Good thing hippos only eat marbles

Before I tell you about my weekend in Liwonde National Park, I'd like to take a moment to show you the biggest bug bit I've ever had:

Note the difference in size between my left (normal) hand and my right (freakishly large) hand. This notable change in appearance of my own two hands kept me occupied for most of the car trip--note that it takes 2.5 hours to get to Liwonde.

Okay, to the weekend: It was amazing. My roommate/workmate/former peace corp volunteer in Malawi/excel master (our trip was in a spreadsheet) Joe organized an awesome excursion down south to Liwonde National Park. Here's Joe in living color as we're leaving Lilongwe.

On our drive down, you'll never believe what I saw (and fortunately for you, took a picture of)--how about Mozambique.

And if you think that picture is poor in quality, you're in for a real treat throughout this blog posting...(something is wrong with my crappy camera and I would like a new one please).

So we arrived at Chinguni Lodge and it was amazing--it kind of felt like you were hanging out at some guys house or something. Here's John and Joe at dinner:

Right so the next day we woke up 5:30am for a morning walk/safari. I really enjoyed just being outside, you know, with the elephants and buck. If you are thinking the same thing I was thinking, yes, there are tons and tons of snakes. I did not see any but I knew they were all around.

Since my friends took much better pictures of the animals, I opted for two different approaches in safari:

1. The safariers become the safaried

2. And even more so...

Since I'm not that into Safari, the morning walk was my favorite because I could sort of run around, etc. During the afternoon we went out on a canoe ride WITH HIPPOS EVERYWHERE and I was feeling both SCARED and antsy. This picture doesn't show it because it was only hour one.

Oh, and do you like the hat? I was feeling very British Safari in the 1800s in that thing and couldn't quite break out of character, see:

But the reason I was so scared about the Hippos is check out how close they were: At one point I looked out and saw this which really made me wonder if I'd made the right choice coming out here: Yup, I'm down with my decision.

Here are the ladies from the weekend--that's Kate on the left and Marva on my right. As you can see the roads were a bit bumpy...

Right after we took that picture, check out what we ran into:

We left pretty early Sunday morning so we could stop along the way. John made lots of friends through his strong command of chichewa.

I made one purchase.

So all in all a great weekend. Oh, and the bug bite is much better.