Day Fourty-Four - Off to Malakal

Today I woke up and packed all of my very damp/still wet clothes to go to Malakal for 10 days. It rained the past 2 days, therefore my clothes only got washed yesterday meaning none of them had dried and I needed them in order to clothe myself while in Malakal. It most definitely added like 5kg to my bag.

Lawrence and I flew to Malakal at 12:00. I slept the whole flight, which was just over an hour. We landed in Malakal, which has a much nicer airport than in Juba and proceeded to wait 2 hours for a pick up. It turned out the contracting company did not even know we were coming so they were not prepared to send a vehicle to come and get us from the airport. After quite a few phone calls and patiently waiting, Lawrence and I took matters into our own hands and called for a taxi. We took a taxi to the compound, the driver tried to royally rip us off the taxi fare, we refused to pay him what he wanted. We got into the compound to find only security guards there. We discovered that due to security issues the contracting company compound has moved to UNMIS compound outside of the town. So we called another taxi to drive us 10 minutes to the UNMIS compound. This taxi driver was even worse than the first one with trying to over charge us. The stupid thing about this is that if Lawrence was alone (Lawrence is Kenyan) he wouldn’t have been charged that much, but because I was there obviously white people have money and don’t know what they are doing so the taxi drivers tried to get money from us. Such is the way it goes here.
We finally made it to the office. They were surprised to see us. They had no accommodations for us in the compound so we had to drive into Malakal town to find somewhere to stay. After 2.5 hours of driving around, we discovered there was only 1 room for 255SDG/night available. We informed the company of this fact and magically 2 rooms in their compound opened up for us. So we made our way back to the compound to get set up in our self-contained air-conditioned rooms. There is really nothing like having your own bathroom, which you do not have to walk outside to use.

Overall today was a gong show but in the end everything got sorted out and we were not homeless in Malakal.