Blogs from Lilongwe, Central, Malawi, Africa - page 5

Sunday 9am Eating breakfast at Mubaya Camp in the sun with 6 other Aidcampers. The journey from the UK on Friday at 8pm to Lilongwe at 11am Saturday can be sumnarised thus: Hours travelled 10 hours Films watched 2 (Veronica Mars - Yes, me too. Noah - Mel Gibson hero, Ray Winstone villain: war, water, Emma Watson's angst). Hours slept 3 Meals eaten 4 Hours spent hanging around airports 6. But it passed. Met the other six Aidcampers, and four more arrived on Sunday. A couple and two friends. We're a mixed bunch ranging from 25 to 72 years, some who have been on projects before, and some Aidcamp virgins. We're at Mubaya camp for the weekend in chalets and A-frame huts, before going to the project on Monday. We'll go to the supermarket first to ... read more

Geo: -13.9808, 33.7721Up and decided to do a little shopping before heading to Wildlife Camp. We wanted to find a "nightjar" for Laura so no walks with the elephants like last year! Zoe told us to go across the bridge and visit the stores there so find the little plastic buckets with lids so off we went.A maze of people coming and going on the bridge, people washing clothes and themselves in the river, lots of things for sale on the bridge as well. Found a store selling what we needed but they were closed and just unloading wares for the next day. They were willing to sell us the bucket because we could give exact change.Went to an electronics store and found most of what we needed to make ourselves an extension cord to run ... read more

Entering Zambia Once the immigration formalities were completed, it was clearly visible on entry into Zambia that it was more developed than Malawi. I came to the conclusion of this in a matter of minutes. As we passed through the Eastern Province of Zambia, which is the most deprived region of this country - we saw signs, good roads and decent sound infrastructure - all of the school children we saw had identical uniforms too. This certainly isn't the case in Malawi. On arrival into Chipata, the town boasted various supermarket chains and banks, plus many other amenities. For a small town, it was quite developed, perhaps not surprising though given it's isolation from the rest of Zambia. One other noticeable difference was the number of cars on the road, in Malawi you got used to ... read more

I will recommend a cup of tea and some snacks for this, I had to have a tea pot full of tea just writing this!! I hope you enjoy and take your time... Lets start with a happy story..... Last week I had a pet tortoise called Mike for 30 minutes! One of the builders at work found him behind some rocks and gave him to me to look at. I picked the tortoise up at the surprise of everyone and took him to the kids, he was very strong and quite heavy, lots of teachers came to look and went away a bit sheepish of him except for Virginia who stayed with us. I asked her what we should call it, she came up with Mike, and it stuck. Lots of the kids came closer ... read more

Note: Get a cup of tea and some biscuits before you read any further as it is a very long entry!! This week has gone quite slowly. It feels like I have been here 2 months not 2 weeks! But in a very good way. I have met some interesting animals (some scary, some gross and some nice from a distance!) they include: 2 scorpions(both killed by me), one green scary snake that was poisonous (Maryanne cut its tail off and it slithered away) 2 cockroaches that were really big and red (I tried to kill them but they ran away too fast ewww) a very hairy caterpillar that will make you itch if you touch it, it moves quite fast for a caterpillar. (Mr Bander took it away with a dust pan and brush). A ... read more