December 28, 2007

Greetings from Malawi!

We are still well and having a good trip. I'm just trying to remember where we last left off...

I think we traveled through a few big cities - Lusaka, Zambia and Lilongwe, Malawi, but there isn't much to write about that part. We have just spent a little more than a week in a place called Nkhata Bay on the scenic shores of Lake Malawi and loved nearly every minute we spent there. We had a great place to stay - good company (including a fun canadian couple we met way back in Livingstone, Zambia), good atmosphere, great food, and lots of fun stuff to do. The lake is absolutely beautiful - crystal clear waters alongside a sometimes rocky sometimes sandy coastline. We swam every day in the warm waters and did some snorkeling to see all the varieties of colorful fresh-water chichlid fish, many of which are endemic to that lake. The place we stayed also had a carving school, and Adam spent a few days with Masa (the teacher) carving mask! After about a week of relaxing, we headed out on a 3day/2night kayak trip! Going from Nkhata Bay to Kande Beach was a 60 km trip (20 km a day). Along the shore every few miles, were fishing villages and people everywhere on the beach. The men fixing their fishing nets and preparing their dugout canoes for the night, woman doing washing, and children everywhere washing, playing and yelling at the 'Mzungo' (white person). It was amazing to see the village life on the lake as EVERYTHING revolves around fishing!? The kayaking was great. Day 2 was the toughest as the lake was rough with a storm but we had two very good guides leading the way! After the kayak trip we countiued to head north. Spent a few days in the area of Livingstonia, Malawai. Two more on the beach with Christmas with our toes in the sand and one in the mountains at a great ecolodge! Christmas was quite (we missed our family and friends even more this time around....next year though!) but nice as the moon lite up Lake Malawi at night!

Today we made it to Dar Es Salaam...tomorrow we head to Zanzibar to celebrate New Years! Do some snorkeling, diving, and laying around....somebody has to do it.

Merry Xmas All (a little late) and Happy New Year

09 December 07

Well, there was some wrong information in that last post, so I thought I'd give it a quick update. Adam had so much fun on the rafting trip of the Zambezi that he convinced me to skip the canoe trip and raft instead. So yesterday we went back - Adam to raft the river a second time and me as a nervous newbie. As I am writing this today, you can tell we survived! It was quite exciting, and at times scary, but we made it. On Adam's first trip, he only capsized once, and yesterday we capsized twice, and one other time Adam was swept out of the boat with one other guy while the rest of us remained in. The first rapid we lost it on was number 7, and it was a total wipe out. Everyone (there were 6 of us in one boat, with a guide - two were Peace Corps friends and two were friends from our long, long bus ride!) was totally thrown out - no one even hanging onto the raft and we got tossed around somewhat violently, but thanks to good life vests and an excellent group of 'clean up crew' guys in kayaks, we were all returned to the boat at the end of the rapid. The next flip was right before lunch on rapid number 10 and most of us remained hanging onto the safety rope of the raft and just floated along with the raft through the remainder of the rapid. Oddly enough, we flipped only on a class 3 and a class 4 rapid, and on none of the 5s! (Rapids are rated 1-6, 5 being the biggest one that you can raft commercially, 6 is deemed unraftable and there was one of those that we had to get out and walk around and good thing too - that rapid was scary looking!) The scenery in the gorge is beautiful - steep rock cliffs rise right at the river's edge, and there are rock fig trees and baobabs among others growing on ledges and some just straight out of the rocks above. Our guides were quick to point out the crocodiles basking on the rocks - no kidding! - which added another thing to worry about for the day, but thankfully they were all small ones, and they tend not to like the fast-moving sections. The afternoon was smooth sailing and we didn't swim at all, except in one place that you can just jump out of the boat on purpose and coast down a small rapid. We are a bit bruised and battered, but the better for it. I'm really glad I went and conquered my fear, and we bought little charms of the river god, Nyaminyami, as reminders.

