ZAMBIA!!!

HOW COULD I HAVE FORGOTTEN!!!!
the craziest thing about that ferry:

instead of docking at every stop (of which there were a few every day and night), the ferry just stopped about 1km away from shore, and about a dozen rickety little and slightly bigger boats rushed up to the side of the ferry. instant chaos. the people either paddling or driving the boats, and every ferry passenger who needs to get off at this stop, and everyone who needs to make a purchase to the boat, is yelling at the top of their lungs. i'm assuming they were yelling things like, "catch this rope!!!!" "take my baby!!!" "come on this boat!!!" "i need three dozen pineapples!!!"

and suddenly there are people on the second deck holding the little boats to the ferry with ropes, people are scrambling out of the first-deck windows onto the boats, throwing their suitcases and bags, passing their babies to strangers, breastfeeding while clambering down.....
the funny thing is that it simply did not get old. a few times a day, and it was the highlight of every few hours. :D

also, at one stop Gil decided to jump off the ferry. from the third deck, so a good three or four stories from water level. and he swam around for a bit before joining the boat-loading chaos. hahaha, one of the boatmen tried to make him pay for climbing onto his boat, so gil just looked at him like, "does it look like i have money on me?!" .... nope.
and two stops later sean decides to do the same. crazy folk. and the people on the boats seemed to be used to this kind of insane muzungu behavious... they must have seen it before, i guess. :D
they didn't even glance twice at sean when he was in the water, and when he got onto a boat, they were 100% business... handing him bags to pass to other boats...

ok, now -actually- on to zambia:
after having travelled half of TZ's north-south distance on the ferry, we touched down at yet another dusty lake-side town called Mpulungu.

OH YEAH!!!!
interjection! when we got onto the ferry, our plan was to get off the ferry at the last stop in TZ, and take buses from there to Malawi. the plans changed when Gil and Ben convinced us that we -had- to go to zambia because livingston was the shit and we -had- to go to zimbabwe to see the great zimbabwean ruins and and and and....
so we just kind of... stayed on the MV Liemba for another stop until we were in zambia.

okay, so now in mpulungu, zambia. our plan is to take the next bus to Lusaka, if one exists, or take it in stages depending on how far a bus will take us, or take a bus to the train station and see what happens from there. so we check in to zambia (which involves an extensive search of our bags for drugs..) and leave the ferry terminal, and this guy walks up to us and asks us if we're going to Lusaka. HOW DID HE KNOW?!?! maybe everyone getting off that ferry is going straight there.... who knows. so he set us up with a conductor (buses have both a driver and conductor, who takes care of selling tickets and loading bags onto the bus and dealing with everyone's shyte).

the bus doesn't leave for another nine hours, so we go on yet another epic search for a place that serves beans. two hours after walking down -every- street in the town, we find a little spot with picnic tables selling the best meal EVEr! chipsy maya. basically an omelet with fries in it (as if the fries are onions or tomatoes or something).

by the way, i have a bum now. and hips. i'm proud of my africa-pounds, esp since they'll double as a winter jacket pretty soon.

at a bar in mpulungu later, we end up playing cards to kill time, and get joined by six local folk, three of whom i'm fairly sure were.... ehum... ladies of the night. it was good times, because they taught us this absolutely ridiculous game that involves no strategy whatsoever, and as soon as anyone does anything, everyone yells "YOU ARE THE WINNER!!!!!" and everyone gets high-fives. it sort of became the joke of the trip with Ben and Gil and Sean and I. if any of us did something a little stupid, we'd yell "you are the winner" and have a round of high fives. :S

i've got to say, zambia was probably the most hillarious place we went. the only downside to the country is that transportation is hella expensive. and it's a huge ass country. so from mpulungu we went to lusaka, the capital, and were horribly depressed at how western the city was, but took advantage of the movie theatre to watch the latest james bond movie... is it james bond? that guy who has gadgets and fucks every woman who has a role in the movie, except his boss? in this flick, though, he barely had any gadgets, to sean's utter dissapointment. but it was pretty chill nevertheless. in every country we sort of have an obligatory all-business day when we check out the internet, a bank, a forex, and stock up on food.

