Travel always comes with risk.
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In the last few days, we've been reminded of that fact with the tragic loss of life in the airline accident involving Ethiopian Airlines. We were just there and took off in a very similar fashion on that same airline in that same city.
When Fiona showed me the headline, I dropped my fork. What?!?! I was stunned. That kind of thing really hits you in the gut. It took my breath away. It could have been ... us.
Ethiopian is an excellent airline, by far the biggest in Africa and one of the largest in the world, with an excellent safety record. We had flown on them several times on this trip. But these things can happen anywhere.
That element of risk is always there.
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That being said, our recent travels were not without their own drama.
We were leaving Malawi and hustling to catch the flight out of Lilongwe, the nations capital. Never fails, when you're in a hurry, stuff happens. The hotel machine for credit cards didn't work (they never do). The only option was to go to a "cash machine" (ATM) which are notoriously unreliable in most parts of the world, they never work either.
So we bust out of there on a taxi and luckily find a machine that works - except that it only allows limited withdrawals in small bills. This takes forever and we end up with a giant wad of money shown in the picture below. It was only worth $300, the biggest bill value was three dollars.
It doesn't get better. So we make our flight and take off for Harare, Zimbabwe (pronounced Zim-bob-way) but we don't go directly there. We land in a city I've never heard of called Ndola (pronounced In-Doh-Lah), it's right on the border of the Congo.
In fact, here is a list of the cities we've landed in within the last few days:
Blantyre
Lilongwe
Ndola
Harare
Lusaka
Bulawayo
I'll let you figure out the pronunciation. This is not exactly a top-ten list of holiday destinations ...
It gets worse: We are about to take off again on a flight from Herare after a ridiculous five-and-a-half hour layover and the guy at the ticket counter says "your names are not on the passenger list."
Fiona says "I was afraid of this, they changed the flight times." So we were told to go to the other ticket counter in the other terminal and get our names added to the list.
This turned out to the a pain. The guy at the "other ticket counter" said it was because we changed our flights. Fiona fired off "No! YOU changed the flights!" Our names were eventually added and we made the flight.
It gets worse:
When we finally land in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe we procure a ride to the hotel and the fun begins ...
It's rather late at night when we walk into the 'lobby' and it looks like a mess and the 'reception' guy says ...
"Um, we have a problem. The hotel is closed right now for renovations."
"Closed?" we ask, "What do you mean?"
"Well," he says "We don't have a room for you, but we have booked you into another hotel."
"What?" we are incredulous "Where?"
"Oh, it's not far. It's nice, out on the edge of town."
We are not at all happy about this "How long has this hotel been closed for renovation?"
And he says: "About a month."
"What the @%#^$&$*#? This place has been closed for a month and you are still taking reservations?? That's a buncha &$@^*&#!"
The guy is very apologetic and then he says "Is it possible for you to pay us now?"
We have finally had enough, Fiona explodes - "NO! First you blow our off our reservation and want to send us to a hotel in god-knows-where, and now you want to be paid? Are you out of your mind?"
This goes on for a while and we end up in a crappy place in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. Like I said, plenty of drama.
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It's not all bad
That being said, there were still plenty of things to enjoy. In between the monsoon rains and floods in Malawi we had a chance to visit the giant Lake Malawi from which the country gets its name.
When we got there, we saw this funky thing on the lake that looked like smoke. Our driver told us it was not smoke, but a cloud of insects. It looked really weird and was moving across the lake (It's the picture at the top of the blog).
"Yes, and when it hits land, the people like to eat the bugs" Hunh? They eat the cloud of insects?
"Yes, they are very good, they scoop them up with shovels ..." Ha! Ha! ... I think I'll pass on that.
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But we did find a nice beach to enjoy lunch and admire the vast lake, the seventh largest in the world, with the most species of fish in any lake.
Another thing we saw that I was not familiar with - Malawi grows a lot of tobacco. It's all over, and it's a really good cash crop for them, and grows great in this semi-tropical climate. You might debate about the ethics of such, but they are just trying to make a living in this poor country.
And then we arrived in Zimbabwe, with the weather just about perfect. We've been all over the southern hemisphere on this trip and most of the times it's been super hot and humid, with frequent tropical rain. But here? Great.
We went to visit around town, and there is evidence of the colonial period with a cool train station. From 1880 to 1965 this country was known as Rhodesia, and then the name changed.
And going way back, a thousand years or more, there was a great civilization here in southwest Africa. We drove out to the amazing ruins of Khami, where you can see the remains of ancient cities. There is evidence of this all over Zimbabwe, something most people are not aware of, a great, advanced, ancient civilization of Africans.
Unfortunately, there are some economic problems here in Zimbabwe and their currency has kinda collapsed. This makes it difficult for us to get any cash to spend, and the credit card machines don't work and well, this is the part of travel that kinda sucks.
It's a lot worse for the local citizens, because businesses are closing and there are no jobs. You wouldn't know this from far away, across the globe. We didn't.
But for us, we press on.
And it's not all bad.
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