35 hours of hell... but at least we are in Malawi!

Well we are in Blantyre, Malawi after 35ish hours on the bus from J'Burg. It was an experience that we are pleased that we did but will probably never do again. Below is a bit of a rushed hash out of where we are at:

The bus itself was great, much nicer than the buses back in NZ but after several hours things got a bit pongie with B.O and the toilet smells. The best bit was that the onboard entertainment was basically B grade christian movies and worship music, followed by a contrasting adults only comedy with full on swearing. As we didn't know the system of bribing the guys at the check in counter to ensure we had seats together, I had to pay the guy I was sitting next to 100 rand to swap seats with Dani. This wasn't so bad as he was a student and his passport wasn't quite legal so he was having to fork out a heap of money to get across all the boarder posts. In fact half the bus didn't have quite the right documents to get through all the boarder crossings so it was interesting watching passports handed across with 50 Rand notes tucked in them and big smiles and hand shaking's going on. We crossed over the boarders to Zimbabwe and Mozambique before reaching Malawi.

Highlights of the trip have been the people on board the bus. It was nice to hang out with a bus load of Malawians, we ended up being accepted as the buses token whites and were helped out whenever anything started going wrong. Everyone wanted to make sure we were ok all the time. The boarder police in Malawi were also awesome. The rest of Africa's police forces should take note of how to gain respect! These guys are underpaid, overworked and don't carry guns.... BUT love talking to you. Whilst we waited for 4 hours for customs to check the bus over, Dani was suffering from the heat after 30 hours on the bus and so had a wee vomit in a drain at the boarder post between Malawi and Mozambique. Next minute this police officer was out and walking towards us. If this was any other country in Africa we should have either run for our lives or been prepared to bay a "fine" (donation for cleaning up the mess), but instead he was extremely concerned for Dani and wanted to make sure it wasn't something serious like malaria. He insisted we take a seat on the grassy bank on the official plastic police chairs overlooking the boarder post where we were joined by the whole boarder police force (3 guys and a women) for a chin wag until the bus left.

Lowlights were the Mozambique boarder posts. These guys are the laziest losers in the world!! We had to fill in these forms which were in Portuguese only so had to ask the boarder guard pretty much what everything was in which he'd reply in a mumble that we'd have to ask him to repeat several times before he'd raise his voice to a level that we could decipher his verbal mess he'd attempted to create. Then it took close on to 30 minutes for the guy to stick the visas into our passports. We were watching him through the window and between bouts of sleeping and standing up for a stretch the bus driver finally arrived and managed to get him to finish his job.... This would have been fine except he'd ripped us off by US$10, so we would have expected a faster service for our "tip".

Anyway, it's nice to be here in Blantyre and it's actually safe to walk around the city for a change. We caught our first real mini bus taxi today all by our selves into town with 15 of us packed in a 12 seater... not bad really! Tomorrow we catch the 7am bus to Monkey Bay (about 5-6 hours away) on Lake Malawi and then we catch a "boat" to Cape Maclear.

Happiness

Quick update.

We are back in South Africa for now. After the Okavango Delta we visited the Khama Rhino Sanctuary for a night where we saw quite a few white rhino up close and then moved on to the capital of Botswana which isn't anything special.

With quite a bit of time left on our car rental we are doing some sight seeing of South Africa knocking of the Pilansberg National Park (fantastic little park with all the big animals), Sun City (SA's bad attempt at Vegas), and the Drakensberg escarpment area (an amazing very green wet place between the highlands and the lowlands with huge waterfalls and amazing rock formations).

We are now heading towards the Drakensberg Mountains until we return the car in J'burg. Tonight we are staying in a lovely hostel with the most unhelpful, angry staff member who epitomises service in South Africa... called Happiness.

Photos

Link on the right hand side to the photos we have put up on flickr nicely organised into sets :) Enjoy.

