Malawi +0days 19hours
Johannesburg International was a bloody joke. It's so tiny, and so many people. To get into the international waiting area took over an hour, and there were too many queues. Oddly enough, if anyone had thought about processes, the bulk of it could be done on a single queue, greatly improving the overall performance. Anyway, that will be the topic for another post soon enough.
Once on board the shaky plane, I had the usual crap airline food—and a bad landing in Malawi (Blantyre, to be exact, if anyone cares). So upon landing, I met the "new" baggage carousel, namely the ground next to the terminal building (glad I didn’t pack anything breakable)—and the most pointless forms ever: two forms, one for customs and one for immigration, both asking the same questions, but you had to fill in both. PHOTOCOPIERS, PEOPLE!!!
Anyway, from the airport, it was off to the local ex-pat/backpackers pub for drinks, food, and watching SA beat New Zealand in the cricket—all in all, a nice evening. The fact that all dogs wear a muzzle (it’s law here) is a little scary the first time you see it (Silence of the Hounds?).
The humidity is another issue altogether—I doubt I’ve sweated this much in years. My hotel room (at the nice Mount Sosche Hotel) thankfully comes with air conditioning. It didn’t come with water last night, due to an ongoing supply issue, but by this morning, there was at least cold water. The area is really beautiful, very tropical in nature (it reminds me of the north coast in Natal), and we’re surrounded by mountains on all sides.
The biggest fear people seem to have when coming here is malaria—but I’ve got a new one. I’m working for a telco here, and there’s a transmission station just 100m from my desk. It’s so powerful it kills car electronics if you park too near it—and here I thought only UFOs could do that. The scary part? That I hope my third arm grows out the front and not the back, like a weird tail.
Oh, and the bandwidth here? Killer. It’s like: "How fast would you like to go?" Telkom, you bunch of clowns, come to a real third-world country to learn some lessons.