On the way there we flew through Lusaka and Nairobi, going a little bit out of the way. Flying back we stayed a day in Nairobi. It happened to be on Madaraka Day, a holiday in Kenya celebrating when they first obtained autonomy from Britain.
Our hotel was cool, I had a huge room. I’m not sure how anyone could use all that space. One of the IT guys from Moshi showed us some of the night life there as well.
While we worked most of the time while we were in Moshi, we did get some gorgeous views of Kilimanjaro through the clouds and from the plane:
We also were able to swing through Nairobi National Park while we were staying there. While it’s partially surrounded by Nairobi, it’s huge. You certainly don’t feel like you’re in a city while you’re driving around inside. There were a fair amount of wild animals inside – its not anything like a zoo, the animals weren’t brought there for the park, they were there from the get go.
The city of Nairobi was interesting in and of itself as well. It definitely had more to offer than anywhere else I visited in Africa.
All in all, it was a good trip. Would have been better if my luggage hadn’t got lost but, that’s life.
Last Sunday all of us staying here at Mike and Hill’s house went over to Lake Malawi for a few hours. It was my first time outside of Lilongwe, I was able to see a glimpse of what the country areas look like.
We ended up having to pay to bring our own food to the beach, which was a little tacky, though it wasn’t a whole lot. After having lunch at the beach, we tried to find some hippo pools that were in the area. Saw some baboons crossing the road on the way, but found out that the hippo’s aren’t out during the day after we drove through the “trail” (tire ruts through tall grass) to get there. Drive back was fairly uneventful, it actually rained in Lilongwe though, which is pretty unusual for the dry season I guess.
On Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday mornings we didn’t have power for a brief period of time, meaning the water in the shower was cold. Thankfully, that wasn’t the case today. Our Zain cell phones finally started working in Lilongwe again on Tuesday I think. Not sure what the problem was with that. We didn’t have Internet yesterday at Michael’s house, until we went in and changed some options on the WiMax equipment to let it use other frequencies. The WiMax access point here has three options for channels set up on it, only one of them was enabled. After enabling the others, the device chose another channel that had a stronger signal.
I’ll just talk about my experiences in this entry, I’ll make another post about how our technical projects have been going.
Last few days have been interesting. I’m writing this right now on Saturday evening (it’ll probably be posted later)-we don’t have Internet at Mike and Hill’s house. Tonse, the local WiMax ISP here has network issues right now. Last night they lost their upstream connection to the Internet. I could still VPN into Tidziwe, using the Tonse connection there. But right now, it looks like they are having problems inside their network too, my traceroute stops at the same point whether the traffic is going to the Internet or to Tidziwe (which is on a different tower from the one we use here).
We also can’t use our Zain cell phones at Mike and Hill’s house. We have a connection to the cell tower though, which makes me think that the cell tower we’re on has lost its connection to the rest of the Zain network. Adding and interesting twist however, my phone worked from the supermarket, but Mike’s Nexus One wouldn’t. Lot of strange connectivity issues going on right now.
I think we’re going to Lake Malawi tomorrow. We’ll probably leave in the morning and then return before dark. Once I got here I realized that I only have two real free weekends here in Malawi. This weekend, and the weekend after next. Next weekend I’ll be in Tanzania. So the weekend after next we might to Mozambique or Zambia or something. I’m hoping I’ll get to see one of the villages in the country at some point while I’m here. It’ll be interesting to compare that to the city.
I’ll start from today. This afternoon we went to a supermarket store here, Chipiku. Then we went to the outdoor market here in Lilongwe. That was an interesting experience, there were tons of people selling fresh fruits and vegetables. A few people were also selling clothes, bootleg movies, etc.
Here are some pictures as we were driving around today:
On Thursday and Friday, Michael and I ate at Tidziwe. A few ladies bring in food that they’ve made. It was interesting to try Malawian food. Much better than the Ethiopian food. Fries are called “chips” here (and potato chips are called crisps). The chips (fries) here are a little different than the ones in the US, they’re wetter and not as crispy. Glass bottles are most common here, though I’ve seen a few plastic bottles for coke and a few cans.
On Thursday I also had a burger from McDouds, a knock-off of McDonalds. The burger was OK, would have been much better without the mildly spicy sauce they put on it. We ordered from the table, and then they brought the food to us. It was about 900 kwacha’s for a burger and “chips”. A lot of places have pictures of the current Malawian President on the wall. Most of the paper currency has a picture of former President Kamuzu on it. The airport, and the central hospital are also named after him. Coins are pretty rare here, they have 20 kwacha bills, which are worth about a dime in US currency. I’ve only seen 10 kwacha coins.
