This is the journal of my three-week trip to Malawi, Africa, to visit my daughter. There was an additional half-week of travel time (more, actually….three days out, two days back) so that the effective time I actually had with Caitlin was exactly three weeks…arriving on a Thursday afternoon, and leaving on a Thursday afternoon.
Caitlin had announced that she was joining the Peace Corps on the eve of her graduation from Carnegie Melon University. Needless to say, her mother and I had been stunned. (Her mother probably more stunned than I, since I secretly admired her a bit for wanting to do this.) It was unclear at the time whether she would follow through and actually make the commitment, and so we parents launched a one-year campaign to dissuade her. Caitlin had apparently gotten this wild idea into her head from one of her teaching assistants from her college work, and we were none too pleased about this fact. But in truth, most of us graduate from college, go to work at a job somewhere that pays the bills but that isn’t completely rewarding, and the only travel experience we end up having is shoehorned into our work vacation schedules. So sowing you wild oats is something that should be done before knuckling down to the every day task of earning a living. But Mary and I both wonder if we have created a monster by trying to take Caitlin on an many varied vacations as we could while she was growing up, and by sending her to Europe for her graduation present. I guess her trip to China as a college freshman should have been a warning shot to us, but we figured that that trip was all the idea of her friend Emily. Maybe it was? Maybe that was just one more factor to add to her wanderlust. But enough of that. She eventually did join the Peace Corp, and was sent to Malawi, Africa, instead of South America, where she had originally wanted to go. The reasons had to do with language skills….lot of Americans have very good Spanish speaking skills, but it is a level playing field for African languages; no one knows them. So she would be just as able to learn Chichewa as the next wet-behind-the-ears unemployed college graduate. And, as it turns out, more able than most.
So Caitlin had been gone for 17 months of her 26-month commitment. I had promised her I would do my best to come visit her even if I came alone; Mary was not warm to the idea of going someplace she had no desire to visit, and had other concerns that the two strong-willed women would almost certainly eventually end up butting heads. Although one of Mary’s high school friends had had a daughter that had done the same thing just a few years earlier, and the family had gone to visit. So the word was that, even though it had been frightening for Kay’s family, Kay’s response was “Well, you HAVE to go!”. So, even though I had personally been dealing with continuing spinal and central nervous system problems resulting from a herniated cervical disc and the resulting nerve and spinal cord impingement that made sitting in a fixed position for any length of time practically unbearable, I made the commitment to make the trip, even though it meant three long airplane rides in each direction, two of which were 8 and 12 hours in duration. And then there was the money. The plane fare was expensive, but the immunizations required for safe travel were equally expensive. So Mary agreed that I should go alone. I admit that I was a little frightened of this idea, since I had never traveled anywhere without my soul-mate at my side. So, even though I ended up have to have surgery for a fractured wrist just weeks before the pre-paid departure flight, I followed through on the commitment.
The flight out.
Mary took me to Dulles airport plenty early, to avoid the DC rush hour traffic. She dropped me off at 4 pm. As it turned out, she had a nightmare driving home, and I am sorry for that. But I managed to check in for my flight easily, and sat around waiting for the 9 pm departure. At first, when I checked in, the ticket agent wasn’t going to take my one checked bag (containing knives and a sleeping bag pad, along with a change of clothes and other things that I didn’t considered really necessary for the journey) because I was so early. But he relented, and took the bag.
I waited and waited, and ate the lunch that Mary had packed for me. What a dear; she had packed a crossword puzzle with the lunch. I felt like a lucky guy to have married such a thoughtful person. As I sat at Dulles before going down through security, I watched the cloud formations form over and over above the building. I concluded that the snow on the ground and the building itself, along with the extensive amount of airport tarmac, was responsible for the cloud formations, being a miniature weather generator itself. When I got to the gate around 6 pm, I watched the birds flying from air duct to air duct within the terminal. Apparently the birds live there.