Zambia and Botswana

After several days in Windhoek Namibia we headed north into Zambia via the Caprivi Strip which is this narrow bit of land hundreds of km's long boarded by Angola, Botswana, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Open now without the need of an armed escort we drove through hundreds of villages strewn along the road. Signs everywhere warned of elephants and to drive carefully, so we kept our eyes peeled, when we weren't trying to keep the car on the road due to extremely localised torrential downpours. The only elephant we saw was when we came across a whole village out on the road yelling and screaming. We slowed down and some kids pointed out a movement in the bush. Next minute there was a trumpeting and a whole heap of crashing noises followed by a huge male elephant running out of the bush. All the kids turned and ran but as soon as the elephant stopped they were straight back into their yelling and screaming. We discovered this was the way villages stop elephants entering their village and knocking everything down... houses, crops etc. Eventually the elephant tired of the village protection squad and sauntered off back into the bush.

Anyway, orderly Namibia turned into disorderly Zambia with a drive across a bridge. After over an hour filling in forms and getting papers stamped in broken down caravans we were back on the road to Livingstone. Swerving to avoid people, cattle, goats and chameleons we arrived at Faulty Towers backpackers and signed up for a white water rafting trip down the Zambezi and a booze cruise for the following day. Joining us on the activities were our next door neighbours from Australia. As it's high water at the moment the rapids on the Zambezi are rather tame but still a lot of fun. Dani chose to go in the "easy" raft and I was forced to go in the "hard" raft which meant the guide tried to flip us as much as possible. Given the size of the rapids he only managed to flip us once much to his dismay. The booze cruise was more of a civilised affair compared to the last one I went on over here and we saw hippo and crocs as we drifted along as the sun set. The Aussies, Dan a South African we met on the rafting, another SA and a kiwi who flew oil prospecting planes were on our cruise. We were to run into Dan everywhere we went over the following days around Victoria Falls and ended up sitting out a massive rain storm in the Vic Falls bridge bungee cafe whilst having lunch.

Zambia is a massive country with not much between points of interest. Given it being the rainy season and advice from other travellers we turned around and headed to Botswana after 3 nights in Livingstone. Approaching the boarder we were confronted by a queue of trucks about 1 km long parked up on the side of the road waiting for the pontoon that takes vehicles across the river to Botswana. We pulled up at the boarder post and after fighting our way through the crowd of touts we then began the weird and wonderfully complicated process of Zambian boarder control. The touts followed us to the river edge we we waited for 2 hours for a place on the pontoon. The pontoon carried one truck and three cars at a time. Given the number of trucks, some of these guys must wait for several days as the pontoon takes just over 30 minutes to make a there and back trip across a 60 meter wide river. African efficiency!

Hitting up a small town called Kasane in Botswana where we spent two nights we did a game drive in Chobe NP followed by a sunset cruise. Elephants are everywhere here and so are hippos so we can safely say we've well and truly ticked those two off. Now we are in Maun where we undertook an overnight Makoro (dug out canoe) trip into the Okavango Delta. It was just Dani, myself and the guide/poler and we had to carry in everything we'd need ourselves. Our guide (Kaiser) was caught off guard by our last minute booking so ended up leaving all his food behind. He said he was happy not to eat for the 24 hour trip much to Dani's disgust, so Dani forced him to eat the muck we made for lunch, dinner and breakfast. I think he was pleased to see the end of us poor guy. The delta was quiet in terms of the big animals, not surprising given the time of year, but was full of birds and insects. We still heard hippo and saw zebra however.

So that brings you up to date. Tomorrow we head out towards a rhino sanctuary and then who knows where to from there. Hope everyone at home is well and we'll update again when we get a chance.

