Zambia – (Almost) Killer Golf

 October 15, 19-20

 

Hello everyone!

 

If you stick around in a place long enough, you start returning to old haunts just as often as discovering new places. Being in my sixth year in Malawi, I have now had the opportunity to visit many places within the country and beyond. One of my favourite spots is next door, in Zambia.

Chipata Golf Club. It looks a lot nicer in
this picture than it did in the park...

Putting on sand: strange

 

The main purpose of the trip was to visit South Luangwa National Park (SLNP), which I visited in April 2017. The world is a bit different now, with cross-border travel becoming a bit more challenging. The other blogs will focus on SLNP, with this one focusing on the travel. This may bring back funny memories to those of you who have previously travelled in developing countries.

 

Keep your eye out for animal-based blogs soon!

Let’s start in Malawi. To cross into Zambia, you need a PCR test. The only place to now get the test is at Lilongwe’s central hospital: KCH. The surrounding area gets choked with traffic at rush hour, which would be the only time I could go. A few people from school were travelling abroad and needed these tests. It was arranged that a doctor would come from KCH to the school to do our tests on Wednesday at 2pm. I had parent meetings that day. Knowing that these things rarely start on time, I blocked off 45 minutes for the test. Next parent meeting: 2:45pm.

I was one of those 633 new tests. Eventually.

 

The nurse tells us at 2pm that the doctor is on his way. At 2:30pm he is still on his way. He claims traffic but Hannah was able to drive a further distance in a much smaller amount of time…between 2pm and 2:30pm. He arrives at 2:46pm. Luckily he is persuaded to wait until I’m back so the test can be done. We fill in paperwork, get the test done, he heads off. Test certificates come back, get printed, all sorted ready for crossing the border on Saturday morning.

Signed, sealed, delivered

 Aah, the border. Crossing from Malawi to Zambia…took time, shall we say. It would have been quicker if the officers stamping papers for the car had been stamping papers, rather than going AWOL for a while. It is a mess, which hopefully will be made easier when the new building opens soon.

There are many trucks at the border, often blocking the path through

Maybe the border officer was taking
advantage of Zambian immigration's gifts...

We had taken PCR tests to enter Zambia, which were checked. We decided to overnight in the town of Chipata on the way back to ensure we could get our PCR tests for Malawi. Arriving at the international hotel (a Marriott), we asked them about it. No idea. Eventually the manager called a man who came claiming to be a doctor. He would come in about 20 minutes. 1500 Kwacha (almost $90US) per test. Just enough time to get money from an ATM and get back.

Chipata has de facto bike and pedestrian lanes,
something sorely lacking in Lilongwe

 

An hour and multiple ATMs later, we still don’t have money. This is because:
- Our Malawian bank cards, which we were told work abroad, weren’t being accepted (except from one occasion at the beginning of the trip, strangely);
- The machines would stop working for ‘maintenance’ just before we got to the front of the line;
- They sometimes just wouldn’t work. With no logical reason.

Both ATMs at this bank flashed this up for
the lady before us in the line

 

We got there in the end and returned almost ninety minutes later. The doctor hasn’t arrived. We decide to order some food. The doctor immediately arrives. He tells us the test 500 kwacha (not 1500), about $30US, for a PCR test, done in your own hotel room. The results were delivered to the hotel later that day. Were they checked by any border people at any point? Of course not.

It has better value than the Malawian kwacha, at least...

 Whilst waiting for these tests to maybe come back, three of us decided to play golf at the local course. The hotel’s website said it had ‘golf’, after all. We asked them about it. No idea. We had found the ‘clubhouse’ earlier during our ATM adventure. The fact that the car park was primarily a car and bike wash says a lot about the club’s status…

Apparently it started life in 1902

That last statement - the misspelt bit - is most probably not true

Calling it a course is also a stretch. It’s a public park, in which people drink and sleep, or through which people commute. The park itself is bisected by a road. Two of the holes of the Chipata Golf Club course involve you hitting over the traffic on this road. Aim high!

The tee box is on the left. The fairway is on the right...

The greens are 'browns'. For you to put, they rake a runway.
It reminded me of playing mini golf.

Not being the best golfer, I almost hit a family with a wayward drive. Another friend’s ball bounced and brushed a group of teenagers who seemed oblivious to the idea that a golf ball might actually hit them. Why would they know? There were no signs and it didn’t look like anyone had played golf here in a while. It didn’t look like anyone had cleaned the park in a while, either…

Aim...carefully...

Without caddies, we'd have had no idea where to hit

Playing this golf course seemed to be the equivalent of getting to somewhere like Central Park and teeing off. It was bonkers and a bit unnerving, and certainly doesn’t need repeating. Hopefully, as vaccination certificates get recognised, we won’t have to do the PCR dance next time as well. Bureaucracy at its finest. Luckily the other part of the trip was incredible and certainly worth repeating…

Car on the fairway

What else to do whilst waiting for a doctor?

Reflecting on one of the stranger
rounds of golf we'll ever play

 Love you all,

 

Matt

Iceland - Reykjavik's Rainbow Roads

June 19-20, 28-29

I’ve taken you around the island of Iceland. But what of its capital city?

One of the city's icons is its yellow box lighthouse

The rainbow road leading up to the big church

Reykjavik is where most Icelanders live. That’s not a generalisation: over two-thirds of its population reside in the capital area. 

