Malawi is one of the poorest countries in Africa and, as is often the case, this seems to bring a sincerity and generosity out of it inhabitants so it’s tough not to fall in love with the place. Naturally, through its poverty, Malawi is a cheap place to travel and because of this you can end up staying much, much longer than you anticipate!

I’m going to just give a quick run-down on the basics for travelling in Malawi, from a budget perspective:

Budget: Can easily get by on $20 a day (lay off the Carlsberg Elephants though)

Transport: Varied, uncomfortable, entertaining, cheap and eventful! You’ll spend time in overcrowded buses (for sure), on the back of pick-ups, on the back of cargo on the back of pick-ups, on push-bike taxis, kayaks, steam boats and dhows etc..

Accommodation: If you want to rough it, you can sleep for cheap! Let’s face it, you don’t need more than a clean sheet, a mattress and a mosquito net – do ya?! if that’s your only prerequisites then $2-$5 rooms are easy to find

Food: Eat local and you’ll eat well. For pittance. Stay away from the eateries featured in your guidebook and you’ll wallet will reap the benefits! Food here is distinctly average regardless of how much you spend, so you might as well spend $1 for an average meal than $10!

Entertainment: Lots and lots and lots. Generally focused on the lake – scuba, snorkeling, kayaking, lounging on the beach nursing a hangover, watersports. Stuff is pretty reasonably priced and for $10 you can try your hand at water-skiing, banana boating etc.

$5 well spent in Senga Bay on the 'sling-shot'!

The general route north: I arrived via land (standard) from Mozambique in a horrible dalla-dalla, which is a minibus designed for 12 people although I’m not sure if the driver was aware of this as he squeezed the 27th person in the van for the 4 hour journey!…

From the border you can jump in another minibus to the industrial city of Blantyre, spend a day or two there. Head north to Monkey Bay or Cape Maclear for a few days chilling with your fellow backpackers. From here you can get an awesome boat up the lake which I recommend highly. If not, head to the capital for a day or two. Then onwards north to Senga Bay and finally onto Nkhata Bay.

2 weeks gone in a heartbeat, guaranteed. Your bank account will love you, as will your sense of adventure! So get to Malawi, asap – i’ll fill you in my the details of my trip in Malawi in subsequent posts…

Backpacking in Malawi – Guide to Malawi is a post from: onestep4ward.com

Related posts:

1. Chiang Mai – Travel Guide
2. Backpacking North Through Mozambique
3. Backpacking in Mozambique – My time in Maputo

From Maputo I’d say the main route (if you’re not heading into the sparse north-east) is to head to Xie-Xie then off to Tofo (cool beach town – loads of tourists), then to Vilanculos (even cooler beach town and much fewer tourists). From there then on to Chimoio (horrible transit town), onto Tete (even more horrible transit town) and then onwards towards the Malawian border.

Mozambique is a great bridge to Africa as you discard your western wants. Maybe you have come from South Africa by land, like me, or flown straight from Europe or North America – Mozambique is the perfect place to land =) Enough other tourists around so you don’t get hit too hard with culture shock but a few minutes wandering down another former Portuguese street and it’s like the Africa you imagined 3 months ago when you were planning your trip.

Geographically alone, it’s a wondrous place. The whole country stretches up the east coast of Africa, allowing itself endless beaches littered with scubadiving centres, water skiing opportunities and a whole host of other water sports. The food naturally focuses around what can be garnered from the sea, and what a feast it promises to be:

Generally the deal is – go to the local market and buy what you want to eat later (normally for a full-on seafood FEAST it’s about $3 per person). Bring it to a local eatery, by local I tend to mean disgusting cheap and probably horrible unhygienic yet what it lacks in basic sanitation and cutlery it makes up in personality and atmosphere! Here is the place we found, note the cardboard box menu:

I wish I was back there eating that! At the risk of sounding uncouth, Africa’s food isn’t exactly michelin starred so when u get an opportunity to gorge on this delicious grub in Mozambique, do it, savour it and do it again!