Issues

So since we have a day of nothing today we're going to update the blog with several entries. This one is about the stuff i'm getting frustrated about here in Africa:

1. Fuel: It's rubbish! Well at least the kerosene. You can't buy white spirits here but luckily my cooker runs on kerosene and unleaded fuel. Kerosene is sold everywhere and is used by everyone for cooking (when they're not braai'ing (BBQ'ing)). I don't know how the locals manage to cook with this rubbish though. What would take us 5 minutes for boiling water at home takes me 45 minutes after fighting with the cooker. A dutch couple are having more success with petrol so will give that a try next.
2. Mosquitoes: No matter how hard you try and keep them away they still get you. 
3. Roads: Actually they're very good but there is one in particular that was rubbish and as this is a complaining post I better pad this post out with complaints. The road running between Kasane and Nata in Botswana is the worst tarred road in the world. It would be better to rip it up and leave it untarred given that the road is one big pothole.

Well that's all. We're having an awesome time so next post will be an update.

School in Katutura, Windhoek

Through a connection with a family from Wadestown School (the Harris Family) who also live across the road from my father, we were able to go and help out at an afternoon school. Cathy, the Harris's aunt is the lovely kiwi woman in the photo. It was in a township area of Windhoek called Katutura. Apparently, Namibian public schools aren't great, especially in township areas. Teachers often don't have higher than year 10 qualifications themselves, classes can be 40 or more, there is a lot of rote learning and of course behaviour management is a whack. So this school is run by expats and relies on volunteers (not always teachers) to teach the children. They have seen improved results from the Namibian school for lots of the children who attend the afternoon school and therefore have a large waiting list for children to come to the school. We ended up staying for 3 days - not a significant time in terms of the children's learning, but as the woman (a Norwegian social worker) was sick, the year one class was without a teacher so I was able to help out none the less.

I perhaps should have been warned when Cathy said, "They were wild when I took them yesterday." Basically there were around 20 year 1 children who had had about 5 days of school so far and no preschool education and the room was about 3x3 metres. It was reminiscent of some of my decile 1 relieving days. You pull on all your resources to survive. Pretty much on day one, we turned up and were taken to the class and I was left to do my thing. I.e. fly by the seat of my pants. Karl stayed and they children enjoyed any opportunity they had to climb on him, and were fascinated by the hair on his legs, arms and especially fingers. They were absolutely gorgeous and a good number of them keen to learn and attentive. Of course there were the obligatory scally-wags. 3 of them who pulled a couple more along at times. In terms of education, most could not write their names (I discovered on the second day when I tried to learn them all), they could sing ABC and count to 10 and that's about it. Well, enough of them could to make it sound like they all were. With Julie Roberts numeracy advisor's voice in my head we spent lots of time counting backwards from 10 (backwards is as important as forwards and is needed for subtraction!). We also did lots of activities using the letter b. (Forgive me if that wasn't a good place to start junior teachers!) We also sang a lot.

By Day three we were functioning much better. Of

course that was until the grasshopper entered the classroom. Hysteria reigned and I had to stop

several children from whacking it with their shoes. They calmed down and we did some maths with the bottle tops. There was a bag of about 500. When the kids were packing up the bag was tipped all over the floor. Metal tops on a tiled floor caused enough noise, but this was added to as children started sliding around on them and the throwing them in the air. It was loud and took a while to sort out. Heads, shoulders, knees and toes helped to get their focus back! Spot scally-wag number one in front of me! Because we had been learning about the letter b, we ended our time with the kids by giving them balloons. So lovely to see their excitement.

You can't see, but as this photo was being taken, I had children's hands playing with my hair ! They loved touching it!

We were able to donate some money to the school raised by the year 7 and 8s from Wadestown School.

Mention should also be made of the fact that Karl was dragged into teaching too. On day 2, the year 7 class was without a teacher so he was asked to step in. The lesson that he was given was quite open and so he ended up discussing climate change with them and making outfits out of plastic bags. He was exhausted by the end of it and had developed his respect for teachers somewhat. he wasn't keen for a repeat performance!

So, if anyone is keen, especially teachers, we can hook you up with some delightful children in Windhoek!