Blantyre Belly

(Ignore the posting date, this is from Friday the 29th, then Saturday the 28th)

Had a terrible night's sleep. Slapping mosquitoes from my body all night and I woke up with 23 bites evenly distributed about my body. Additionally, loads of the bed slats were missing, in particular the one under the pillow, which I didn't discover until this morning, so I have a cricked neck and spent most of the night choking/snoring/waking up due to the choking and snoring, but not enough to realise what was going on.

As I'm in tonight's cook group we had to shop from the supermarket for tonight's meal. I was feeling quite rough so I had to get water and find a loo half way through - I'd had little bit of
Blantyre Belly yesterday, but today it hit me really hard. When we got back to camp I couldn't even help cook, so I had to go to bed about 5pm and slept through until 9am. I didn't take my evening antihistamine, so the extra fifteen mosquito bites I picked up in the night were itching like wee bastids they were, but I felt an awful lot better in the belly.

The only reason we were going to Blantyre was to get our Mozambique visas: they take two days to get, but that's longer than we plan to spend in Mozambique - we're just passing through on our way to Zimbabwe. There is a rule (which I made up) about countries. You can judge how insignificant a country is on the world stage by how onerous its entry procedures are, and how ornate and huge its visa stamps are. Needless to say the Mozambique visas are HUGE and they take the aforementioned two days to get, kind of amusing really.

We're going to travel along the Tete corridor through Mozambique, which used to be a route for the weapons trucks, but it's safer now. Hopefully.