So Vilanculos was probably the highlight of my time in Mozambique, partly because I stayed at a place called Complexo Muha, run by a guy called Muhammed. To cut a long story short my friend and I were the only people staying at this local-ran place, we stayed for a fair few days and ended up becoming quite good friends with Muhammed. He seemed to take on our advice about renaming his place, remarketing his place, repricing his place, redoing his menu so when we returned from an afternoon on our last day there he had made some wholesale changes to his entire complex! Massive new signs, new pricing structure , new food options all off the back of our advice =) I can only hope it has proved successful for the man. Naturally should any of you guys end up in Vilanculos please pay him a visit, you won’t regret it.

The safety net I described earlier doesn’t extend itself to the transport however! You will be crammed into buses (only big enough for an average family) alongside 26 other Mozambicans who seem surprisingly unperturbed by the whole lack of personal space thing! A tru backpacking adventure in Africa isn’t complete until you’ve had a few sweaty bodies perilously close to your face – and you’ll have this on regular occasions!

Just before I sign off mozambique and have a chat about Malawi I think it’s only appropriate to whack in a few of the beautiful beach shots that you can’t avoid if you spend anytime here – awesome country, awesome people, awesome food, awesome flag (have u seen the AK47 on the flag?!), awesome beaches:

Backpacking North Through Mozambique is a post from: onestep4ward.com

Related posts:

1. Backpacking in Mozambique – My time in Maputo
2. Backpacking in Malawi – Guide to Malawi
3. Backpacking in South Africa – Cape Town

On the ferry we jumped to cross the bay, grabbed a beer en route and sailed across towards their hotel. We disembarked, made less than 200 metres progress until we met a guy called ‘Trouble’, he looked, walked and talked like a gangster but a nicer guy you’ll struggle to find. We walked the 200 metres and stopped by a shack at the dock ran by a old rasta lady know as ‘Mama Marley’ and what a cool ladt she was. Trouble, Adrian, Mama Marley and the 2 Candian chicks (Rachelle and Melissa) proceeded to polish off a fair few Lorintinas until 8pm became midnight, the girls had failed in their attempts to offer us room and board and we were, in all honesty, pretty drunk by Maputo dock with nowhere orgainsed to sleep that night and our bags perched by the shack :S Luckily enough, Mama Marley took pity on us and we stayed at her place – Queue the scene of me walzing into this local ‘house’ with a 50 year old rasta woman by our side singing “don’t worry… about a thing… ‘cos every little thing’s gonna be alrite’!! And you know what – I think Bob might have just got that right =)

Day 2 was equally as unpredictable – ah the beauty of travel. So Mama Marley’s place had no running water (naturally) and the awesome Canadian girls came up trumps and sent their personal driver (Jorge) from their swanky hotel to pick us up from Mama Marleys that morning. Apparently she’s somewhat of a local eccentric celeb. Jorge obliged and before we knew it we were showering both in the glory (and hot water) of the girls’ 5* hotel!

We spent a day wandering around the beautiful city of Maputo, eating copious amounts of prawns and other seafood for dirt-cheap prices and soaked up the old Portuguese flavour that permeated from every old building. Nighttime soon arrived and again we had organized nowhere to stay (some people never learn) but a few cheap beers put paid to our concerns and before we knew it we had 4 people rammed into the back of a single tuk-tuk against the drivers initial wishes but a 50 cent bribe soon persuaded him otherwise and off we went…:

with Shakira’s Waka Waka blasting out of the the driver’s makeshift stereo on 10000 decibels we weren’t the most inconspicuous traffic on the road but we made it in one peace without any police involvement and before we could say ‘free accommodation’ we were in the girls’ posh hotel’s hottub with 4 bottles of cheap wine

A few hours later we were awoken by the girls in their hotel room, apparently a few of the guests had complained of raucous, rowdy behaviour and the room (with ALL its’ inhabitants) had been fined $50 – we paid up and made a sheepish escape, eagerly trying to avoid any other guests or staff members :S Not a good impression!

