Our Last Great Adventure....

I keep telling Ashley this is our last great adventure...before our next one. No but seriously, in some ways this trip will begin the end of our Peace Corps service as we hope to be coming home some time in mid-June. But it also brings to an end the last three years in which we have been living an unconventional nomadic lifestyle (at least for Ashley and I it has been, for some it is perfectly normal). And it may be our last big adventure before we have to start to bring along little ones on the adventures which will make them all the more exciting. (No, Ashley is not pregnant but we are hoping in the next year to start trying)

So, on Tuesday March 9th we departed Bandiagara, Mali and traveled east across a desolate and dusty road that took us into the country of Burkina Faso. We bought visas at the tiny boarder crossing ($20 usd - they are good for 7 days) then went onto spend three nights in Burkina. Burkina has a great feel and the people were wonderful but the weather was hot and we couldn't stop sweating. They sell frozen chocolate milk on the street for about 25 cents for a little serving in a bag so that brought a little relief from the heat (it basically tastes like chocolate ice cream). I bought about 5 a day. Guys walk around with little freezer boxes on the front of there bike or pushing them around on a cart. So you just walk around on the street until you find one of these guys and you flag them down...and buy three...because one is never enough.

After our short stop in Burkina we traveled by bus (a bus with air conditioning, something Mali does not have) down into the much greener land of Ghana. We arrived in Accra at 5am and went to hostel called the Phoenix which sits on a cliff over looking the ocean. We needed a room to rest from the bus ride and take showers before we left for our flights to Malawi so we got a room for the day which cost us around $12. If you like rasta guys everywhere and the smell of marijuana constantly you will love this place but that is not our scene so we enjoyed the views of the ocean but will probably not be coming back for a long term stay anytime soon.

We then flew from Accra, Ghana to Lilongwe, Malawi (Malawi's capital city). After the flights we proceeded onto a nine hour bus from Lilongwe to Nkhata Bay on Lake Malawi which is where we are currently at taking a four day scuba diving certification class. (Did I mention Ashley's luggage did not arrive on the flight and so she has been without her bag for four days now. Luckily we had carried our swimsuits onto the plane just in case this might happen so she has been surviving in her swimsuit and a few pieces of cloths she bought at the local market. What a good sport!)

Today we did our first dive and it was incredible. Lake Malawi is the eighth largest lake in the world and has more species of fish than any other lake in the world. Its most famous attraction are is hundreds of species of Cichlid fish which are brightly colored and make you feel as you are swimming in an aquarium. A huge blessing to us is that Malawi has the cheapest Scuba certification coarse in the world and yet our instructor Kate from Oxford, England has been absolutly world class.

I don't have an underwater camera so I grab this photo of Lake Malawi off the Internet.

Cichlid fish in Lake Malawi.

I got up at five to watch the sun rise over Lake Malawi and Ashley slept.

It rained the first morning in Nkhata Bay.

The view out from our dive center.

A view of our dive center from the water (Aqua Africa).

Ashley cutting up avocado to make guacamole (avocados are 15 for $1 usd) so we are in heaven eating fresh avocados everyday.

Ashley sitting at our hostel waiting for a taxi to take us to the airport in Accra, Ghana.