FricksAroundTheWorld

Hello All; For those of you that haven't heard, we're back! It was a wonderful, fun, adventure-filled 10 months. We're already planning our next adventure, it's just so hard to choose from all the wonderful places our planet has to offer. Of course, we need to work for a little while before setting off on the next big adventure. Until then we'll have alot of smaller adventures. I will continue to post blogs of places we visit close to home, that you might also be interested in visiting. We have settled in Albuquerque, have a great new place, bought a Smart Car today. So cute, and cool. It's been very fun changing cities, getting a new place, buying new furniture, changing careers, etc.. Let us hear from you if we haven't seen you yet. And to ... read more

Hello All; Since you last heard from us, we flew from Zanzibar Island, Tanzania to Nairobi, Kenya. When we were ready to leave our hotel in Stone Town and head to the airport, we walked over to the taxi stand which is located in front of a Muslim Mosque. It just so happened that when we got there, the call to prayer had just gone out over the loud speaker. As I told you in our last posting, 90% of Zanzibar is Muslim, so almost all the men were in the mosque praying. There were 2 guys in the taxi stand parking lot and one of them asked if we needed a taxi. We said yes, so he loaded our backpacks into the trunk of a nice Toyota Camry. We thought it was strange that he ... read more

REVISED WITH A FEW PICS! Hello All; Well we had a thankfully uneventful, if not quite comfortable, trip back to Blantyre. Mini-buses the whole way. I think we had to change 4 times. One more night in Blantyre, we actually managed to get tickets on the luxury, overnight, bus leaving the next afternoon at 4:30 pm to Mzuzu. We were all excited. These buses are really nice. Comfortable airline style seats, AC, curtains on the windows, etc. Well our excitement didn't last to long into the trip. After we got on there were only about 10 passengers on board. Then we stopped at 3 more bus stations and the seats filled up. That was fine. Then he just kept stopping and more and more people got on board. We actually ended up with 65 seated passengers ... read more

Jambo! That's Swahili for hello. Since you last heard from us, we crossed the border into Tanzania. Had a comfortable taxi ride from Kargona, Malawi to the Tanzanian border. Just 11 people and 9 buckets of dead fish in a Nissan station wagon. There are some of the funniest named shops in Malawi, here's a classic we saw in Karonga. It was a bakery named "Jesus Rose and So Does My Bread" Bakery. To funny! Anyway we got to the border and exited out of Malawi, no waiting, no problems. Then walking over to the Tanzania side we needed to change money. If a countries money is not backed by a hard currency (gold) there are no change bureaus which means you have to change money with a street vendor, a black market money changer. They ... read more

Hi Everyone; Finally got a few Mozambique pics loaded. It's strange, we spent almost a month in Mozambique and didn't take very many photos. We really did just hang out with Martina and get rested up from our previous adventures. Once again, we'd like to thank Martina for opening her home and heart to us and putting up with us for so long. We really had a great time with her and miss her alot. Mozambique is really just opening up to tourists. They were at civil war for so long. That's been over for 10 years now, but their infrastructure was completely torn away. Roads and bridges are just now being re-built. Burned out tanks removed, etc. They've been working on their unexploded land mine situation for several years now and have that under control. ... read more