Transit

When I leave Africa, I'm certain that my most enduring memories will be of travel, most specific of travelling in chappas (or matapas, daladalas, whatever you call it), the small mini-vans which provide cheap and (relatively) frequent transit throughout Africa.

The from inside a packed mini-van

The chappas are crowded, hot, slow (sometime dangerous) and every trip invariably involves some kind of dispute, ranging from the mundane issues of how much a Mzungo should pay for the trip, to how many people (and chickens) should be sitting in one row (this number is surprisingly large) to whether the chappa is actually going where it's supposed to (you often don't have this argument until you've already ended up somewhere you don't want to be).

As mentioned, travel can be dangerous, especially at night. These were just some of the accidents we passed on the road.

In spite of all this, independent travel in Africa would be impossible without them. They also give you good insight into the people and the places you are going to. Finally, once the ride is over and you're showered and rested, each journey takes on a nostalgic feel to it.

James terrifying some local kids to alleviate the boredom.

Anyway, it was in one of these chappas which we departed Inhambane and began our long journey up to Malawi, and finally to Nhkata bay on Lake Malawi. The journey itself would take a around 5 - 6 days of travel spread over 8 days and was tiring to say the least. Even with a rest day in Vilankulos, the final beach town before we headed to Malawi, it was a hard slog. The journey was also complicated by James' bag being stolen at the bus station in Lilongwe and the subsequent wasted day in Lilongwe (courtesy of the incompetent staff at the Lilongwe police station).

The view from Inhambane peer.

The beach at Vilankulos.

As i mentioned though, in hindsight this is all a blur and the truth is we did see a view of Mozamabique and Malawi which was unique and interesting, so it's not all bad. Luckily this puts most of the hard travelling behind us, we'll have a few more mammoth efforts, but these should be one or two days at most. So onwards we go, next stop Nhkata bay on Lake Malawi which by all reports is absolutely amazing!

Love and Hate Tofo

Never have I been to a place which has left me with such conflicting emotions. We pretty much failed to do everything we intended to in Tofo, but somehow found a whole lot of other things which made it all worthwhile... i think. Let me explain:

Tofo beach itself is a beautiful place. Our backpackers, Fatima's Nest (or Rat's Nest as it could well be called) was perched precariously on high sand dunes over looking the beach. From the bar you had unspoilt views of long sandy beaches and deep blue water - very very cool (See photo below).

The view from the bar.

Yet another amazing sunrise in Africa.

Wooks and James enjoying a refreshing ale after the long bus ride here.

The accommodation was basic, mainly grass huts but this was kind of all we needed. We also ended up in a dorm full of really cool people. We'd made friends with people on the bus there and for the next five days the 10 of us lived in a dorm. It was a lot of fun.

This was helped by the fact that Tofo is a great party town. Every day a bus load of backpackers arrives from Maputo, keen for some beers and party, so all in all it was a really fun place. That was the part of Tofo we loved.

The other side of Tofo was typified by amazingly useless and apathetic staff, ridiculously over priced food, accomodation and activites (more on this). For exmaple, the staff at the hostel were habitually stoned and unable to answer any questions, we soon realised it best just to not do anything which involved their help. Simple things such as "can i get my bag out of the safe?" were some how completely impossible - Please come back at another time, at which point we may or may not decide to help. Useless.

This aside, the major disappointment was the Diving / Whale Sharks spotting. The single reason we came to Tofo was to see Whale Sharks. Tofo is unique in that it has the only resident whale shark population in the world. All other Whale Shark populations are seasonal, but at Tofo they are always there - apparently.

We started our search for the whale sharks with an extortionate two tank dive. (we're still not sure why but diving in Tofo is by far the most expensive diving we've done). Diving isn't the normal way to see Whale Sharks as they normally spend time on the surface, however, the guys at Tofo scuba ensured us that between dives we'd spend time looking for them then snorkeling with them. Sounded great.

Sadly, the seas were angry that day. Heading out of the bay we were met by 10 ft swells which didn't stop. This wasn't helped by the fact that instead of a normal sized dive boat, we were instead in a small rubber ducky style boat. After 25 minutes of bobbing around we were on the verge of sickness. 2 hours later after our dives, we were most definitely sea sick (Nick, Wookie and I anyway, somehow James escaped unharmed). The massive waves and cloudy sky also made it impossible to find any Whale Sharks.

The diving itself was... ok. Wasn't great, but wasn't that bad. All in all a pretty disappointing experience.

