Happy 2014!

..can you tell I’m terribly behind on my blog posts?

*sorry, folks, internet is horrible right now. Was planning to include lots of photos, but it’s too slow! You can check my facebook if you wanna see photos from December.*

As much as I hate turning this thing into a travel blog, half the time it seems like those are my most exciting, interesting, and educational days. So here’s a brief recap of my travels with Marie in December.

We started by traveling north and east through Namibia, and across the border into Zambia. I am still amazed at how easy it is to cross borders here – you can seriously just walk across. Probably nobody would even notice if you didn’t pay for your visa, but we didn’t try it out =) Although we have both been to Victoria Falls already, we stayed a day in Livingstone, Zambia so that we could go whitewater rafting on the Zambezi. It is seriously exhilarating – something like 25 rapids, up to a level 5 (if that means anything to anyone). I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be legal in the States since there were very few safety precautions and we were even allowed to float through some of the rapids outside of the raft! Since I was with a bunch of Peace Corps volunteers, we obviously chose the routes that were trickier and harder to manage, and flipped the raft lots of times. I didn’t have the hundreds of $ to buy the video/photos, but there were some pretty great photos of us all with our legs in the air flipping out of the raft!

From there, Marie and I bused through Zambia. We took an overnight bus to Lusaka, then a bus through the rest of Zambia and into Malawi. We overnighted in Lilongwe, and continued the next day to Nkhata Bay (on Lake Malawi). Nkhata Bay was seriously amazing. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves playing in the water, laying on the beach and even listening to/watching thunderstorms at night! We went snorkeling, boating and cliff jumping on the lake. The town was also super cute, right on the lake and we enjoyed walking around, exploring the markets and trying to prove to people that we weren’t TOTALLY “mzungu” – the local word for white person/usually meant to be a foreign tourist.

After spending a few days on the lake, we bused to Mbeya, TZ, and the next day to Lushoto, TZ. Lushoto was incredibly beautiful – green, lush, and mountainous. We hiked around, saw some incredible wildlife in a natural rainforest, and went to some really cool small-town markets.

Then on to Dar es Salaam, the (not-official-but-basically) capital of Tanzania. Dar was busy, kind of smelly and dirty, and totally unlike anyplace I’ve ever been. We stayed in the Kariakoo district, which houses the famous Kariakoo Market, one of the biggest in TZ. People sold everything there, but it was also really dirty to walk around! We ate local foods, went to the National Museum (where there was actually more about the anthropological studies done in TZ than I had expected!), shopped for kitenges (the Tanzanian version of the shitenge, a traditional cloth-wrap used for skirts or other clotehs), and generally absorbed the city.

In a few days we were done being totally overwhelmed in a city with 4 million people (most of whom seemed to be on the streets at the same time, I have never seen such traffic!) and we went on to Zanzibar. Lots of tourists and other Peace Corps volunteers from all over Africa, but also beautiful white sandy beaches, clear blue water, tidal pools with sea urchins and starfish, … Zanzibar was by far the most touristy place we went, but the strong Muslim culture (similar to that of Dar) also made an impression on us. We saw a lot of the history in Stone Town before heading to the beach.

Finally, Marie and I flew home to start of 2014 right. Thank goodness we didn’t have to bus the whole way back!

Important phrases:

Thank you: tawonga (Tonga, a Malawian language); Asante sana (Kiswahili)

I can’t eat peanuts: hawezi kula karanga (Kiswahili – super useful!)

Hello, how are you: Mambo (Kiswahili)