Amazing. I really enjoy all the pictures you've shared with us. It really adds to your travel stories.

Good health, Chop.

Amazing stuff, moar plz.


There used to be a bunch of SPARs in Finland as well, I used to work at one. I'm pretty sure I've seen them around Europe in a bunch of countries like the Baltics and around the mediterranean. SPAR in Africa definitely surprised me tho.

Wiki has SPAR as a Dutch chain originally and are pretty much everywhere now.

Thanks guys, always good to get feedback and know people are still interested in coming along virtually on the travels. Also helps to keep the photos per page count down which speeds the page load times.


That was a cut & paste of text from a recent FB post I made, will post the photos when I catch up to that point.


I pretty much just eat/drink whatever thanks to current Typhoid/Hep vaccines, but it depends on where I am. I should absolutely get the cholera vaccine (and may do so when I go to Blantyre in a couple of days) since I've been spending lots of time recently in cholera outbreak areas. Have been using a lot of hand sanitizer lately. It's even worse because shaking hands is very important in lots of African cultures and it's rude not to accept someone's hand, so the hand sanitizer gets used up pretty fast.

For drinks I usually stick to something that is factory sealed like water bottles / sodas, or something that was recently boiled, like water for tea. For food I eat whatever, as long as it's cooked or the source seems like it's halfway decent. Ate a bunch of salads this week because I trust the place I'm at (Monkey Bay, Malawi), would never have done so in Lusaka. Haven't had any food/drink issues other than the standard initial water adjustments once or twice.


42 countries per wiki!

And speaking of Dutch things, I learned today how to say the Dutch equivalent of "see you later, alligator" - it's "ajuu paraplu" which translates to "later, umbrella!" <3 <3 <3 Busted that one out on some Dutchies who left here today and they absolutely loved it.

Doubt I'll have another update for a while. Leaving Monkey Bay tomorrow, heading down to Liwonde for a river safari thing. A couple of days there, then south to Blantyre, which is the biggest city in Malawi. A week there for the last taste of civilization for a while, and then into Mozambique.

The Mozambique & onward plan is pretty fluid right now. I'll head to the coast and spend some time at Mozambique Island, Nacala, and Pemba on the northern coast for some diving. After that it gets fuzzy. If I can find a boat to Madagascar and/or Comoros, I'll get on it. Unlikely to find a sailboat since it's cyclone season, and unfortunately the container ships mostly only go to those places when inbound to Moz, and skip them on the outbound route. So it seems unlikely.

More likely is that I'll just continue north up the coast into the wild country, hopefully check out Quirimbas Archipelago, then cross into Tanzania and make my way up to Dar es Salaam.

If I can get to Comoros either from Moz or Mad via boat (looks like maaaaaybe there's a ferry from Majunga in Moz to Moroni in Comoros) then I'll try to take another maaaaaybe existent ferry from Moroni up to Dar if the scheduling works out. We'll see.

The week in Blantyre is going to also be used to try and figure that stuff out.

Have fun! Thanks for the updates.

It's been a long time since I jumped into this thread and what a surprise it is! I am reliving my adventures in Africa reading this thread, everything from Joburg hijacking signs to Choebe to Zim idiosyncrasies to Moz.

From one DC'er to another, good luck finding a boat in Moz. I've been to Beira in Moz but it seemed more of a commercial port and I didn't really see any sailboats there. I'm sure that sail trip will be epic!

Damn you Chop.

dc_p - yeah I'm not optimistic. Not looking for a sailboat, the channel is too rough this time of year, it's the middle of cyclone season. I'll be much north of Beira, starting in either Quelimane or Moz Island, hopefully I'll find a cargo ship or ferry but I'm putting it at <10% right now.

pokeraz - can't say I didn't warn you. Shields the GOAT advancement or what?



Almost done with the week in Blantyre and have got a lot of good research done regarding Mozambique. Malawi has been great but I'm also looking forward to being in a country that hopefully doesn't have electricity outages literally every single day. That's how it's been in Malawi due to low water levels at Lake Malawi and the country using hydroelectric to generate 95% of its power.


