Financial Update: Going Broke in Southern Africa

Andy updated you on the obsessions of Southern Africa, so it's my turn to relate our financial status. Even though we didn't have to buy visas in most of these countries, the whole region was quite expensive, thanks to a combination of Western-priced supermarkets, developed-world hotel standards, and pricey national parks and safaris. But there were still a few good deals. Here are the details.

Madagascar: $184/day. Madagascar is actually really, really cheap once you get there, but flying there cost us each about $900 roundtrip from Johannesburg. (If you're coming from America or Europe, double that.) Since we were in Madagascar for 18 days, this added $100 a day to our average. The only other really expensive thing there was a last-minute internal flight that cost us about $170 pp (adding another $20/day). Road travel, street and restaurant food, hotels, and national parks are a fantastic deal, however, so if you can manage to swim to Madagascar, it's a very budget-friendly place to travel...

Zimbabwe: $144/day. Surprisingly expensive for a country whose economy collapsed just a short time ago, Zimbabwe doesn't have particularly cheap rooms, food, or national parks ($30 per person for Victoria Falls felt especially outrageous). It would be a good place to have a tent of your own, and/or a car that you could sleep in...

Botswana: $131/day. Another country where we could have really used a tent! Game drives and boat trips in Chobe National Park are good value, but you can't get a room outside of the park in Kasane for less than $50. We managed to find cheap food and decently-priced tours in most places, but there are just no budget hotels in Botswana.

Namibia: $100/day. Don't let that average fool you--Namibia may be the most expensive country in Africa. We only got it down to $100 by renting the cheapest car possible and a tent with a friend and camping our way around the country. Public transit is particularly outrageously expensive...when you can even find it. We had to hitch a lot to get to Windhoek from the north.

Lesotho: $108/day. We only spent two nights in Lesotho, so take this average with a grain of salt. We were driving our own rental car from South Africa at this point, so gas and rental costs jack things up, while sleeping in our car brought them back down for one of the two nights.

Swaziland: $260/day. This average is also skewed since we only spent two nights in Swaziland, one of which was at a fancy game reserve (other one, in the car). Gas is slightly cheaper in Swaziland and Lesotho than South Africa, in case you were curious.

South Africa: $114/day. We visited South Africa in two sections--first for three days in Johannesburg, where we didn't have a car, then for about two weeks driving in a rental car from Cape Town to Nelspruit (detouring into Lesotho and Swaziland). Things were definitely cheaper when we stayed put in one city, since once we got the car, we covered a lot of ground quickly (and paid for a lot of gas). We were paying around $50/day for the automatic car rental (sticks are cheaper) and $25/day for gas. We slept in the car about half the time in South Africa...the other half the time we were usually in double rooms at backpackers hostels, which cost around $30-$35 a night. We also cooked our own food a lot. Activities in South Africa, such as national park visits and shark diving, made up most of the rest of our expenditures.

Mozambique: $80/day. Finally, a country under the $100/day mark! Mozambique is great value. It's not as developed as South Africa, but it's not quite as poor or disorganized as many other countries in Africa. We traveled by bus, stayed in decent hotels and hostels, did snorkeling boat trips, and celebrated the return of street food for very reasonable prices.

Zambia: $200/day. We only spent three days in Zambia, visiting South Luangwa National Park. It's not exactly a budget destination, but by traveling there on our own by bus and cooking our own meals, we managed to save about 30% off the packaged tour we were considering out of Lilongwe. This would be another good place to have a tent--we paid $60 a night for a room at a camp outside the park, but camping would have only cost about $10.

Malawi: $65/day. Malawi is cheap. A two-day private kayaking trip on the lake, including meals, snorkeling, and camping equipment, cost us $40 per person per day. I feel like a similar trip in South Africa would have cost over $100 pp/day, at least. Hotels, food, and buses are also cheap. There isn't much to do in Blantyre or Lilongwe, so if you go, head straight for the lake if you can.

There you have it, Southern Africa by the numbers. As a general rule, the countries that start with "M" are pretty cheap to travel in (once you get there, at least)...and the ones that start with "S" or "Z," not so much!

Obsessed in Southern Africa

We thought it was finally time to catch up and write about what Southern Africans obsess about. As always, these are based on our short time in the countries, and may have little or no relationship to what you think.

Madagascar- A dead currency. The country got rid of the Malagasy franc in 2007 and replaced it with the ariary, which is worth 5 times more. However, nearly everyone still quotes prices in the old currency, as though you can still pay in it. It would be as though you went to Italy and everyone was still quoting prices in Italian lira, but you never really know. So, someone says 1,000 when asked a price. Is that 1,000 of the old currency or the new?

