Lilongwe
Trip Start
Nov 18, 2002
1
125
157
Trip End
Ongoing
Lilongwe,
Malawi
Monday, July 7, 2008
So having spent 5 hours or so doing the long journey south to Lilongwe we finally arrived at the capital.
Normally we would have chosen to break up a long 300km journey and stay somewhere on the way.
But there just wasn't anywhere of interest.
Once we arrived in the capital we started to have a small problem of where to stay. Everywhere was booked up. Backpackers, mid-range hotels and even some of the top end hotels we fully booked.
Welcome to the capital! Great. We ended up staying in a hotel for $135 a night. 'Sunbird' hotel group are meant to be the most swankiest hotel chain in Malawi
Home made toys
. Well in our experience we have got a lot more for a lot less money. It was unbelievable. Luckily the next day I rang round about another 6 hotels and finally found one which was much cheaper than the Sunbird that's for sure.What can we say about Lilongwe? Well its just one big sprawled out city full of huge hypermarkets and a few shopping centres. It's definitely not a place to walk about at night mainly because there are hardly any street lights.
Our main reason for coming here was we had intended to take a flight back to Dar es Salaam from Lilongwe. When we visited the travel agents we found out that that flight no longer existed!
But that we could fly to Blantyre (the next city 3hrs from Lilongwe) then up to Nairobi and then Dar es Salaam. Err don't think so besides there was no way our bags would be there to greet us at the other end, not with all those connections!
We had no other choice but to take the bus back up through Malawi to the border. Then we plan to take the train to Dar es Salaam from Mbeya.
So on the 9th July we got took an expensive but hopefully safe bus from the capital (of which we were rather pleased to be leaving) to Mzuzu.
