Consider it a short hiatus based on a profound love of turkey, freezing temperatures and missing the beginning of the rainy season. In January, I will return to my adopted land for the next stage of work. But back to basics. Since our latest cyber render-vous, I have had the pleasure of spending an exhilarating couple of days in lovely Blantyre, center of the African tobacco trade, before beginning a long and deranged voyage back to the US.
Blantyre and its strip-mall, slumdog sister city, Limbe, are bustling traditional African cities, with a downtown of multi-story buildings, fancy banks and a collection of hotels for the wealthy. While I expected to enjoy the city after weekday meetings, I only had two days to do so when the ever-reliable Air Malawi informed me my flight had been cancelled a mere three days beforehand. Undeterred, I took moments to find pizza, play squash and eat everything from ethiopian Injera Wot to Palm leaf burritos.
To avert disaster and not miss my flight home from Johannesburg Monday evening, I found a bus company that would take me (in an advertised 25 hours) from Blantyre to Johannesburg, leaving Saturday morning and giving me a whole day to take in Jo-burg. I showed up for the bus on Saturday and immediately signs pointed to tardiness: we left three hours late, made it to the Mozambican border where there was no electricity and I got into a verbal shouting match with border officials who refused to issue me a transit visa without electricity (bribe hunters). Finally, the electricity burst back to life and we made it past the border moving at a snails' pace through Mozambique and arriving at the Zimbabwean border at 8:30, hours after it had closed.
We spent the night in the sketchiest border town, hunched in our sleeping seats like jack in a boxes. I even had the distinct pleasure of being woken around midnight by three local policemen who had heard that there was a "Mizungo" (white person) on board the bus. they asked me if I would like to join them for dinner, I said no thank you, and they said for my impoliteness, I
should definitely join them or give them a gift. Pissed off, and half-asleep, I paid them off with a stale carton of Oreos, which I told them were a delicacy (I got the oreos from an expat in Blantyre).
The next morning we awoke at 4 to cross into Zimbabwe, where we were delayed another four hours before zipping through lovely Zimbabwe and into South Africa, with numerous other attempts at any money I had. We finally arrived in Jo-burg 30 hours late, with just a few hours before my flight. Highlights of the trip include a budding friendship between me and Chief Steven Kasonga, who called himself a kind, wore a rolex and other gold chains and said that he, like me, "was reduced to the serf-like passage by bus" because he missed his plane as well. He refused to be touched at borders without customs officials asking permission of "his highness." The whole act was very comical. But, at the end of the trip he insisted on buying me a $200 bottle of spirits as we were now soul mates (different meaning than US, but not really) and he would expect me t
o await him with a royal procession when he eventually visited the US.
Altogether it has been a nice week 51 hours by boat, 7 hours by bus, 55 hours by bus, 23 hours by plane = 136 hours. Glad to be back. More to come next week on my return to Africa.
In the spirit of Celine Dion, the blog will go on.
Happy Thanksgiving,
President Chester Arthur
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