525,600 minutes. How do you measure a year in a life?
Some people said we were crazy. Some people said we were awesome. Some people said we’d be back within 3 months, some people said we’d never return. “It’s my dream to do that” some people said, while others shook their head unable to understand. We just didn’t know what to think, and when we stepped into Mexico last year we were about as prepared as we could have been for a journey that’s impossible to prepare for..
525,600 minutes. How do we describe a year on the road? There’s the bad: countless nights in nondescript hotel rooms, countless hours in transit on an overcrowded, smelly, …

Lake Malawi is known for its amazing fish population- several thousand types of cichlid and frankly there is no better way to see a lake than from the bottom.  So that’s how we found ourselves our first night in Nkata Bay- at the bottom of Lake Malawi- looking up at the full moon.
Night diving in Lake Malawi was an incredible experience, and for our first night dive it was the perfect place.  As the dive master said over and over again, there is nothing that can hurt you in the lake: no sharks, no rays, no crocodiles (at least not near Nkata Bay!).
As we flipped out of the boat and reassembled our dive group at the bottom I couldn’t help …

The trip to Malawi was a long one but worth it. We’d have to cross through Mozambique and needed a visa before doing so, which cost $30 at the border or $110 at the embassy in Harare so you can guess which option we chose. Rushing to the front of the bus at the border though quickly caught the eye of just about everyone else aboard with them all wondering why the mzungu (swahili for foreigner) was cutting the line. Having been the first people in the office and the bus still waiting for us a good 10-15 minutes, everyone was soon thankful we’d cut in front.
Once inside Malawi we were greeted by some of the warmest …

From Blantyre it was off to the shores of Lake Malawi, something we’d been looking forward to for quite sometime. Aside from diving and snorkeling and looking at the fish, I also wanted to eat some as well.
One of the reasons Lake Malawi is so unique is that just about all 1200 varieties of fish are decedents of one fish specie, the first cyclid from here on known as the “mama cyclid.” In a way that made for a very limiting menu but in another way there was endless variety, not to mention that everything here is completely unique and not found in any other part of the globe.
The butterfish I had was so good that we later purchased two …