Stayed somewhere in Monkey Bay, Malawi for a while and when it came time to depart, asked to pay by card in local currency to avoid lolDCC (dynamic currency conversion) aka the forex scam to end all forex scams.

My invoice was 380k in Malawi kwacha (about $525 USD at current interbank exchange rates). No worries, charge me 380k kwacha and let my bank convert it to about $525 USD. We agreed there would be no additional fees of any kind.

Except the payment processor decided to charge in Kenyan shillings (despite the charge being placed in kwacha - the property manager showed me the screen) instead, most likely so the processor could convert from kwacha to shillings and skim exchange fees off the top. Charge ended up coming thru as $540 USD after my bank converted from the inbound shilling charge.

While $15 is of course lol, my hatred for payment processors that try DCC shenanigans is off the charts, so obv I told the property what happened. They suggested they refund the charge and then just charge me $525 directly in USD, which I was fine with.

Was just notified of a refund for $515 (hasn't processed yet). Also got an email from the property advising they saw it and that they guess the processor decided to charge a fee. They also advised that they had sent a new $525 USD invoice, which I got a different email for.

Replied to the property with an email telling them to send me a $500 USD invoice, which I'd pay after the refund processes, and a suggestion to have the processor provide them a $25 credit to their merchant account as an apology for the "error" which of course was no error at all, but a deliberate action to generate fees.

We'll see what happens next.

Kudos for taking a principled stance, but I'd have gladly coughed up the $15 and counted my blessings.

I knew Africa was large. I'm not sure I had it in quite the correct perspective.

How much will you see Chop? I think you'll need more time.

Mercator projection screws up everyone's perception.

That's that whole Mercator-projection problem. On standard world maps, land masses around the Equator appear smaller than land masses nearer the poles.

Africa is unimaginably vast. The combined land area of Algeria and Niger alone is bigger than India, by a margin bigger than Montana. But Algeria and Niger have a combined population of 61.2 million, to India's 1.3 billion.

Starting to really miss things like unhorrible internet, reliable electricity/water, not being stared at everywhere I go, labeled prices, decent public transportation, non-malarial zones, etc

Project Fi hasn't worked for just under two weeks. Worked the first couple of days in Moz, but not since then. I get full signal and tower registration, but no data connection. There are three primary providers in most of Moz - VodaCom, mCel, and Movitel. When I first entered the country I got an SMS from Movitel saying welcome to Moz. It worked for about 2 days, then nothing since. The phone only registers on mCel now, VodaCom / Movitel always return a network unavailable message. Google rides Tmobile's international partners.

Google's Project Fi staff as usual are cheerfully unhelpful, continually asking me to try troubleshooting steps that I've already explicitly explained having attempted multiple times. I get that it isn't their fault, these guys are tier 1/2 CSR/support drones and their job is to follow a script. Doesn't make it any less frustrating, tho. Would give up and switch to a local SIM if I weren't heading to Tanzania so soon. They can't even tell me which network is the partner network, they just tell me to keep trying all of them. Um that's not how cellular networks work, guys.

The wifi at hotels in Moz is pretty lol. I stayed at a "business hotel" for a few days in Nacala specifically for the purpose of having usable wifi to get some stuff done and even that was quite bad. Constant connection drops, super slow speeds, etc. Maybe 2-3 notches above unusable. Was eating dinner at the hotel restaurant one night and the power went out across the city. The dining area went pitch black. I didn't bother taking out my phone for light. Just kept eating, stabbing away at where I remembered the food was on the plate. The power came back on from the hotel generator a few minutes later and the kitchen staff thought it was very funny that I was still just sitting there eating as if nothing had happened and had cleared half my plate in the darkness.

The place that I'm at now has wifi of about the same quality, but it's only available between 18:00-06:00. I asked if I could pay to have access during the day but was told that was impossible lol.

