lizard island

Getting down to the last weekends so they’ve all been planned out. Time to go to the lake as it is hot hot hot. The days are fine because you can get in the water and cool off. The nights are still and not any cooler—harder to deal with since you can’t jump in the water to cool off as there may be crocs or hippos (though we haven’t actually seen them here) took a boat out to lizard island where we could snorkel and had a picnic lunch. Walked around the island looking for the lizards but no luck—just saw and smelled lots of poo on all the rocks. Had a few boats full of Malawians on tour come up to the place we were…felt a little like we were part of the tour as they didn’t get off their boats and they did take pictures of us…on our way back to nkhoma on Sunday we stopped in salima at the ice cream den—we saw it every time on our way back and figured we should really stop. So we went in and the menu seemed extensive for the choices of ice cream. Well turned out the choices weren’t actually that extensive—vanilla ice cream and you could get chocolate sauce on it which was good for most people. Isabelle and I ordered a banana split. The waiter went away and came back a couple of minutes later and said that he’s sorry but they can’t make the banana splits. I’m confused because I know there are bananas everywhere right now (maybe not in the kitchen but easy to get probably right next door) and since everyone else is getting ice cream and chocolate sauce adding bananas would make a good split. So we asked “why not?” we can’t make the banana split because we don’t have any strawberries. ??? we asked for the bananas with the chocolate sauce and that seemed to confuse him but he did go to make it. after about 5 minutes he came out with one of them…and about 5 minutes later he came out with the second. (these are not works of art—small plastic Dixie cup with soft serve vanilla, choc sauce, and sliced banana) but we enjoyed and then continued our return.