When we woke up the next morning at about 5 AM (the time when it is officially too loud to sleep anymore), Chris and I were both instantly in love with Malawi. Chris described it as not having the same kind of desperation as Tanzania sometimes does, which I think is a really good description. People were equally, if not more, fascinated with us, and just smiling at someone often caused them to burst out in bashful giggles.
We walked past a nursery school and heard every single child inside scream “How are youuu?” with sounds that could only come from a tiny person. There are beautiful, forested mountains that drop straight into Lake Malawi, easily mistaken for an ocean. You can see the silouette of Mozambique across the lake, and if you hike up into the mountains there are waterfalls, caves, cold springs and forests with baboons and wildflowers blossoming everywhere. It really did look different from any other place I have ever seen, and it is so strikingly beautiful I would just be content to ride around in buses, looking out the windows.Definitely one of my favorite things about Malawi, though, was talking to people. English is one of the official languages of Malawi (it is in Tanzania too, but few people speak it very well) so we could talk to almost anyone. Peoples’ names are hilarious- we met people named simple, Jealous, Jester, Tiger, King David, Ricky Martin, 2pac, and we met three people named Gift. Everyone is really friendly and interested in chatting with you for no less than 2 hours at a time....
One thing that we were introduced to in Malawi was the phenomenon of “The Backpackers” (translated= cheap places to stay that cater to a certain crowd—not quite hostels, but similar). Most “backpackers” have things like guitars and board games to borrow, both of which you could play from your barstool. They have composting toilets, big gardens, and some sort of livestock that they would slaughter for you if you wanted to eat it so that you could “live off the land”. We stayed at several of these places, each one being very unique. For example, our second night in Malawi we stayed at a place called “The Mushroom Farm”, where we slept in a tiny tent flush against the edge of an enormous cliff. It was about 11 km straight up a mountain, so we hiked up with our packs and three small boys who were wearing no shoes. It took us a couple hours to arrive, and when we did we were both sweaty and unable to believe the breathtaking views from our campsite. We stayed at another place called the Butterfly Lodge, where we had our own personal chalet and there were rabbits along the path to the bathroom. When we arrived in the town where this lodge was, we were picked up in a boat, carted across the bay, and dropped off at our doorstep by our own personal boat escort... But none of these places cost more than $5-10 a night, even for the most expensive rooms... we spent the equivalent of about $5-7 to stay there.
For the most part, the people that arrive at these backapackers’ places seem to be absolutely ridiculous. Take, for example, the regular, Sunday night crowd that we encountered at the Mayoka Village Bar, one of the “most legendary wicked backpackers’” along Lake Malawi, as described by a young, flamboyantly counter-culture British guy that we met at “The Mushroom Farm”. We first met a man who we would later refer to as the Man-who-wouldn’t-stop-talking. I don’t know his name, because there was never really a moment where he wasn’t speaking when we could have asked, but he seemed really angry the majority of the time and his eyes bulged out of his face when he got really heated. Chris and I tried not to make too much eye contact with him, hoping that the conversation would end. While it definitely didn’t end, it was interrupted by Sage, a clearly bipolar man who we later learned came to Malawi to escape the South African Police after being convicted of a hit-and-run. Sage was giving us advice too crude to repeat while Chris, myself, a boy named Thaeus from New Zealand (with flowing blonde hair, gray, skin-tight jeans, and the I’m-so-shocked-that-I’m-hearing-these-words-come-out-of-someone’s-mouth face), and a 22 year-old guy from New York (who seemed to have acquired some sort of strange Australian-English hybrid accent from travelling) sat and listened. One of the local guys, King David, came over to listen, and all the while, there was a narcoleptic old man in the corner attempting to sell candy bars. We were later told that the sleeping man was actually the first black man to catch a fish in Lake Malawi, the first black man to work in a white bar in Malawi, and the first black man to own a boat in Malawi. While I’m not saying that these were lies, I am saying that I am highly skeptical of this series of claims.
I know I have spent many-a-blog-post dsecribing East African transportation to you, but I definitely think that public transportation reached new levels of terror for me in Malawi. I cannot get over how people drive like absolute maniacs in this region of the world... We found ourselves on quite a number of interesting vehicles over the course of the week. We started off in a big charter bus called the Sumry High-Class that had unbelievably psychadelic apolstery—with neon-colored bush animals in a mosaic-like pattern. After realizing that we were too late to catch a bus one day, we hitchhiked on the back of a flatbed truck that had 6-8 pigs, a gazillion tomatoes, and at least 20-30 people on the back.
Two pigs in particular coveted the sack of beans that Chris was sitting on and muscled him off the bag in order to steal his seat. On our trip back home we rode in a dalla dalla that was literally taped together—as in the steering wheel was partially attached with packing tape, dashboard was attached with tape, and I wish there had been tape for the door handle so that maybe it would work. You could see through the floor to the ground below you, and there was no glass on the windows. I was impressed, however, that the spedometer worked, but that was the most terrifying part. I looked over at one point and saw that we were going about 120 km/hour with at least 30 people packed in. After one of the tires exploded into tiny slivers of rubber and we arrived to town with the spare, I swear I started believing in some sort of higher power. We transferred onto a new bus, where Chris and I both shared seats with many, many boxes of chickens (102 baby chickens in each box, total of 12 boxes) and drove off into the sunset. We hopped a bus the next day, only to stop for an extended period of time where we were told that the radiator had burst (?) and it might be 3 hours before we left again... so we flagged down a giant truck and hopped into the cabin, where we were stuffed into two very cushioned, though dark and confined corners where we wouldn’t be spotted as passengers at the police stops. Well, I could go on and on about the adventures that we had in Malawi. Needless to say, the trip was unbelievable. I will post some pictures and creat a link to them which you can find below with the other links to photo albums. Enjoy! Chris and I will be in Iringa, Tanzania again working for about a week and then we’re off to Nairobi, Kenya for another little trip. Hopefully we’ll be going to the northern extension of the Serengetti (where the wildebeast migration is), a giraffe sanctuary, and an elephant orphanage... Okay, more later. Love.
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