After a 3.5 hour flight that felt way worse than the previous 10 hour one, we were greeted by Phoebee and Helen who drove us to a fried chicken place to grab take away lunch and then start on our 6 hour brutal ride to Mulanje, the mountain town we were would be working from. By brutal I mean 5 of us in a diesel pick up truck traveling at light speed over a bumpy road. I dozed off numerous times and was awaken to us either beeping at or swerving from headlights aimed straight at us. The truck wouldn't start at one point after we had pulled off the road for a leg stretch, and amazingly wiggling the cables on the battery did the trick. Upon arriving, we met Anos and the rest of the Save the Children crew, and realized they were all locals, and I instantly knew what we were in for. Anos had not picked a hotel for us yet and wanted us to look around and at the rooms of the one we were currently at before then moving on to the next place to do the same. We all knew damn well that any rooms at either of these places would make any of our top 5 most wretched rooms lists, not to mention that the owner of the first really wanted the business and we had to turn him down as if his rooms were sub-par, and in a place like this they were probably above norm. I felt bad for the poor guy. After we dropped our bags Anos and another driver took us to a restaurant nearby for some local food including chomba a fish native to lake Malawi fried whole, and nsima, a corn flour based doughy spongy cross between pancakes and mashed potatoes, served instead of rice or a potato as the starch with many meals. We then headed to a bar for a couple brews which was pretty cool looking. Dimly lit with logs for seats that were rubbed so smooth from people sitting on them that it seemed like that had been around for 100 years. We soon learned that Carlsberg beer is the staple here, as the Danish brewery has a big production facility in Malawi, and it is also the staple of the British who had colonized this place before it gained independence in the early 60s. Our team of locals clearly enjoyed drinking a lot, which at minimum was an honest first impression, and wanted us to go to another bar with them. After a 40+ hour transit however we declined and headed back to the roach motel. We were told it had hit water, which was surprising, but after looking out my back window I realized that wouldn't be something I would enjoy that night or any time soon. The system consisted of a big oil drum filled with water that had a wood fire oven carved out of the wall below it, and a pipe at the top that fed steam into the bottom of the clean water tank. No fire was lit.