The vast majority don't live in houses like this

I'd also imagine most don't each fish and chips
as much as I did during my time here

It is a compact place, however, and easily walkable. This is a pleasant enough thing to do in the sunshine and mild June temperatures (it reached 14’C when I was there at the end of the month). I imagine it is less pleasant on a windy winter’s day, when the Sun may not rise until close to midday.

Tjornin is the pretty lake which is
one of downtown's centrepieces

This is Tjornin on a sunnier day

To give you an idea of the long summer
days, I took this picture shortly before 4am

Quite a few people walk, particularly downtown. A sizeable number will use a different method of transport: an electric scooter. You can often find these unattended on pavements or in parks around the city. They’re available through an app and it doesn’t seem as though people think they’ll get stolen anytime soon.

No, not this...

...this. Most of the scooters are yellow. 

The city - and country - feels incredibly safe, which is recognised by the fact that Iceland is

regularly voted as the safest country in the world. The picture below shows the office of the

country’s prime minister. It is on a main road and next to a bus stop. Can you imagine being

able to get that close to the White House?

This is Iceland's parliament building. Seriously.

Could easily knock on the door and chat to the PM!

Considering how young the actual land of Iceland is, Reykjavik has a lot of history. Legend

has it that one of the first settlers threw large pieces of timber off his boat when approaching

the island, deciding to build a home wherever they landed. I’m sure you can guess where…

I got the idea of ancient Egypt from this art.
We're not talking that old...

These supposed timber logs could have landed here 

Recent construction work has unearthed some rather old buildings in the city. The

Settlement Exhibition is based around a recently-discovered Viking hall or longhouse

which dates from the 10th century.

The hall is in the basement of the exhibition
(Lonely Planet picture, mine was blurry)

This map shows the most recently discovered islands:
among them New Zealand, Madagascar and Iceland

A lot of the history is connected to the sea, which is demonstrated in many of Iceland’s

numerous museums. The Maritime Museum focuses on important events, such as the

shipwreck of the Milkmaid in 1659, and the cultural importance of the sea. The board

game shown below is one of many examples of this.

The shipwreck has been investigated since the mid-1990s

Icelandic sea monopoly, maybe? 

The National Museum of Iceland also talks extensively about the importance of the sea

whilst charting the story from first settlement to independence, via being ruled by Norwegian

and Danish kingdoms.

Paraphernalia from Iceland's first day as a
republic: June 17th, 1944

Weapons from the Viking era of settlement

Walking around the coast itself is a pleasure, though looking back at the city’s skyline

doesn’t give you the prettiest view.

The Sun Voyager landmark on the northern shore

The futuristic building is the new concert hall, which
apparently cost five times its budget

That skyline is often dominated by the Hallgrímskirkja, an enormous church on top of a hill.

The building is modelled off a combination of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State

Building...and Iceland’s hexagonal basalt columns.

It took 40 years to finish the construction

It is almost 75 metres tall

The cool picture you can get of this church is from the bottom of the hill in downtown. The

road is painted as a rainbow. This was originally done as a temporary celebration for gay

pride; it proved so popular that the city made it permanent.

There's also an epic hopscotch street

Residents , even the mayor, helped to paint the road

Reykjavik is quite a colourful city. Other streets have different designs and some of the walls

have been ornately graffitied. This apparently was because people were vandalising the

walls. ‘If you can’t beat them, join them’ was the pervasive attitude, with positive and creative

results. Many of the buildings also have a varied palette. I’d imagine the colour raises spirits

on those long, dark winter days.

Houses aren't allowed to be built of wood now, after a
fire in the past. This is one of the few that survived.

Icelandic mountains showing ther strength

All that learning and walking is thirsty work. Alcohol is prohibitively expensive here unless

you know a couple of tricks. One is the Vinbudin - the government liquor shop.

Supermarkets (such as Bonus, which is represented by a pig) aren’t allowed to sell it so

most will go to these places to stock up. There’s only one downtown. 

I did actually see one Iceland supermarket in Iceland!

These places often keep short hours
so you have to plan your visit

The shop is on an old street full of bars. Almost every bar has a ‘happy hour’, in which

drinks become more affordable. A beer drops from £8 to about £5 for example. There’s a

clever app which tells you which places are currently having their happy hour time.

The American Bar is where I watched Euro matches,
which were often on during happy hours

There are plenty of reasons to come back to Reykjavik and Iceland. One would be to see

those cute animals I didn’t see this time; another would be to experience winter here. This

is the time when you can see the famous ‘northern lights’, when the skies above the country

illuminate with a show of spectacular solar energy. Being summer, I had to content myself

with the Aurora Reykjavik, a multimedia experience in the capital.

The experience shows many examples of
the northern lights around the country

This shows the zone in which you're likely to see the
aurora borealis - Iceland is very much in the zone

A cool (if expensive) place to spend time, the world’s most northerly capital city has a lot

going for it. The alternative to being here was eleven days in a UK hotel under government

surveillance. I’m so happy that things worked out to allow me to visit and enjoy Iceland

instead.

Virtual reality allows you to 'see' the northern lights

Liquorice is surprisingly popular here -
the grey is salted liquorice ice-cream

Love you all, 

Matt