The flight to Heathrow was smooth, on time, and uneventful. The crew and most passengers seemed to be British. At Heathrow continuing passengers were diverted to the international transfer area, and I waited near the South African Airlines desk (which was scheduled to open at 2 pm…I had arrived early in the morning..). Finally at check-in, I was able to verify that my checked bag was making the transfer to SA. After a very long wait (all day), it was finally time to go to the gate. I made the mistake of zippering my two backpacking backpacks together to make carrying the pair on my back easier. (The backpack was designed this way, with the intent that the large part would stow in an overhead, and the small bag would fit under the seat. This had worked fine on the UA flight from Dulles.) But the Nazi at the SA gate forced me to check the large portion of the backpack, even though I separated the two halves, stowed the carrying straps and converted the large backpack into a carry-on with a handle. I argued that my carry-ons were smaller than most of the other people in the gate waiting area. The Nazi’s response was something to the effect that economy-class customers sucked hind tit, and that if I’d paid more for a better seat, I could carry on more crap. I begrudgingly check the bag, although I was concerned that it might get damaged with handing, since it was simply waterproofed cloth, and a rip would be catastrophic. As it turned out, it was a relief not to have to cart the thing around, and I could devote more attention to taking care of my digital camera and telephoto lenses that had been tediously packed into the small backpack with plenty of padding for shock absorption. I had whittled down my photographic equipment to what I considered the minimum….the camera, the primary 4:1 standard zoom lens, and additional 4:1 telephoto zoom picking up where the primary lens left off, and a 2:1 converter. Additionally, I had packed three 4 GB storage cards and four fully charged batteries, along with the universal charger. I figured I wouldn’t need to recharge at all, but I was prepared, anyway.
The SA flight from Heathrow to Johannesburg was long, long, long. 12 hours long. I managed to actually sleep some, even though I got a headache, and my feet burned from my bulging discs pressing on my cervical spinal cord. We arrived on time, having had two meals in the process, and the layover a Joburg was only two hours. The next leg of the flight, also SA, was about 3 hours, and the plane was only ½ full. There seemed to be a lot of English or S African high school kids on the plane; you could spot them a mile away. They all dressed in their little knickers and vests. We arrived in Lilongwe right on time. I was encouraged to see the Kenya Airways airplane sitting on the tarmac also, since this was the flight that I would be leaving on in three weeks.
Malawi: day 1
I walked off the plane, down the ladder, and boarded a tram to the terminal…a distance of maybe 100 yards. People were on the second floor terrace, and I wondered after I walked under the overhang if Caitlin had been up there. I regretted that I hadn’t had my glasses on. I popped out to the side, looked up, and waved, just in case. I asked her later, and she told me that yes, she had been up there, and that she had seen me walk off the bus. Her initial reaction was that I was much grayer that she remembered…that her dad was getting OLD. I had warned her about this when she left home, but seeing is believing.
After clearing immigration, I walked though the final gate with my bags, and to my relief, there was Caitlin. She looked good….not undernourished, and clean and healthy. She introduced me to her “driver”. She had not had her driver’s license when she had gone to “Best Car Hire” to pick up our flat-rate 1996 Toyota Corolla rental car, and so a driver had accompanied her to the airport, and would accompany us back so that I could fill out the paperwork to finalize the rental agreement. Caitlin had already paid about ½ the flat rate as a deposit. The car was pretty unimpressive, and had “Best Car Hire” and a phone number written in 3 inch letters on each front door. It got us to their office, we did the paper work, agreed to pay for incidental damages not covered by the included insurance (which I worried about later) and set off. First order of business: the black market moneychangers. On the drive, we passed by Madonna’s “School for Girls”, barely under construction.
The current in Malawi is the Malawi Kwatcha (MKI). I imagine at one time that one Kwatcha was maybe on a par with on US dollar, but that was a while ago. The official “bank” exchange rate is 148 MK for one US dollar. But at the black market money exchange (100 yards from the Bureau of Exchange, at the entrance to ShopRite) the going rate is 176 MK per US dollar for “big head” bill (the modern US currency with hologram and 150 MK for “small head” bill (older currency). I knew nothing of the discrimination between newer and older bills, but I had mostly new bills (I had one older $50 bill, which I ended up keeping to bring home). And $50 bills were worth 176/dollar, which $20 bills (big headed ones) were worth 170/dollar. In any case, it was a better deal that the bank or the Bureau of Exchange. So we sat in the back of a Malawian stranger’s car as we exchanged money. The largest denomination of bill I saw in use was 500 MK, worth about $3. So we changed about $350 to a huge wad of 500MK bills. It was a little daunting doing this the first time, but we ended up doing this twice more. We took the rest of our US dollars to Caitlin’s Peace Corp office and locked them in the safe. All together, I had traveled with $3000 in my money belt, in $50, $20, and $10 bills. We planned to use this first $350 to fund our first 10 days of touring Malawi, and to pay the balance of the car hire flat rate. Caitlin and I had both gone through budgeting calculations, and this was enough money for this part of the trip. We owed the balance for the safari, which we would pay in MK when we got back to Lilongwe after the 10-day Malawi tour. Caitlin had suggested renting the car, so that we could see more stuff. I had initially resisted this idea, but she was correct. It would have been difficult to do what we did without a car, even though driving was a bit of a challenge. The challenge was because the roads are more terrible that can be imagined, driving is on the left side of the road, and the car, at 14 years of age, had 420,000 KM on the odometer, and had maybe 60 horsepower. We checked into the Mufasa Backpacker Lodge near the PC office, where we shared a 6-person dorm room with a variety of people…some PC volunteers, some Dutch backpackers. I was at the upper end of the age spectrum. We paid for the evening meal, which was some sort of chicken and potato stew, I think. I didn’t write this down, surprisingly.
