Day 15: Lilongwe to London

Morning tea at the bus station

We woke quite early and headed out for breakfast. I was yearning for a café where we could sit down, relax and enjoy a good breakfast. I would have loved a Australian / British style brunch, but that isn't really Malawi's style.

We stepped inside one café only to be told the chef hadn't yet arrived for the day. Walking round the corner we found a bakery that was open and decided to pick up a couple of croissants, although they sadly didn't have anywhere to sit down. We continued strolled and seemed, inevitably, to end up back at the bus station.

We saw a popular looking tea stall and decided to grab a couple of seats. It was quite a sight to see the man running the stall pour the tea. Fresh tea leaves were placed in the sieve and hot water poured through to give an instant brew. Milk powder and sugar were heaped in and then the plastic cups were handed to us.

Watching it being prepared it looked like it might be awful, but the sweet tea hit the spot perfectly. The locals were all having huge door steps of bread slathered with butter, but we politely declined as we'd already had our croissants.

We got chatting to the guy next to us who was heading down to Dedza for the day to watch a football match.

Street dough snack

On the way back to the hotel to pick up our bags I bought a fried dough ball for pennies just to see what they tasted like. Bland was the answer.

We took a taxi to the airport and had to give our driver part of the fare along the way so he could fill up with petrol.

There were two flights departing close together and sleepy Lilongwe International wasn't really geared up for it with only one departure lounge and security scanner. It would have been all too easy to end up on the wrong flight, but luckily that didn't happen to us!

We tried to spend our final Malawian Kwacha on two cups of tea, but didn't have enough change to afford them at the inflated airport prices. We must have looked a bit forlorn leaving the coffee bar as an America student followed us back to our seats shortly afterwards with two cups of tea. What a lovely lady!

Our flight up to Nairobi was uneventful. We had an eight hour layover before our connection to London. Our original plan was to use the time for a mad dash into the city to check out some of Nairobi's highlights, but we both decided that we didn't really have the energy.

We asked if there was an earlier flight to London we might be able to change to (no was the answer) and then checked out whether we could access to the business class lounge. You could only buy a three hour pass to the lounge so we decided to hold off as long as we could before going in.

Once inside the lounge wasn't really up to much, but at least we got a seat, there was wifi and free booze.