The next day we thought we'd try again, this time a dedicated whale shark trip. Again, extortionately priced (nearly $100 US for two hours!), and again disappointment. After barely two hours of heading down the coast then back, we were told "sorry no whale sharks today", spent 10 minutes snorkeling on a "reef" completely devoid of life and then headed in to the shore.

This was all very disappointing, but that wasn't the end of it, not for me. The final kick in the teeth (hehe) came that evening when, whilst biting into a delicious chocolate bar, the bridge work which holds my false tooth in place broke. This has been waiting to happen for a long time, but the timing couldn't have been much worse. After a day of doubt and despair (I was almost ready to jump straight on a bus to Maputo, Jo'burg, then fly home) I decided to soldier on. I'm really glad i did now as it turns out i probably wouldn't have been able to get on a flight and would have stuck in Jo'burg along - not a lot of fun.

So, with that decision made we head off through northern Mozambique to Malawi, minus one front tooth. I can't help but laugh at the irony of the post below, I definitely did get a serious dose of travel pain, hopefully that's it for this trip though.

It begins in Africa... (South Africa actually)

Things are going smoothly. In fact, things are going a little too smoothly and I'm strarting to get suspscious that we are due some serious travel pain sometime soon.

We arrived safely at Jo'burg after the best transit stop-over I've ever had. 6 hours in Singapore was spent relaxing in a pool, playing Xbox and watching premier leagure soccer. Changi Airport is now my favourite place in Singapore (granted, I haven't been anywhere else).

Once in Jo'burg we managed to make it to our hostel without incident and our tour of Jo'burg consisted of one site - Eastgate mall, A.K.A Fountain Gate from Kath and Kim. We even rounded this out with a lovely Latte. Fairly strange experience, however by the end of it we were stocked and ready for Kruger.

Early the next morning we successfully negotiated City Park Bus Station (Jo'burg's number one mugging point) and boarded a bus to Nelspruit where we stayed at the Funky Monkey. Less said about that place the better.

Now to the serious bit - Kruger Park. This place was absolutely amazing. We opted to organise the trip ourselves and hired a car for four days. This ended up being a very economically sound decision. Rather than paying the extortionate $375US each, we got away with $475US TOTAL for the four us. BAM!

Also, my fears that we wouldn't see as much wildelife without a guide were totally missplaced. The only animal we didn't see was a Cheetah, otherwise we saw 4 different Lions, two Leopards, loads of Rhinos, Elephants, Hippos, Giraffes and even some baby Hyenas (which were extremely cute!). Below are some of the pics:

Hyena Family

African Sunset

Elephant

Leopard - thanks to nick for spotting this guy.

So now we are off on the second leg of our journey - Mozambique. It's time to soak up some surf, sand and diving, woohoo!

Here we go. In some 13 hours I'll be jumping on a plane with James and Wookie, some 25 or so hours later we'll be landing in Jo'burg. At the moment I can't really conceive what it's going to be like. After 10 months of solid focus on work and resettling into Brisbane, it's hard to get my head around travelling again.

I'm thinking it's going to be different. Very very different to anywhere I've been before.

Anyway, speculation aside, here is the rough plan for the next 7 weeks:

Arrive Jo'Burg.
Leave. Straight away (ok, maybe the next day), but we plan to head off asap for Kruger.
After a few days (5?) in Kruger, head for the Mozambique, Maputo and the coast.
I'm hoping to spend a while here in Tofo and some other placed.
After this the next stop is Malawi, possibly Mount Malanje then work our way up north.
From Malawi onto Tanzania and New Years in Zanzibar (woot!).
Soon after that we'll be heading in the direction of Uganda, at which point my part of the journey comes to an end and I fly back to Jo'burg then back Brisbane.

It's going to be an amazing trip and I can't wait to see how it pans out. Stay tuned.

Pass the Sexy Tractor please.

I awoke in the sleeper bus from Lijiang to Kunming with Marlon Brando's voice in my head: "Damn, Saigon." Ok, this wasn't quite Saigon circa the Vietnam war, but somehow the sentiment fitted. The bus station was bathed in an eerie pre-dawn light and the sky was dark and smoky, a spider web of free-ways twisted, barely visible, over head. It was like something out of Blade Runner.

