Off the Couch and On the Road

If you have been reading this blog over the past 6 months (and I doubt you have. Maybe one or two of you. Hi Bel!) you may have noticed by blatant disregard of travel advice that I have ultimately regretted - I think this stems from my mother’s lassez-faire attitude to everything from illness (’take a panadol, you’ll be fine’) to anything else remotely stressful (’[insert suggestion here]…you’ll be fine’).

So when I heard that Africa doesn’t have many ATM’s, only takes Visa and never accepts Cirrus, I took two Mastercards, a Cirrus cashcard and no travellers cheques and thought, I’ll be fine.

Until I couldn’t get any money. Anywhere. From anyone. This feeling (similar to walking down the street naked) was only lessened by the fact I was on a group tour. It was still however, quite stressful knowing you are in a random place with empty pockets, and I couldn’t help but manically run my hands through my hair when everyone else was doing their budgets and scream, ‘I would but I don’t have any money!!!’ Following which they would look at me ad say:

‘We’ll figure it out, don’t worry, you’ll be fine,’ (repeated every 10 minutes). Which I was, in the end. But listen to those travellers tips people - Visa is king! I’ll only tell you once.

That evening we met up with the Kumuka ‘white’ truck (us being the Kumuka ‘blue’ truck) who was heading in generally the same direction from Nairobi to Victoria Falls as us, albeit a little slower due to them having what they described as ‘A truck with shitty suspension’ (I’ve left out all of the technicalities). We ordered Nando’s for dinner, had a few beers and realised the most I saw of the capital of Malawi was every ATM and bank in town, the bar at the campsite, and the back of my eyelids soon after.

-Sarah

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 18th, 2007 at 11:47 pm and is filed under Africa, Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.