Lilongwe to Harare, Zimbabwe – short flight 1:15 hrs. While waiting in the Departure lounge I chatted to a guy sitting next to me, first time travelling out of India on a business trip and he said when he arrived in Lilongwe he was at the luggage belt and saw his suitcase coming around. Instead of waiting for it to come to him he put his backpack down and went to get it. During those couple of minutes someone opened his backpack and stole his travel wallet which had $2,800 and his yellow fever card. He went to the Police but they refused to register a complaint because he could not provide a receipt showing the source of the USD. The same guy was ahead of me and when we got to immigration where there is a security guard who checks your passport and he asked him for $’s to let him through, he said he had none, they did not try that with me. At the Gate we met another guy who had $300 stolen from his backpack while in transit from the Airport to his Hotel, it was in the back of the hotel shuttle. Zimbabwe Visa on Arrival for which you pay US$30 cash or credit card quite painless. SIM cards and ATM’s are availabe at the Harare Airport I bought an Econet SIM with 10GB for US$13. The Taxi App to use here is Rida cheap and plentiful or inDrive which has fewer cars.
Harare – population 1.5 million, broad 4 lane streets mostly in good condition, cleaner and less crowded. The currency is the US$ though in April a new currency was introduced called the ZiG which was 9.5:1 then and now it is 14.5:1 US$. The previous currency got out of hand when they ran out of space to add zeroes after they got to Trillion dollar bills hahaha. The ATM’s dispense US$, I learnt this the hard way when I withdrew what I thought was $400 ZiG and it turned out to be US$400 with a US$15 ATM fee, the highest fee so far. I wanted a ZiG note as a souvenir and it took a lot of searching to find one, they are rare and only 10’s and 20’s have been printed so far. They have a Museum an Art Gallery, some nice Churches, an impressive Heroes Monument and a surprising shopping centre called Sam Levy’s Village where you mainly see the white population.
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