A couple of folks emailed me with sailing ops last week. One from Mauritius to South Africa. Nice route but I declined as he's one of those lifestyle vloggers and those folks tend to be insufferable. The other is a guy who is currently in Cape Town and will be crossing from Namibia to Brazil with a stop at St Helens. I think he's planning on leaving Namibia in mid May. I used up my full 90 days in Namibia but think I can get a 7 day transit visa or similar. Not gonna lie, kinda tempted to ditch the current plan and just get on dude's boat to Brazil. From there it would be up to Trinidad & Tobago by mid August or so. Or more likely, just get off the boat at Brazil and have some times in South America for a while. How have I not been to Argentina yet?!?

There's also another dude somewhere off the coast of Kenya that told me to email him when I get up near Mombasa. He's sailing up into the Med but probably way too slowly for me to join for anything more than a week or two of coastal cruising fun.

Tried to buy a plane ticket from where I am now to a northern Moz city in order to skip a 12 hour chicken bus ride but the Moz airline website is about what you'd expect it to be so of course that didn't work. Going to show up at their office first thing tomorrow morning at 08:00 and see if I can buy one in person for a flight that departs at 10:40. I'm not optimistic. Guessing they'll also charge me double the price or whatever.

Speaking of which, tried to send a postcard yesterday and dude at the post office tried to charge me $53 USD to send it. $53. A postcard. loooooooool guess if you're going to swing, you swing for the fences.

Sorry for lack of photos, this internet connection is the lolest of lol and I doubt that's going to change until at least Dar es Salaam.

This is a pretty bloggy post, maybe this thread should move over to House of Blogs or something so everyday OOTers don't have to read my whining. Don't want to pollute OOT with a bunch of lolchop stories if I can't even post a damn photo to make it halfway entertaining. And I do have a photo of the $53 amount he tried to charge me, I had him write it down. He also weighed the postcard on a scale for some reason (5 grams) and I've got a photo of him doing that as well lol.

In conclusion, I'll likely be stuck in Nampula, Mozambique for the rest of my natural life with horrible internet that I can only use from 18:00-06:00 but at least there's a bakery close by that has pasteis de natas so yeah

a;ljf;ldakjfa;lkjfs;dsajlkf;lkjds;lkjdsf

It is very reassuring for me that I am not the only one who gets annoyed by crap internet and locals trying to rip you off.

Yeah, what's up with that?!? You could also get very close to Antarctica. Would be a very "cool" place to visit. It would be in the dead of winter though.

**** them.

lapka - the only things I care about at a place to stay are wifi, electricity, and water. A fan is nice in hot/mosquito areas, too. When Project Fi was working I wasn't picky about wifi, but now that it's not.. well I'm still not even that picky but it's nice to be able to research destinations, transport options, etc. Scammers gonna scam wherever one goes, that's just part of travel.

p4b - is that not the best time to go?

wiper - tyvm, but I want to make sure this thread is at least somewhat entertaining or interesting if it's going to stay in OOT. It spawned from OriginalDids extracting a bunch of posts I was spamming the LC thread with. Made sense but I know both the HoB and Travel subforums exist and I wouldn't object if people thought it should be in one of those instead. I deliberately try to keep the posts focused on photos, stories, and howtos for this reason, as opposed to bloggy personal thoughts type stuff like my previous whining.

Seems like I'm running pretty hot today, was able to buy my plane ticket two hours before fight departure for almost the same price as quoted online. Landed in Pemba without issue and now at a hotel that has functioning wifi during the day! If the speed is decent I'll try to make some actual updates later. For now it's off to find some fish. The hotel manager warned me three times to smell the fish before eating it, guess there's some bad stuff floating around.

We saw this yacht on the Antarctic adventure I went on. Maybe you could connect with them and crew to see what the penguins are doing.

I'm practically certain you mean St Helena, the British Overseas Territory in the South Atlantic, famous mainly as the last place of exile of the former French 'emperor' Bonaparte:-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Helena

And not St Helens, Lancashire (now Merseyside), which is basically a town that's become part of Liverpool.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Helens,_Merseyside

Although of course both places are named after the mother of the Roman emperor Constantine.

That sounds like a good idea, though you will be heading into the Southern Hemisphere winter.