3^rd and final night in Maputo didn’t get any less crazy, well maybe a little. We wanted to catch an early bus to Tofo the next day at silly o’clock so we tried to find a youth hostel in the city centre – full, full, full – no room at the inn. So we ended up having to rent out the penthouse (a 3 room suite) of a hotel straight from the 1940’s for the grand total of $40 for the night. The night was spent and the alarm went off at 4.00am (whoever said traveling was an extended holiday was most definitely wrong) and before we knew we were off to Tofo, naturally a couple of hours late though – Mozambique is cool but it’s still Africa when it comes to timetables

Backpacking in Mozambique – My time in Maputo is a post from: onestep4ward.com

Related posts:

1. Backpacking North Through Mozambique
2. Backpacking in Africa – Zimbabwe
3. Backpacking Through Bangladesh

It’s expensive and we all know its less than salubrious reputation in respect to safety! If and when you do go however, a trip to the countries largest township, Soweto, should be high on your agenda. I spent most of a day there, with the highlight being a smaller suburb within Soweto called Kliptown and it was certainly an eye-opener. The squalor in which the South African Government ‘allows’ so many of its citizens to live in is quite alarming and considering this is in a country which likes to be considered ‘first-world’ I find it doesn’t quite sit to well with me.

Traveling isn’t all about drinking buckets of whisky and red-bull on the beach, or finding a cheap happy hour in Manhattan – and that’s what I truly love about it. The end of the apartheid in SA was certainly hastened by the people of Soweto (with a special mention to the students who defiantly stood up against the sweeping changes to their education system and many were killed in the process). But it seems that while lots of Soweto has moved on since then, there’s plenty of it still in absolute poverty with a distinct lack of education and health care. *While I was there I saw an angry mob storm past me, on questioning everyone as to what was going on, apparently where we had parked, a guy had been stabbed in the neck and died a couple of days previously and the mob had just discovered where he was being kept so they were off to fetch him and were planning to beat him to death :S

I don’t want to paint a negative picture of Soweto however – the people here are some of the nicest I have ever run into (and I guess the mob were merely governing their own land, in lieu of an effective police service) and are more than accommodating to people coming in and looking around so go ahead and see for yourself, I’m sure you’ll find the same hospitality as I did. Soweto also houses the only street in the whole to have hosted two Nobel Peace Prize winners in Nelson Mandela and Arch Bishop Desmond Tutu – now that is impressive! You can see their house – literally 20 metres from each other!

Soweto is a great way to spend a day – just go with an open mind.

Also, if you have time there’s a great museum dedicated to the Apartheid – it’s massive though so give yourself time to explore the whole thing, it gives real insights into South Africa’s chequered past. Even if you’re not a museum person, this place is still awesome.

Backpacking in South Africa – Johannesburg, Soweto Township is a post from: onestep4ward.com

Related posts:

1. Backpacking in South Africa – Cape Town
2. Backing in Southern Africa – Getting to South Africa Via Botswana
3. Backpacking in Africa – Zimbabwe

Naturally, Table Mountain receives most of the plaudits when people remark on the natural beauty of the city and who am I to argue. It constantly gazes over the skyline and even at night when it is lit up it’s presence is still felt. You can’t help but throw endless glances up at it while you stroll around the city and ever once do you fail to marvel at its impressiveness.

For the fitter among us you can hike up to the top – alternatively you can take a cable car directly up to the top. For the purpose of my blog I took the cable car up so I can give it a fair appraisal It rotates all the way up and aside from the vulgar Visa sponsor plastered over it, it’s a great and fast way up. The views from the top of the mountain are incredible and a couple of hours can be lost before you know it.

Any trip to Cape Town wouldn’t be complete without paying your respects to the prison where Nelson Mandela (‘Madiba’ to the locals) was kept for the majority of his 27 years in captivity. A ferry to Robben Island leaves 3 times a day from the picturesque waterfront (book ahead – it’s predictably popular!). On the island you get ferried around in a bus for the first half on a compulsory tour bus, I hate tours at the best of time but a compulsory one doesn’t sit well with me, not a highlight! However, what follows is very cool. You go to the actual prison, walk around and if you want you can go on a guided walk around the prison with a former political prisoner who was held in captivity alongside the revered Mandela. He speaks very candidly about his experiences, about his training for the ANC (Mandela’s party which turned to guerilla warfare in a successful bid to end the apartheid in South Africa). You can walk freely around Mandela’s garden, see his cell, read about his experiences and it’s generally a very poignant scene. That man is one seriously special dude.

After cultural bids to sit atop of Table Mountain and visit Robben Island, I was feeling much too sophisticated so off to the Great White Sharks I went for a spot of Cage Diving – check out these pics!

