Zimbabwe25.02.98 - BolowayoWe got off the train today after a good night's sleep. We didn't even wake up when Rie got off at midnight (she was going to a game park just inside Zimbabwe) which was kind of bad of us. We headed into town after buying our train tickets for that night to Harare.We walked around the city, got breakfast and basically killed time till around 6pm when we walked back to the station to catch the 9pm train out. Bolowayo is a pretty cool town, very relaxed and quite modern (the most modern city we're seen in Africa). Most of the day we just spent lying around in a park, which is what a large percentage of the population seemed to be doing, actually. Otherwise we sat around at the markets for a while and chatted to some of the locals who were very nice after they stopped trying to sell us souvenirs and marijuana. I just worked out, by the time we leave Africa we would have spent 6 of the last 7 nights on the road, our sole night in bed being at Gecko's lodge at Livingston.
26.02.98 - HarareWe got into Harare and pretty much planned to just sit around until it was time to leave. First, though, we had to get our tickets checked at the Air France office in town since we had changed them to fly out of Harare instead of Jo-burg. That turned out to be a bit more of a hassle than we thought because Air France is basically totally disorganised. Eventually it got done, however.We needed US$20 each to get out of Zimbabwe (Airport Tax) which they wouldn't accept in any other currency. We didn't especially want to change any more money, and Joe had some spare cash from Kenya still so we tried to find somewhere to change it. Eventually Joe found a guy at the Kenyan embassy who wanted to get some KSh so Joe negotiated with him for a while and got ripped off (of course) but at least we had enough to pay our $20 each to get out of the country. In the end we only just got the money in time, we couldn't pay the tax in the city because all the banks were closed, so Joe changed his Zim$ into US$ and we headed out to the airport. We payed the tax and had only enough money between us to buy a Coke and a couple of packs of chips. We checked into the plane and sat back - damn it was good to have everything totally out of your control again - let someone else handle the rest of the trip home. Our plane flew first to Jo-burg where we picked up a whole bunch of passengers and then we continued on home. We dropped Brad at Perth and a few hours later we landed in Sydney only a little behind schedule. Home.
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