I guess if you want to walk from Argentina to Antarctica. The boats like to go on water.

57 - Yes, St Helena. Certainly don't have the correct clothes for winter, tho.


So we were on the train to Bulawayo, Zimbabwe when we last left off. That was in early February so I'm going to speed things up a bit in the hopes of catching back up to current day sometime soon.

Bulawayo is a fairly large city for Zim, so it has everything you could really need for daily living available:




along with some sweet African fast food chains:





but that wasn't enough to keep me around for more than a few days. I left for Harare relatively quickly and was surprised to see the USA#1 flag being flown at half mast when the Intercape bus pulled into town just after Valentine's Day:



Guessing this was due to the Parkland shooting, but don't know for sure. Didn't stop and ask because taking a photo of an American embassy overseas is generally forbidden and they are rarely friendly to Americans who just want to drop in to say hello.

Harare was much more of a city city with a few skyscrapers, busy city streets, lots more cars, etc:




I managed to start my own little restaurant while there:




as well as finding a taste or two from home:




after going to the black market money changers:



and exchanging some USD for some Zim bond notes. The official exchange rate is much worse than the actual exchange rate, something like a 20% difference or thereabouts, so it makes much more sense to exchange on the black market. I wrote about this before so I won't go into much detail here, but in a nutshell it's much less expensive to exchange your USD for Zim notes, then buy everything using Zim notes, because the prices are structured to reflect a 1:1 parity, but the reality is a 1:1.2 exchange rate.

The exchange I did was with some dude I had met in Vic Falls who was visiting from Harare, but those folks are the ones I would have gone to otherwise. Lots and lots of forex traders in Zim, because regular jobs pay little to nothing, so people risk the illegal forex trading to put food on their table. There are occasional crackdowns by the police, but for the most part it is tolerated without issue.

My new Harare friend also took it upon himself to show me around his town. I needed a new pair of socks, since one of mine had fallen out at the Cape Town airport, and he asked me if I wanted to go to the store or where the locals went. Obv I picked the locals option, and off we went to the Harare market, which is a massive structure of tents in the dirt, full of all kinds of stalls selling anything and everything:




Very close quarters, and my friend warned me multiple times to secure my wallet/phone/passport as pickpockets are rampant there. I'm used to these kind of settings so it was a non-issue for me. We quickly found the area where socks were sold:



and I dug in to find what I could find. Ended up getting one pair from there and another pair from a different sock mountain. The socks were in every condition you can imagine, from brand new to is-this-still-considered-a-sock? so it took a while, but eventually walked away with two semi-decent pairs of hiking socks.

The market also had massive sections of fruits, vegetables, and meats:



but I decided discretion was the better part of valor after seeing the swarms of flies buzzing around.

After the market we took a trip to the outskirts of the city where a religious healing ceremony was taking place:




this guy was getting his blindness cured:




not sure what ailment required the help of assistants:




They were pretty interested in me showing up, and we had some chats. There was one pretty old healer dude not pictured above that shook my hand nonstop for about 7 minutes during our conversation. Dude had a grip like a vise. He was intense and curious about who I was, why I was there, what if any ailments I had, etc.

What ailments did you admit to? And what is the cure for insufferable arrogance?

Harare itself was a hodgepodge of activity. There is one main street with the huge buildings like the Zim Federal Reserve, and a bunch of side streets where the action is:



(the sale of cooking oil is extremely popular in many African countries)

along with some alley action as well:



tho I stayed out of that one.

The movie Black Panther came out right around this time, so I went to see it, figuring Harare would be a pretty good place to check it out. There was a massive line:



(imagine four of those to get an idea of the full scope)

and the theater was completely packed, every single seat taken. The audience went nuts when . They had these slushie machines in the lobby and with the exception of a single one that looked like lime, every other machine had purple slushie in it, which of course I got.

Also went for a sick little chicken shawarma afterwards:




at Eat n' Lick, a Zim fast food chain that specializes in that's right, shawarma:




I'll be starting up an EnL franchise upon my return to USA#1.