It costs about $150 for the day but it’s worth every cent! Huge Great Whites literally 40 cm from your face, going for bait and generally looking absolutely terrifying. Sure, the water’s cold and your crammed in the cage with 4 other people but within one second of coming face to face with one of these creatures and you forget all about the water temperature and the other people and you stare in wonderment. Really, this is one of the coolest things I have EVER done, highly recommended!

Cape Town is a great city, with the backpacking vibe concentrated around Long Street, parties galore, plenty to see, a positive vibe (such a vibe that you’re not necessarily guaranteed in Johannesburg), loads of people and all-in-all one of my favourite cities ever to have visited

Backpacking in South Africa – Cape Town is a post from: onestep4ward.com

Related posts:

1. Backpacking in South Africa – Johannesburg, Soweto Township
2. Backing in Southern Africa – Getting to South Africa Via Botswana
3. Backpacking in Africa – Zimbabwe

The Zambia/Botswana/Zimbabwe/Namibia border crossing

Got a cab from Livingstone to Kazungula, the town bordering Botswana and from there my initial presumptions that this trip through Botswana would involve nothing more than a couple of buses through Francistown then Gaborone (the capital) then jump over the border and Joburg suddenly went a little less regimeneted, although that is certainly not a complaint.

The tone was set when we crossed the border the wrong way around by walking through immigration from the wrong side therefore inadvertently missing the hordes of Botswaneans surging through the correct entrance but, predictably in Africa, the immigration officials didn’t bat an eyelid and began process our exiting from Zambia. I then got stamped out by a seemingly blind border guard who looked at my 6 foot 2 English friend with black hair, then back to my passport photo, then at him again then nonchalantly shrugged and stamped him/me/us(?) through. The quirkiness continued when, busting for the toilet, I realized I had no local currency but luckily enough the paying toilets became free when we allowed the toilet dutyguard to sing us a song on my friend’s guitar while everyone relieved ourselves – “welcome to Zambia, thanks for visiting my peaceful country full of joy” and so on and so forth until everyone was finished!

We then crossed the smallest international border in the world apparently via a very dodgy boat – 700m of water separating Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana to and Namibia.

To cut a long story short, we crossed the river and got told there were no buses going through Botswana after 8am (it was not 9.30am) so we got dropped off on the highway and began to hitch-hike the 500km to the next destination Francistown. The search wasn’t looking fruitful until a guy came charging up in his car, flung open the door and when a load of Botswaneans approached him for a lift he declared “No no no no, I am here only for the whites” and waved them away! He was one crazy dude – also, he had lost his right arm in a car crash a few years ago and now drove only with his left arm. We naturally used that as a bargaining tool and before long Daika, our onearmed chauffeur, was caning it down the highway to Francistown.

His driving wasn’t too bad (:S) and we managed to avoid the elephants and giraffes and boars and donkeys that insisted on crossing the road at the seemingly most inopportuned times but things got a bit hairy when his mobile phone rang and HE ANSWERED IT with his left hand, going 120 km/h when it struck me, if his left hand is on the phone and his right arm is stting on the side of a Bostwanan road after his crash – what bloody arm is he using on the steering wheel?!!? After a few more occasions like thise we finally reached Francistown, got dropped off at a campsite, pitched the tents, said goodbye to Daika (crazy dude) and headed into restaurant to watch the football.

Literally crossed the road in front of us!

The other guys watched outside on the bigscreen while I checked my emails inside alone. 2 guys and a girl asked could they watch the football with me, of course I agreed. It transpired that one of the guys was the recently retired former Botswana football team captain, record caps holder with over 125 and national hero! He had just come back from England last month where he was playing at Stamford Bridge and St James Park with John Terry and Alan Shearer. I spent the evening with these guys, they bought me booze, dinner and then… his mate has offered me a lift to the capital city 500km from here and I can stay with him and his family tonight. Tomorrow he will help me arrange my passage to Joburg – I hate to generalize but Africans do seem amazingly friendly, I really am falling in love with this continent!