the train
after a few days in lusaka, we jumped onto a train to livingston, which was the ultimate destination of the trip. so within a week we made it from the far north of zambia to the far south.
the train was a... supposed to be twelve but turned into 16 hours... trip to remember. it had no classes - everyone just slept on benches, which were surprisingly comfortable. and i think we made the better choice by taking this train, even though the bus was only 6hrs. the bus is 30,000Zambian Kwatcha and the train is 12,000. so $30 vs $12.
and mum you'll hate to hear this, but we found a spot ont he train where we could smoke. as soon as we were on the train, the staff brought us back to the staff car ("the train is unsafe, people will steal while you sleep"), where people who didn't have tickets were stored until the next stop to be dealth with by the local authorities (probably put in jail for a bit, or bribe their way out). and the staff car just happened to be at the very back of the train, so we could sneak to a little back spot, open the doors, and smoke with our feet dangling over the tracks.

livingston
in short, i think everyone should stay a jollyboys, beautiful lodge, awesome croud, fab.

111m bungee, 120m crater above the zambezi
the bridge you jump from is in no-man's land between zambia and zimbabwe. luckily, you don't have to pay to get back into zambia, you just get a piece of paper and walk out.
it's hillarious, because they set it up so that there's absolutely no way that you can back out of the jump. because before you see the bridge, you go to this little covered desk where you pay and sign a paper that basically says, "this is non-refundable," and then go for the jump. so as we're paying, i'm realizing that... if i don't jump, i've wasted a good chunck of money.
hahahaha, so you get to the middle of the bridge, and by this point your heart is racing, you're freaking out, and the staff there is welcoming you, explaining that this is safe, there's a 100% success rate, and they start strapping you in. they look at the numbers on your wrist (the people at the desk weigh you and write it on you) and get the appropriate bungee cord. while they're putting your harnesses and ropes on, they're telling you that this one can hold 5tons, this one can hold 6. then they start strapping sean and i to each other (we decided to go in tandum). don't worry, you're attached at three points, the bungee cord ataches at your feet and if that breaks then it will swing you right side up and you'll be attached at the chest, and two to of you are attached to each other at five points. blah blah blah. and they sit you down and start getting your feet prepped. two folded towels wrapped around each ankle, and a thing that looks like a dog leash (this can hold 5tons) wrapped around your ankles, and this is what they atach the bungee cord to.

the whole time sean and i are absolutely petrified. looking at the towels and the dog leash and the eetsy ropes, and the way the bungee cord is atached to the bridge by a little rope....
they explain to you that they will be counting "FIVE FOUR THREE TWO ONE BUNGEEEEEE4"
and on one you bend your legs, and on bungee you jump. and suddenly we're at the edge, i'm freaking out, sean's looking pale, they're trying to make us hold on to each other, which we're glad to do do in this situation. every time one of us looks down they tell us to look to the horizon. and they're still explaining the ropes and you're safe and five tons this and six tons that and keep your arms out and FIVE FOUR THREE TWO ONE
and suddenly you realize that, shit they pushed us, and SHIT THE TREES ARE RUSHING BY AND WE HAVE 100M TO FALL AND
your mind goes blank. sean said later that the whole fall i was making a suppressed "nnnnnnngggggggggg" kind of sound. and we kept looking at each other like, "what the hell are we doing, this is not the variety of thing that by brain is comfortable with." and your brain really does fully shut off. it's like, "i don't know how to deal with this, so you're going to start thinking that these trees rushing by are quite pretty, and the water rushing towards your face is quite interesting, and this person next to you seems to be screaming.... and so are you"
and that moment you realize that you're screaming is the moment you begin to think that this is just fucking dandy, and you start to laugh your ass off. probably purely in hysterics.
and of course all of this happens within 10 seconds (9.8m/s/s???), and by the end of it you start to feel the rope tightenning on your ankles and you're fully upside down and your eyeballs kind of hurt. and once again sean and i look at each other and laugh like there's something seriously hillarious about this situation, being thrust off a bridge and then right back up at it and bouncing around upside down holding onto each other, feeling the rope tugging at your ankles and getting tighter and tighter, and our faces are turning bright red, tears being forced out of our eyes,

if i had the choice, i would do it again.

