We'd heard about a town called Zomba a bit to the North of Blantyre which was set at the base of a lage table-top mountain and supposedly had a great market. The market was more geared to locals than to tourists but it was nice to wander around and have cheeky barganing sessions over things we had absolutely no intention of buying. We decided to spend the next day up on Zomba plateau and so caught a taxi up to the top. We jumped out at some rapids called William...

This is more like it! A quick two hour bus journey and we were at Malawi's economic capital. Jumping of the bus we saw a backpackers' hostel 100 yards down the road and struck gold. The place was nice with a pool and bar etc. It was also perfectly placed to explore Blantyre. The first day was spent relaxing by the pool but then the next day we thought we should do something cultural and decided we'd go down to the Museum of Malawi. Not exacty the biggest of museu...

The day didn't start well: AXA, Malawi's "punctual, reliable and comfortable" bus service, was 2 hours late and took 10 hours rather than the scheduled 4 hours to get to Lilongwe. Standing up the whole way wasn't fun either. Couple this with the drunk who started abusing all the Mzungo at the bus stop (apparently it wasn't fair that we didn't transfer our money into his bank account) and you can imagine we weren't in the best of moods. Lilongwe is a nic...

After a couple of days in Mzuzu we headed over to nearby Nkata Bay on Lake Malawi to escape the rain (yes it rains a suprising amount in Africa and gets quite chilly, well not as chilly as an English winter, but you get the idea anyway). We jumped out of the minibus and some guys decided they were going to 'escort' us to the hotel, one of whom was absolutely wasted. We were adamant that we were not going to give them money, but they carried on nonetheless so we f...

After staying a night in Karonga in the North of Malawi we discovered we had only MK200 (that's 50p in English money) and our bank cards had been cancelled by the friendly people at Nationwide. Thinking that we might want to eat some food in the next couple of days we managed to catch a coach down to Mzuzu. To our delight there were working ATMs and so we found a nice little backpackers to relax in for a couple of days while we planned our next move.