South Africa- Named Routes. Every road seems part of some touristic route. If we lived in South Africa, our driveway would probably be dubbed the "Andyandtara.com Driveway Route" by the government. It would come complete with nice signs. At one point we were driving down a tiny dirt road that no one uses and it had a huge sign saying something like "The Bob Robertson Mountain Route" and we just laughed.

Zimbabwe- Bartering. Because the Zim dollar is catastrophically worthless and people haven't fully adjusted to using dollars and rand, many people are still happy to trade. How much is that souvenir? "$10, but I'd rather trade it for your shoes." I was very tempted to trade the sunglasses that I bought for $1, but I really didn't need any of the junk they were selling...

Botswana- Urinal cakes. Tara has to take my word for this one. Every urinal has no fewer than 50 small urinal cakes, most often in a rainbow of colors and sometimes in a variety of shapes (cubes, round, thick, thin, etc.). All the bathrooms smell very nice.

Namibia- Germans. Sure, it was a German colony, but so were lots of places. Only Namibia has kept alive everything from German sausages to sauerkraut. Any German would feel right at home speaking German and many of the towns look like small German villages.

Lesotho- Walking in the road. The people of Lesotho don't really seem to understand cars. Because they see so few, they have the belief that the roads were built exclusively for them and their livestock to walk on. This proves problematic if you are going down the main road at 60 miles per hour at night, come around a turn, and discover a huge group of people right in front of you.

Swaziland- The King. Though most famous in most of the world for choosing a bride from a parade of topless, dancing teenagers each year (Google Reed Dance if you want to learn more), the king of Swaziland seems revered by all within the country. Let us know if you figure out what he does other than waste the country's money.

Mozambique- Male and female symbols. This sounds weird, but many places in Mozambique use the biological male and female symbols. You know, the little circles with an arrow coming off, like you might use in a biology class or the 1970s. We always had to do a double-take and figure out which was the right one to use.

Malawi- Teaching the language. In most places, people act as though we should know the local language, even when it is only spoken by about 100 people. In Malawi, they don't expect you to know it, but they always wanted to teach us. At least 20 people tried teaching us greetings for different times of day, but all failed.

Zambia- Coming to America. We had kids as young as 10 and adults well over 50 asking us how to get to America. At least we could tell the kids that they should study hard and maybe get a scholarship to an American school. The best we could come up with for the adults is that they should thinking about trying to get to an easier country like South Africa (even though South Africans mostly hate other Africans coming to their country).

And that ends another fine addition of obsessions. Hope that you enjoyed it!

Hungry, hungry [to eat a] hippo!

While being in Southern Africa was nice for a number of reasons, we really missed the cheap and varied cuisine of West Africa. Crossing the border into Mozambique was crossing the food barrier back into the real Africa. On the South Africa side of the border, you find sanitary little restaurants serving boring food. On the Mozambique side, women throw whatever dirty food they have at you and you eat it off the ground with your hands--and it is almost free.


As soon as we had a hotel in Mozambique, we set out to find the market that was supposedly lined with food sellers. We got there well past the lunch rush, but found a few places left with food. This one was called guisado vaca, a beef dish, and cost us about $1.20. Exactly what we needed and very tasty. Many small vendors of candy and cigarettes in Maputo have buckets of what looked like miniature garlic knots. In the interest of our readers, we bought a couple of them for 2 cents each and discovered that they taste like a little, crunchy, not-so-sweet donut. Not terrible, but not worth the stomach space.

Because Mozambique speaks Portugese, it apparently has great trade relations with Brazil. We were happy to see many products that we first learned to love in Brazil or knockoffs of Brazilian products. We found cheap peach nectar which was at leat 50% sugar, not like the pure juice garbage that they have in some countries. Amazing. I drank many liters. (A liter is like a quart for those who are metric-challenged. A liter is the same as a litre for those who are British or dyslexic.)

We mentioned the South African love of green cream soda in an earlier post, and that carries over to the yogurts of Mozambique. Tara decided to try the cream soda yogurt, but she later regretted that decision. Slimer from Ghostbusters apparently went into business making this stuff.

Lots of our favorite Brazilian cookies for cheap. Hooray! The bottom one--banana and cinammon--are some of my favorite cookies. We carried no less than eight rolls out of the country with us.

Back to rice and bean country! I have no idea why the beans always taste so good, and I'm fairly sure it is best that I stay in the dark.

Mozambique has very cheap cashews everywhere. Huge bags of them for a couple of dollars. Well, I love cashews, though I have a bad skin reaction to them (they have the same chemical that causes poison ivy reactions). Without even considering my allergy, I bought a bag and started eating. Three days later, my face looked like was coming down with leprosy with my skin flaky and splitting. Oh, well, at least I had some good cashews.

The local soda brand of Mozambique is Fizz. Very good. It comes in Lemon (or maybe it is lime--the word is the same), tangerine, raspberry, and pinacolada (coco-pine).