TZ

we moved on from there to Tanzania. we basically went down the west of tanzania, half on shyte roads, and half on a ferry. Nyakanazi was a piece of shit town that surprisingly had great beans, tea that tasted JUST like froot loops, and really pleasant hotels (which tanzanians call "guestis"). this was my second ever basin wash, which is surprisingly not that difficult to get used to. Heh, the best thing about this town though is that it illustrated to me the extent to which everyone knows everything that's happening in the town. we told one person that we wished to travel on to kigoma the following day, and the next day when we came out of our guesti, the first person who saw us said, "you are travelling to kigoma, i will take you to the stage." (people call bus stops "stages")
On to Kigoma. a town on the shore of Lake Tangyinika, second largest lake in africa (after lake victoria). it's a long very thin lake that stretches north-south, bordering the DRC to the west, TZ to the east, and barely touches Burundi at the north and Zambia at the south.
So we took advantage of the fact that we could get to zambia via the lake.
but before i get to the ferry, i have two short notes about Kigoma. first off, it's a dusty, boring, yet pleasant town. sean and i were there for... i think four days. so it's the first place we lingered. and not because the place kicked ass, but because the ferry that usually runs on wednesdays now runs on saturdays, and every second week is taken by the UN to repatriate DRC refugees. so we wandered Kigoma until we found the one spot along the shore where we could swim. we had lots of fun at this place, because they served fanta (my fave) and coke (sean's), and it was almost always populated with a bunch of kids who wanted to have water-fights with us. sean and i figured out how he could swim under me and put me on his shoulders, and suddenly everyone around was attempting to jump UP onto each others' shounders.... unsuccessfully mostly. a blast. we had ourselves a good 45 minute walk in the POURING rain one day, and made absolute mzungu fools of ourselves, jumping in puddles and trying to make the best of the fact that we were indeed frickin freezing and both had to pee REAL bad.

the ferry.
that's a story in itself. we boarded on saturday after sunset, and arrived on monday morning. so two nights and only one full day on the ferry. there are a few very notable things that happened on our few days there. but the best things were meeting fellow travelers. first class (the only real option --- third class is the hull, crammed with hundreds of people with nowhere to lie down) is on the top level of the boat, and populated by both rich ass mzungus and rich ass locals. most people use the boat to bring pineapples and mekene (little eety beetsy fishes) to zambia and down the coast of TZ. so we met a few guys:
Carel: South African guy, real cool, well travelled, packed full to the brim with good stories.
Gil: Israeli, very cool aswell (who am i kidding, they were all incredibly cool), who'd been travelling the dark continent for six months at this point.
Ben: Australian guy, very layed back, who'd been in africa for four months, i think.

both gil and ben joined is for a good chunck of time after the ferry, all the way to livingston for gil, and zimbabwe for ben. they were both reaching the end of their travels, which made their paces and sean+i's very compatible (we all wanted to see as much as possible in the shortes period of time possible).

so the bunch of us discovered this spot at the back of the ferry that wasn't fenced in, about three stories above water level (sorry mom, sometimes you have to put yourself in harm's way to avoid serious clausterphobia). so we sat there most of the days and enjoyed each others' company.

overall, the experience in TZ was pretty damn good, but it was hella difficult to find places who served beans (the only local dish that vegans can eat). English is very common in most of the palces we went, but in western tanzania, it was difficult.... OHMANIIHAVETOIPEEEE......
BRB111111

winter, here i come!!!

i have got to start posting stories about our adventures.

in short, there are a few epic things that simply cannot go unsaid. the ferry on lake tanginyika, the 110m bunjee jump into a gorge in no-man's land bt zambia and zimbabwe, some chiller towns like Nkhata Bay, Kigoma, and Nyakanazi. stories are coming, guys!!! esp now that sean is spending hours in internet caffees to apply for jobs in Korea, i'll have tons of internet time to bore everyone with africa!!!!!!! :D:D:D:D:d ...... :P

man, we started off with the hills of Rwanda, which are undoubtedly a little bit more than "hills", they're fucking huge ass ridiculous mountains with winding roads and beautiful houses (in african standards... they have walls that aren't made of crumbling mud), terraced agriculture.....
we only spent one day in Rwanda, which was enough to figure out that neither english nor my french were understandable to anyone. when it came to mimming picking up food from a plate (my hand), and putting it towards my mouth.... simply to find a place to eat... have food... manger... j'ai faim... we want to purchase food..........
the language barrier was a bit much. but hey, to all my friends who learned french in english schools, you'll do just dandy in this country. everyone understood sean's broken school-french better than my attempt at not sounding quebecois. :S