Movie citations aside, why were we in bus at Kunming bus station at 4:00am in the morning? Rewind about a week. We left Lhasa early boxing day morning after a pretty ugly disagreement with a taxi driver. There was an issue with the price: apparently 5 Yuan isn't enough for a 2 minute drive. So we payed the (extortionate) 10 Yuan he was asking. This, however, still wasn't enough and we were treated to a further 5 minutes of abuse while we waited for the airport bus to leave. The worst part about it was the comment made by the official at the bus station: "I can't do anything, he's Chinese..." the implication being that were he Tibetan they could have turfed him out no problems. The whole incident left a sour taste in our mouths that, unfortunately, is somehow appropriate in China run Tibet.

The flight itself though was amazing. I had originally wanted to travel overland from Lhasa to Lijiang as the landscape where the Tibetan plateau descends into low land China is apparently breathtaking. Unfortunately, this would have taken about 2 weeks and cost about $2000 US Dollars, neither of which we had. From the air we did at least get a feel for what it would have been like: for as far as the eye could see there was nothing but rugged mountains and frozen lakes, very very cool.

Upon arriving in Lijiang we (true to form) spent the first day or two organising how we were going to get out of there and into Burma. We've learned the hard way that getting out of (or into) these places is sometimes difficult and time consuming - if you leave things to the last minute it will cost you. Again we'd originally planned on traveling overland from Lijiang down into Burma, however, after a bit of chasing around we decided it would be too costly - the overland permit costs around $200 for a 5 hour drive, all of which goes straight to the Myanmar government. For the same price we could fly from Kunming to Mandalay, save 2 or 3 days travel and also enter the country knowing we weren't directly funding the corrupt military junta which is the Myanmar government. This is one of the goals of the Burma trip - try to give as little to the government as possible - and it wouldn't have felt right to capitulate so early on.

After sorting this out (4 seats on a flight from Kunming to Mandalay sort of booked), the next morning we jumped on a bus bound for Tiger Leaping Gorge. The gorge is renowned for it's spectacular beauty thanks to the steepness of the gorge and the ruggedness of the surrounding mountains. We decided we'd spend at least 2 days hiking up and then down into the gorge. And we SMASHED it in record time, probably due to our super-human physique (thanks to elevator red-blood cell counts due to the previous 2 or 3 weeks at altitude) and all round ruggedness... Ok I'm exaggerating but we did make it most of the way through the two day trek the first day which was lucky as it gave us the whole next morning to do the walk down to the bottom of the gorge. All in all it was a great trek, the place really is spectacular, especially from the foot of the gorge.

Cherry Blossoms along the way.

The view from the top of the Gorge.

Early morning.

James standing on Tiger Leaping Gorge

After the trek we returned to Lijiang with 2 days in hand before new years - which we spent doing very very little. It was a pretty idle time that was well needed and was complemented by the fact that Lijiang is quite a scenic and a pleasant place to relax. It's pretty much the epitome of an ancient Chinese town: narrow canals, red lanterns at night and lot's of old wooden pagodas. Unfortunately there also a few "old wood" - logged from the old growth forests - pagodas too. It is a bit of a rampant tourist spot with the Chinese which detracts slightly, but not too much. In general it was good place to relax and wait for new years.

The old town of Lijiang

In fact our most pressing concern was a) find a venue for new years b) find ingredients for Long Island Ice Teas, our drink of choice and c) find some other people to spend the New Year with (James, Wooky and V are great, but you know, variety it the spice of life 'n all).

Luckily the day before new years we met some like minded travelers (4 cousins from various parts of london / the world) and found a likely venue - The Sexy Tractor. We were pretty much sold by the name, to add to this though, they advertised that you bring your own iPod and be your own DJ. Sold. As a final sweetener the Long island Ice Teas were cheap and the White Russians were OUT OF THIS WORLD. Sorry, bit too excited there (I was at the time too). Our fears that new years would be just another night with the four of us were laid to rest in a blaze of drunken stupor, helped largely by a game called Waterfalls which some of you may (or may now) be familiar with. Waterfalls also played a large part in us alienating many of the clientèle at the Prague Cafe (our NYE dinner location) - sorry about that.

And that was new years, the next day was suitably wasted at the above mentioned cafe: any place that let's you spend 5 hours relaxing over breakfast (and a subsequent lunch) gets my vote. Then it was onto our night bus and off to Kunming before our flight to Mandalay, which brings me back to where we started.

So now it's off to the Union of Myanmar a.k.a Burma. I really am not sure what to expect, but we've met a couple of people so far who've been there and everyone has raved about it. At the same time though, it is such a black box, you hear very little about what's actually going on there.

All in all though, I'm looking forward to it, it really is exciting to head somewhere this intriguing.