One morning in Tofo, I was exploring while Tara was off learning how to do crazy yoga poses. I found the local bakery and bought a jelly donut. It was only a mediocre jelly donut, but it sure looks good with the lovely background.

More yogurt. Didn't try it and don't know what Tara thought aboutit. Probably just okay.One of the specialties of Mozambique is called matapa, which is some greens stewed in coconut milk. A surefire way to get your kids to eat their greens. At the market in Vilankulo, we found a yogurt seller. He cut open this plastic bag of white goo and poured it into the mug for Tara. After one drink, she ran for the sugar that he had sitting there, which is something that she very rarely adds. She adapted to it, but took a pass on more the next day. On our snorkelling trip, they served a stewed squid and crab (no fears--they made me a chicken). Tara says it is probably the best squid that she has ever had and she still tells me regularly that she is thinking about it.

A return to the land of frozen juice bag popsicles! I first saw some little kids coming from school with these and ran up to them and tried in my best Portugese to ask where I could get one. They looked scared and had no idea what I was saying, so Tara made me leave them alone. Following the stream of kids coming from school, we were then able to locate the source outside the school.

The last time we were someplace that sold a bag of fries (aka chips) with a piece of fried chicken in the bag was probably South America. They had them in Mozambique, though.

We made dinner one night in Chimoio, and then we ate it in our awesome camper.

The local grocery store had a sale table where they put out things that are almost expired and on super discount. We couldn't pass up the Frosted flakes that were expiring in a week. Really, we just wanted to educate our readers that Frosted Flakes are called Frosties in most of the world. We speculate that it is because "flake" is a hard word to say for many people who speak other languages, but we don't really know why. They are still Grrrreat!

In all of Africa, it is common for people to run up to the buses selling food at rest stops, toll boths, police roadblocks, etc. In Malawi, the people seem to have a specialty at each stop. Sometimes, a hundred people run to the bus selling bread when all you want is fries. You wonder why someone doesn't try to sell something else there. Well, at this stop, the bus was swarmed by people selling carrots. Seemed very strange. Yet, many people on the bus uncomplainingly bought carrots and started eating them.

Tara with some more yogurt. I'm sick of putting in pictures of Tara's yogurt, so I'm sure you're sick of seeing them.

Once again, we found baobab juice. Called Malambe in Malawi and Zambia, but much less sweet than in West Africa and generally not as good. Tara paid about 50 cents for 25 tea bags, paying extra because they are "export quality". Based on this purchase, we suggest avoiding Malawian tea at your local store.

But then we found the problem. In Malawi, they make tea by mixing six parts sugar, three parts milk, and one part tea. Prepared in this way, it is good and quite similar to how I make tea at home.

At breakfast time, guys wander around the bus station with buckets of sausage. It's like a secret since you have no idea what they are carrying unless you live there or you ask. In my case, I walked up and asked if he was carrying some kind of food that I should know about. While waiting about six hours for this stupid minibus to leave, our choices were limited. I found some fries and a drink called "Milky Tropical Juice". Thinking it was a dairy product, I was excited to try it. However, it had no dairy. But it was frozen, which made it like a slushy, which I love. In Zambia, they have so many hippos that they have started a community program with the government to kill a limited number for food. They sell some of it to tourists at crazy prices which allows them to sell the rest really cheap to locals so that they don't go shooting endangered animals. We tried the biltong (like jerky) and it was very good. A lot like beef. Yum, hippo!

On lake Malawi, we tried many foods on the street that all seemed to turn out to be rice or rice stuffed into dough. This one turned out to be pure rice with a layer of palm oil on the outside. Not terrible if you are in the mood for rice.

Malawi is a big peanut butter country. Since about half my diet consists of peanut butter, this was really good for our budget and my happiness. Malawi and Zambia have Sobo as a local drink. We were talking to kids in Zambia about life in America and the most distressing part of the entire conversation for them was when they found out that we don't have Sobo in America. Tara holds a coco-pine and a berry flavor. They aren't bad and come in fun flavors. Fanta competes by adding fun flavors that don't seem to exist elsewhere. These are Exotic and Passionfruit Fanta. We give both high marks. They should distribute them in the US. Write your local congressman or Coke executive.
Nsima is the local pounded starch goo. This happens to be made of maize, but they often make it of cassava as well. We like it, but many tourists hate it, so it makes the locals very happy to see us eating it. And you pick up a piece with your hands and then dip it in the stew and eat it. No utensils.

This is Richard. He came over and told us how excited he was that we were eating Nsima. When he found out that we take pictures for our blog, he suggested that we should get one of him eating his whole fish. Here you go, Richard!

That concludes foods of Mozambique, Zambia, and Malawi. Let me know if you have enjoyed it. Send any complaints to Tara.