Backing in Southern Africa – Getting to South Africa Via Botswana is a post from: onestep4ward.com

Related posts:

1. Backpacking in South Africa – Cape Town
2. Backpacking in South Africa – Johannesburg, Soweto Township
3. Backpacking in Africa – Zimbabwe

I arrived in Lusaka, the capital of Zambia, headed to one of the 2 guesthouses and threw of my bags. Standard practice with my lack of planning meant that I had no local currency, no idea what to do or see and no map so I spent the rest of the day rectifying that! Walking around the city, people are so keen to talk to you and with the former British colonization, nearly everyone can speak English.

I often had people walking me around the city, showing me where I needed to go and not once was I asked for any form of payment, a welcome break from my years in Asia and the constant haranguing from touts!

As far as a city goes, Lusaka is pretty relaxed. There’s not necessarily so much to see or do but simply walking around and soaking up the atmosphere can easily fill a day. There are a couple of local markets that I walked around which were an experience in themselves and I even managed to find a Subway franchise and treat myself to a footlong meatball marinara (easing myself back into my backpacking ways slowly after a year in Australia )

Lusaka soon came and went and I was off on a 5 hour bus (that’s an African 5 hours apparently which is somewhere between 7 and 9 hours in reality) to Livingstone, the town closest to one of the 7 Natural Wonders of the World – Victoria Falls. Essentially, Vic falls was the reason I had come to Zambia so I was buzzing at the prospect of finally seeing it. The bus journey was fine, if a little overcrowded, but it was broken up sporadically by various breakdowns, overenthusiastic gospel preachers and wildife so it was certainly entertaining. The roads in Africa, so far, have seemed pretty good so it was relatively smooth throughout (*disclaimer – relatively smooth in relation so some less developed countries I’ve been too, relative to the West it’s like a very, very dusty rollercoaster)

Livingstone is awesome. Of course it’s set up for a fair bit of tourism being so close to Vic Falls but it’s laid back, relaxed and affordable. I stayed in a cracking hostel called Livingstone Backpackers for around $8 a night for the dorm. I shared a room with a cool Dutch guy who had driven from Holland in a 80’s military landrover through the centre of Africa to be here, he had some crazy stories about getting put in prison in the Congo for 3 days en route and taking a secret agent across a few countries over 3 weeks – I love the people you meet on the road!

On day 2 I got peer pressured into bungee jumping off the bridge which crosses one of the gorges at Vic Falls. 110m freefall for $110 fee, extortionate – yes, but worth every cent! Jumping off the bridge, into a circular rainbow caused by the mist coming off the Falls, white water surging past beneath you and a full view of the Falls behind you as you bob up and down after your jump waiting to be reeled in. Don’t get me wrong, I was terrified but it was definitely something I would recommend.

You can feel the wet mist coming from the falls from nearly 1km away, it truly is something special and you can see the ‘smoke’ (read:mist) from miles and miles away surging up from the falls high into the sky, it’s difficult to describe it so you should come and see for yourself

The bridge that you jump off for the bungee :S

This day marked a special date too – the start of the world cup!! We watched Bafana Bafana (South Africa) draw with Mexico in the local bar and the atmosphere was great, I really hope an African side goes far in the tournament because the continent will go crazy. After the game we got dragged to another couple of bars and then to a Zambian club and let me tell you, these guys no how to have a good time!! Everyone ear to ear smiles, dancing like crazy, buying me drinks because I was a guest in their country – one of the best nights out I have ever had for sure, I clambered back to my dorm about 4am I think :S

Early start the next day, pretty standard in Africa it seems so everyone is up around 7am. I went with the crazy Dutchman and his car to National Park to see the Falls close up. The water levels at the moment are the highest they’ve been in 40 years so the mist is at an all-time high, which is a sight to behold. I think to get the best experience you would need to come both at the peak of wet season to see this and also at dry season to see the sheer size of the falls, or am I just looking at reasons to come back?! We walked around the park, monkeys running around EVERYWHERE, completely unperturbed by humans. I was walking around in flipflops when some guy tells me to go down a track because it’s beautiful but “watch out because I saw a cobra down there” WTF?! You don’t here too many sentences like that back in Ireland.

It’s almost needless to say but the Falls up close are something else. The noise is deafening and the volume of the water is incomprehensible, my photography does it no justice at all but here are a few snaps regardless:

At one point you cross a bridge probably 100 metres from the centre of the falls and as you cross you are entirely engulfed in the spray, literally soaked! Brilliant experience and you can hardly see anything due to the amount of water in the air – crazy.

