Infected Computers and Infected Stomachs (again)

Just a short blog this time round, I'm in an internet cafe *gasp.* Our laptop has died :(

Stu arrived on Monday night as planned, hooray! I had sort of thought we'd spend his first day just hanging around Accra, then maybe go to Elmina (a short distance from Cape Coast) to have a look at another slave fort or maybe a national park. Then later in the week factor in a day trip to Bojo Beach. But I should have expected that it may not go to plan...

First thing was the laptop. Stu turned it on, took one look at it and started laughing. Incredulously. I had realised during last week that there was something drastically wrong with it, but I never realised that it had been infected with about 30 virus's that in turn had infected over 300 files :O you can't begin to understand how dreadful I felt when Stu worked out that alot of these virus's were ones that try to gain access to bank, email and other passwords :/ I frantically messaged my parents and asked them to ring through an international number so I could call my bank, which I did, and was extremely relieved to discover everything was ok. Needless to say I have since changed all my passwords...

On Wednesday Stu began to exhibit symptoms that were all too familiar to me. Yup, gastro. Poor thing! Africa has certainly extended her welcome to him, he'd only been here for 5 minutes! Its now Friday, and without going into too many details we think he may be starting to pick up. Phew! So, no Elmina and no Bojo, just a very quiet week :)

Stu has done everything he can to try and fix the laptop but we're afraid its going to need a complete re-format. Which is a pain in the a***. Short of lugging the thing around for the rest of the trip, we're thinking we might fly it home early. It explains why we're doing the internet cafe thing, we're both really annoyed about it but I guess you have to factor in things that can, and do go wrong when you travel. Have I ever said that nothing is easy here? Well, it really isn't.

Despite having gastro, Stu is doing an awesome job of taxi-haggling and brushing off street people who rush up to you and demand water or money, or your name, or push things in your face to buy. Its not easy to be polite but firm and not sound like a mean bastard at the same time. I was hoping to drag him around the place on tro's this week, to show him what they're like but unfortunately tro's do not lend themselves to comfort and when you have gastro, well, its just easier to stay put. We've ventured to the mall to buy a new memory card for his camera and use the internet, and we leave Ghana tomorrow night.

In some ways it will be bittersweet for me. This place has been my home for over a month *ooh, I have 18 minutes left...* and I've got used to pretty much everything (not that a month is a huge amount of time but for me its long enough). So much so that I wouldn't be heartbroken if I had to stay but at the same time, I'm really looking forward to the next adventure. We arrive in Casablanca late on Sunday, and we're hoping to hell that by then we'll both have stomachs of steel. We're both really looking forward to Morocco, hopefully we'll have good opportunity for bloggi-ness there but if not I'm sure you'll all be very patient in awaiting news!

If anyone has tried to text me and not heard anything I have to apologise, the reception here is questionable at times and for a long time my telstra sim card wouldn't work. We seem to have fixed it, so I'm alternating between that and my Ghanaian sim at the moment and Stu's isn't working at all! I'm hoping for no problems with our sim cards once we leave here!

Stu's Addendum
For the tech heads, the main virus was something called Win32\Virut. Look it up, it's pretty nasty. It infected most of the windows exe's to the point where they were irrepairable by AVG. And when AVG attempted to clean the exe's the computer stopped working completely...

And sorry for the lack of pictures. If it's possible to copy them to an internet cafe computer at some point I will, but don't hold out hope :)

Love Stu+Cat