"Africa's Golden Pond"... That's what the Guardian calls lake Malawi in their latest travel feature.

The article highlights just how special the geography of Malawi really is. The author somehow managed to find accomodation for $100-$200 USD per night, but believe me, you can find paradise on the shores of lake malawi for about $15 USD per night.

Visitors who want to come see what we mean are all "most welcome here".

I have noticed that the Gmail folks have made improvements to their web interface for people connecting over low bandwidth or unreliable internet connections. They now display a message that says something like: "your connection is too slow, click HERE to view your mail using standard HTML view." This is great, but sometimes still, its not enough.

Here are two tricks we use to access Gmail from Malawi:

• Get Mozilla Thunderbrid and use Gmail's POP capabilities to access your mail.

Just before moving to Malawi Marissa and I changed our email adresses from YahooMail to Google's Gmail accounts. I was pulled away from yahoo buy some great new features that Gmail offered and I was worried that Yahoo's beta interface for webmail would not work well on older computers in Malawi.

Since arriving in Malawi however, I have found that my Gmail account is not suited for connecting over the overworked internet connections currently in place here in Malawi. In fact I am almost never able to access my email via Gmail's web interface (so we use POP access instead) during the daytime peak hours for internet usage. At night, when few other users are online, Gmail works fine.

We bought a car today! And so we say good buy to the mini-busses for a while. Buying a car in Malawi was an entertaining experiment and a wonderful insight into the economy here. In all the process took about one week from when agreed to buy the car. Everything here is done in cash, so it made things the transaction a little tricky. We were able to wire money from the US to our recently opened Malawian bank account. It took about 4 days for the transaction to take. We then wrote a check to ourselves for an amount equal to about a foot and a half tall stack of bills in Malawian Kwacha. The largest bill in Malawi is 500 Kwacha (this is about $4.50). If you can imagine buying a car with a stack of five-dollar bills you will quickly be able to visualize the chunk of change we were carrying with us. So we loaded our chunk into a backpack and a friend of ours drove us to the office of the owner of the car. The office is in a rougher end of Lilongwe, a place where you really wouldnt even want to walk around with as little as $10 in your pocket (hey, we really needed wheels). There we traded the stack for the car you see here... a pretty good deal if you ask me.