Day 216 - I want your used batteries

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Not much rain today and in fact we even saw the sun at one point. With 2 consecutive nights in the same campsite we were able to do some laundry, barter to our hearts content in the market and most importantly of all watch sport on TV.

Laundry was made easier by one guy breaking with the established cartel (500 kwatcha) and charging 200 kwatcha for a bag. He ended up a busy man. The market was a bit of fun but without much there. One person taught us how to play a game called 'Bao Game' - and even let Gemma win - in the vain expectation that we'd buy it, or the chair we sat on, or indeed just anything. And we were introduced to just how desperately they want to do deals when we found out that we could trade used batteries (apparently rich white folk consider a battery dead long before the Malawians). The Merseyside derby came and went without anyone noticing, even the people watching, and then attention turned to Six Nations and England vs Scotland and some very incorrect punditry ("Wilkinson is sh*t") from the rather random group of Australians who had turned up.

The truck that they were part of was travelling Southbound and they gave us a taste of what lay in store for us when they arrived at their punch party mostly dressed in drag. The 'bad taste' theme included one man parodying rap artists and he wore his baseball cap back-to-front. One of our group is an Englishman in his mid-forties with a defining part of his image being a back-to-front baseball cap, who was no doubt confused why someone would dress like him at a bad taste party. Finally, the other point to note today was an instance of Big Brother-style friction in the group, basically because the other faction were being busybodying idiots.

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