do this.
When possible, we use air miles to travel but this year we did not have enough and were ging to have to pay for our tickets so he did research on the best deal we could get. As we have done in past years, we decided to fly to Oakland, visit with Paul and Kjersten and camp from Monterey to Mendecino and fly to Llongwe, Malawi via San Francisco.

It is not an easy journey but worth it once you get here. Left San Francisco at 8:15pm and flew through the night and landed in Zurich, Switzerland at 4:15pm the next day. The nice part of this leg was we were able to leave the departure area and go and meet Stefan and Marianne for dinner and a nice visit. Our big luggage was checked on through so we only had our carry on bags. In hindsight, we could have actually left the airport, gone to their place for a shower and dinner and returned in plenty of time. Don't know how but we managed to have to go through security three times before we finally made it to the gate!
Departed Zurich at 10:45 pm and once again flew through the night. The good news is Zurich and Johannesburg are in the same time zone so our bodies are beginning to adjust to the time difference. Arrived in Johannesburg at 9:15am and departed from Johannesburg at 1:00pm for Lllongwe, Malawi. Had a 45 minute stopover in Blantyre and arrived in Llongwe, Malawi at 4:20 pm. Both of the night flights were 10+ hours and the waiting to take the next flight was 4-6 hours.

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Photos

man on bike with sugarcane load!!!!
we were walking to go do some shopping before heading to Wildlife Camp in Zambia and saw this gentleman trying to maintain his hold on his sugarcane.

rugby balls
group of rugby players traveling in Africa teaching rugby to villagers as I understand it. They were both at Mabuya Camp and Wildlife Camp while we were there.