I’m back in the hostel now, thinking about leaving Livingstone today  I have to be in Johannesburg by in 3 days for my first World Cup match and I have no idea how I am going to get there :S either through Botswana or Zimbabwe by bus I guess…

STOP PRESS:

Luckily I bumped into some guys who are also going to Johannesburg via Botswana although they are aiming to arrive one day later than me, rather than go alone like Steven F*cking Glansberg I thought I’d arrive in South Africa a day later with them. Anyway, that meant I could visit the Victoria Falls from the Zimbabwe side of the border this time so I nipped over to Zimbabwe today and WOW!!! I thought it was amazing yesterday… the Zim side  blows the Zam side out of the water, it was awe inspiringly beautiful today, from the Zim side you get a much better grasp on the sheer size of the falls and they are much better viewpoints so if you make it this far then go that extra step and check it out from Zimbabwe – you won’t regret it!

Backpacking In Zambia – Victoria Falls is a post from: onestep4ward.com

Related posts:

1. Backpacking in Africa – Zimbabwe
2. Backing in Southern Africa – Getting to South Africa Via Botswana
3. Backpacking North Through Mozambique

I flew Air Zimbabwe from London to Harare, one-way and on my own – starting another leg of another (unplanned) trip around the world. The vague idea is to get from the bottom of Africa, all the way to the top by land over 6 months or so – taking in the World Cup, climbing Kilimanjaro and trekking with Gorillas in Uganda – all depending on the common constraint… cash :S

So I arrived in Harare on my own and to be honest I was pretty scared, never been to Africa before and I was all on my lonesome. The backpacking Gods were shining brightly on me though and I ended up meeting a Zimbabwean girl who asked me to help her lift her excess luggage off the conveyor belt onto her trolley. A little bit of chat ensued and to cut a long story short, within 90 minutes I was at her extended families place with her cousin getting fed breakfast by the maid!

Really, they were so nice. I spent my first day in Harare getting driven around by these 3 girls, shown the sights, introduced to the highend of society ( I gathered their social class early on, firstly by their massive house, security guests and 2 full-time ‘help’ and swcondly by the virtue of the fact that President Robert Mugabe went to her cousin’s wedding because she was married to the Secretary of Defence for Zimbabwe!!) so I landed on my feet and my African fears were quickly dissipated. That combined with the fact that Air Zimbabwe made a mistake with my flight so I was comped a 5* hotel in the city centre for my first night’s sleep in Africa made my initial experiences all the sweater!

Harare, as a city, is pretty nice – open, spacious roads punctuated with palm trees, but the poverty and disparity in wealth is there for all to see. The average monthly salary is around $150 but the cheapest accommodation there is $100 per night!!! It is NOT  a cheap place to travel, consider yourselves warned but it is interesting, and race/colour/creed or whatever you want to call it is never far from people’s tongue. The family took me out for drinks and I was having a conversation with one of their (black) friends about their group’s relative wealth. She began to tell me about the farm her family owned and she was so quick to insist it was nothing to do with Mugabe’s ‘reallocation’ of farms that I didn’t even have time to crack a joke about it

The next day, by a turn of fortune the ODI (One Day International) cricket final was on in Harare, featuring Zimbabwe (Zim to the locals) against Sri Lanka, by new-found, awesome friends soon had us in the corporate boxes section watching the final for free and a great day was had until I had to rush for my flight to Zambia.

In the airport I managed to obtain a couple of remnants from Zim’s recent turbulent economic past:

Anyways, awesome time was had, with awesome people met and I’m off to Zambia, a little scared all over again albeit not so much after such a positive opening experience to this beautiful continent.

Backpacking in Africa – Zimbabwe is a post from: onestep4ward.com

Related posts:

1. Backing in Southern Africa – Getting to South Africa Via Botswana
2. Backpacking in South Africa – Cape Town
3. Backpacking in South Africa – Johannesburg, Soweto Township

Incidentally, I recently read a book called ‘The Lunatic Express’ and I had to giggle when I saw our old trusted rocket steamer feature as one of the most dangerous boat journeys in the world, apparently over 1000 people die each year on Bangladesh ferries – the highest ratio of deaths to journeys in the world – I’m glad I had read the book prior to our departure or our $4, two day journey mightn’t have felt quite as good value.

