We have spent the last couple of days doing very little staying at the Dive School shown above, that is what holidays are supposed to be isn't it although this is a bit of a novelty for us as we usually plan our trips such that we do something every day.
I was somewhat embarrassed at the last lodge as once I paid my bill the receptionist who was a slim 20 year old girl in a nice dress picked up my case, put it on her head and skipped up a steep gravel drive in bear feet! Yesterday the two women in this photo came down to the beach to collect building sand in sacks. When both sacks were full one helped the other lift it onto her head but they needed help to get trhe second sack up on the second head. Step forward the strong man who has been lifing bags of cement for the past year - I could not lift in on my own but two of us managed to get it up on her head and off she went up the beach. They realised I was weakling as for the next load they brought a third woman. The bags must have weighed over 40kgs! We have borrowed a two person kayak and practised our Hawaii Five 0 skills (mostly going round in circles) and reading lots of books, I have particularly enjoyed Boris Johnson's book on Churchill with of course lots of Churchillian stories;
He was sitting next to a clean-living Methodist bishop at a reception in Canada when a good-looking young waitress came up and offered them both a glass of sherry from a tray . Churchill took one. But the bishop said, ‘Young lady, I would rather commit adultery than take an intoxicating beverage.’ At which point Churchill beckoned the girl, and said, ‘Come back, lassie, I didn’t know we had a choice!
The only serious work each day is a visit to the bank. Later on the trip I will add a blog entry all about money but for the moment all I will say is that whilst we are in a town with an ATM we have to make the maximum use of it. You can only take 40,000 Kwacha out at a time (about £50) but you can have three goes on one card. So I go through the, card in, pin entry, enter amount, do you want a receipt, remove card, remove cash three times and then Gill does the same with her card much to the annoyance of anyone in the queue behind us. We managed this for a couple of days running then today all the machines in town were off the air.
We are about to spend five days in the bush followed by four in a town with no bank and then two on a ship so it will be almost two weeks before we can get any more cash, we therefore need to stock up whilst we can.
To try and prevent fraud there are no high value notes, in fact almost the only note in circulation is the 1000 Kwacha which is about £1.20. The consequence is our visit to the bank results in a huge pile of notes (see the picture of £600 worth) which you need to try and stuff inconspicuously into your pockets.
The lack of smaller notes also causes problems, on the ferry the purser who sold the tickets had a big list of IOU's of people he owed change to. He owed me 200 but had no small notes, fortunately later on I bought a couple couple of drinks, he remembered the debt and was able to round the amount up to something divisible by 1000. Whilst we rich Europeans can ignore small change to the locals 200 cannot be written off so each transaction can become quite difficult for both buyer and seller.
Try to imagine the train conductor on the Craven Arms express writing down who he owes change to and then making sure he is square with each person as they leave the train hopefully gaining change from other passengers!
To pay for our safari we needed rather more cash than the machines can give us (very few people take credit cards and when they do the rate is awful) so we went inside the bank to change some uk pounds. As soon as they saw our white faces we were summoned into the managers office which is rather offensive to the queue of local customers but a sensible precaution as our small pile of £20 notes was swapped for a rucksack full of Kwacha. We were pleased to quickly give it to Patrick, the German who is our safari guide, and he walked home with it stuffed in his pockets.
This chap adopted us yesterday, he was quite helpful and showed us the best route along the coast for which he was rewarded with a beer. He then borrowed a guitar and started to sing us songs from his latest CD, I think he is the Nkhata bay version of Simon Willis. In the end I bought his CD, fortunately it only cost £2.