Today we're off on the bus to Lusaka to take care of some visa business, and then onto Malawi. We'll write again soon,
Andrea

December 07, 2007

Greetings, all, from Zambia!
We finally left Namibia behind, although the country almost didn't let us leave. Our already grueling 18-hour bus ride took a turn for the worse when our drivers noticed an empty radiator and pulled into a gas station to get it fixed. 1 hours delay turned into 18 as we sat in the parking lot in the small town of Rundu, jockeying for shade with our fellow passengers. It was not fun, but I think we made the most of it - chatting with some newfound friends, playing cards, and having political discussions with some eager young (and successful!) Zimbabweans. We finally pulled into Livingstone, Zambia 24 hours late, and exhausted! Yesterday we went to view the world famous Victoria Falls, which was quite beautiful to see but not what we expected. You always see those amazing photos of an immense waterfall, but that is during the wet season, and now it is the dry season. But it was beautiful nonetheless and we spent all day there, walking around and seeing the falls from all angles, even getting to walk around on top of the falls - not as dangerous as it sounds! We walked out onto the bridge over the Zambezi river between Zambia and Zimbabwe and watched a 50-year old Indian couple bunji jump together off the bridge which was funny to see. Today, I am being a big chicken and hanging out in Livingston (trying to plan where we're going next!) while Adam rafts the mighty Zambezi river with some Peace Corps friends we ran into here. I'm sure he'll write and tell you all about it at a later date. It's one of the largest, scariest, commercially raftable rivers in the world, and it was just too intimidating for me. But Adam's belief in the local Nyamanyama god of the Zambezi should get him through the day. Tomorrow we're going to do something a little more my pace and canoe on the Zambezi, where we only have the hippos to worry about.
Hope this finds you all well...

Andrea

Oh and one last thing. For those of you intersted, I just thought I'd let you know that we finally bought our plane tickets home. If all goes according to plan (yeah right!) our two year, 7 month journey will be coming to an end on February 29th. First stop will be LA, and eastwards from there. We still don't know where we're going, but that's not really important, right?

Elephants

Hi Everyone,
We are back in Windhoek after two fantastic weeks in the desert. We volunteered with a group called EHRA - Elephant-Human Relations Aid, and had a blast. We spent the first week at their base camp, building a dam for the elephants nearby. The camp is set on the Ugab river, which for 99% of the year is just a dry, sandy riverbed. Usually they do projects that help strengthen relations with the farmers in the area and help protect their water sources from elephant dammage, but since there has been an extra-dry spell in the region lately, most of those water points have dried up. So we built an elephant-friendly water point instead. It was a lot of hard work, and the first day was HOT - 40 degrees C in the shade, which is well over 100 degrees F. The weather calmed down a bit after that though, thankfully and we were even shivering a few nights! The camp is quite rustic and in a beautiful location. We slept in an a-frame - basically just a wooden deck floor with a reed-thatched roof, open to the environment on the sides. There were outdoor showers and a composting toilet, and a kitchen area where we cooked over a fire every night and still ate very well! We knew it was going to be an excellent two weeks when about 30 minutes after we got to camp the first day, a herd of elephants came down the river and close to camp with two 2-month-old calves. We didn't see any more elephants for the rest of the work week, but for the second week we were out on 'elephant patrol'. Basically just traveling around the area in a big, old, beat up, modefied land cruiser, checking on the elephants in the area. We started near camp and found the two herds in the area along with a few solo males within the first day so we were incredibly lucky and got to head across the desert to another riverbed to check on the other herds. I guess they don't make this trek very often, as it is long and hard on the vehicles so we were incredibly lucky. We traveled for an afternoon and a morning through the desert, and camped out overnight in a fantastic place where nothing hindered your stargazing, not even a tree. Just the big mountains in the distance sillouetted against the sky. It was absolutely beautiful. In the morning, the colors of the rocks and sand were spectacular and we got to stop at a series of caves where the bushmen used to live and see shards of stone tools on the ground. The second riverbed was the Huab river, and we found two more herds there along with more solo males. Again we were incredibly lucky, as one of the females in the first herd had a less than 2-day-old calf. He was amazing to see - so tiny and still trying to figure out his feet and trunk. What a cutie! Since we were the first to spot him, our group got to name him and they settled on Homer as it was a little boy and the name had to start with an H. I wish I could post a photo, but we've been having problems with that later so maybe another time. I hope! One other hilight of the trip was while watching two big bulls feeding on the last morning. I was sitting on the top of the vehicle when one male decided to come inspect the car. He walked by, incredibly close, just watching us and when he got to the back of the car turned and stared me down for a minute, before reaching up with his trunk and feeding on the tree directly above my head. He was less than 5 feet away and it was absolutely an incredible experience! Some of our friends in the other car got a few photos which will be quite a memory to hold on to, as long as they remember to send them to us! Needless to say, we had a great time and met some fantastic people. This organization is definately an interesting one and we learned a lot in our time there. I'm almost out of time so have to cut it short here. I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving. We actually forgot until about 5pm that day, but oh well. Tomorrow we leave Namibia and head to Victoria Falls in Zambia for a few days. So until next time...

Andrea