The ridiculous hospitality of our adopted Bangladeshi family had continued as Raul had arranged family of his to meet us in the Khulna port when we arrived which removed some of the trepidation that I was constantly flooded with throughout Bangladesh (probably partly due to the huge holes I saw in the boat we were about to disembark on). So we boarded and off we went! The three of us had our own cabin which apparently was one step down from the luxury travel but a hell of a step up from 200 people squeezed head to foot in an open room on the basement of the boat so we were happy enough.

I headed to the back of the ferry and had one long gaze back at Dhaka, it had been a hell of a start to my new backpacking life and one that would hold me in good stead in the years to come..

Dhaka had been a hectic place but one worthy of a visit for sure and we felt as if we were leaving in true Bangladeshi fashion, this boat was an experience itself and I was relishing every moment. The scenery over the next 40 hours was amazing and the widespread damage from all the flooding is there for anyone to see, this country seems bereft of any hills, mountains or hump of any description! As we meandered down the river we past scores of ‘ports’ where the people were full of frantic smiles, laughs and waves..

To be honest the 40 hours or so flew by, we had constant visitors peering into our cabin making sure the rumours they heard about the 3 young white guys were true. Wandering around the boat kept me occupied for a long time too as did fighting off the various insects and cockroaches that were cohabiting our cabin for the evening, before too long we were approaching Khulna which would be our next and last leg of the Bangladesh adventure, praying that Azim would be waiting for us at the port :S

Backpacking in Bangladesh: The Boat from Dhaka to Kulna is a post from: onestep4ward.com

Related posts:

1. Backpacking Through Bangladesh
2. Cheap Travel: Bangladesh
3. Cheap travel – boat from Thailand to China (taking a cargo boat, up the Mekong river, from Thailand to China)…

If you make it to Dhaka I recommend making your way to the waterfront. From here you can hitch a ride on one of the boats and ride around the river, sure it’s filthy but you get a real feel of the old city this way and for half the price of a can of coke you can’t go too wrong.

After getting covered in the dirtiest water this side of the India we thought we’d continue our trek through Dhaka, next up was the countries largest Mosque. For me, this is what traveling is all about; I’m not ashamed to admit, being a caucasian lad from a small town in Ireland I wasn’t exactly clued up on the world’s religions, but in the 3 or 4 years I have been traveling I have been exposed to Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism, Islam, Ba’haism and Judaism is some depth and now I feel more than comfortable holding a conversation about any of these religions. So, this was my first direct exposure to Islam and the people in the Mosque were overwhelmingly happy to see us there – a really positive experience and one I will never forget.

We spent the next couple of days exploring the area and the place never ceased to amaze me. The heat was almost unbearable but the peoples’ warm smiles more than compensated and although the blatant staring never let up, you come to realise that there is no malice in their eyes – only  intrigue and wonder, which in fairness is the same thing our stares were carrying right back to them so I guess we were even! Here are a few of the sights we came across:

Ahsan Manjil (The Pink Palace) in Dhaka

Lalbagh Fort, Dhaka

Crazy balancing man in Dhaka

Things were about to get a lot more interesting. We met a guy in the mall who basically adopted us as his foreign friends, before we knew it we were playing cricket and having dinner in the slums!

Our extended Bangladeshi Family

Playing cricket in Bangladesh

Our accommodation for the evening

Rahul and Azim really took care of us, let us into their homes, showed us around the city – what a cracking experience. With their help we devised a plan to get to India, we were going to take the steam boat down the river Buriganga to Khulna, just off the bay of Bengal. From there we can make our way to India.

So off we went in search of tickets to this rocket steamer….

Searching for the ticket kiosk to get the boat

Onto the boat we went… again the only white people to be seen…

Backpacking Through Bangladesh is a post from: onestep4ward.com

Related posts:

1. Backpacking in Bangladesh: The Boat from Dhaka to Kulna
2. Cheap Travel: Bangladesh
3. Cheap Travel: Backpacking in China – Yunan Province