The Mufasa is the lodge of choice for PC volunteers. Recent funding cutbacks have “forced” the PC Malawi director to eliminate the “safehouse” that used to exist in Lilongwe. There was also a safehouse in Blantyre that was eliminated. The PC subsidizes rents at several lodges, but does not pay full per diem except in very rare circumstances. Another way to screw over the volunteers. I mentioned this fact to the director, Vic, when I met him, saying, “Oh, you’re the guy to took away the safe houses.” But we spent the night at Mufasa, and Caitlin socialized with fellow volunteers. I have photos from some of this.
It was a noisy night. Two Malawians on the street below talked most of the night, and without air conditioning, the windows stay open (with no screens). All the beds have mosquito nets.
Impressions: there is a smell that pervades the air. I liken it to marijuana. Caitlin says I’m smelling burning trash. As it turns out, the burning trash aggravates my eyes, and I have trouble with itching, red eyes for days.
Day 2. Friday Feb 19.
Up at 6:45, ready to roll. It had rained during the night. We had breakfast (cereal and toast) and checked out. The cost per bed, with dinner and breakfast, was on the order of maybe $8? We decided we needed more cash after making some more calculations, so Caitlin called her moneychanger contact and made arrangements to meet him. We ran errands, went to PC office, dropped off luggage and cash, check email, went to the grocery store to buy snacks for our driving (chips, cookies, etc). We went to the Kiboko Tours office to firm up our reservation for Safari, leaving in a week. Caitlin then took me to “Amina’s Takeaway”, also known as “the steak place” for lunch. We picked steaks out at the grill outside, in front of the dining room. I think I got a photo of this. Along with the steaks, we had “nsima”, which is a gelatinous glop of ground maize that is the staple of everyday Malawians. The nsima is formed by hand into a ball, a dent is put into one side, and it is used to scoop up the mixed vegetables (it’s best not to wonder what the vegetables really consist of) which are eaten with the steak. The steak was flavorful but very tough. No grain-fed animals here. Eveything is range-fed, with the range being any area that is not paved. So in general, where the meat is chicken, beef, or goat, it is very tough. Takes some getting used to.
Caitlin took me to the “food” side of the Lilongwe open-air market. I take some photos, including photos of the bridge across the river to the “clothing and other stuff” side of the market. We end up later in the week eating at a “restaurant” in this market. Never having seen anything like this before, it was a bit overwhelming. Everywhere we went we were surrounded by vendors hawking their wares. Caitlin’s verbal skills are amazing, and her command of the language and all its fine nuances instantly disarms everyone around her. I will learn that this happens everywhere she goes. She is a bit of a curiosity, and people are curious to talk and interact with her. She has been here plenty of times, and so I get the impression that she has been through this a lot. People are also curious about me, and ask her in Chichewa about me. Some also talk to me in English. People are curious and continuously ask “Where do you come from” and “How is America?”. So you don’t answer by saying, “Well, we’re in our worse recession in 80 years and I’ve lost a fortune in the stock market”. You simply say “America is fine”. I conclude later that the small countries in Africa are unconcerned with the global economy or the first world, since they have their own more immediate problems to worry about…primarily famine, the rain season being late in coming, and AIDS. Although I don’t see any evidence of AIDS myself, other than billboards. The newspaper headlines have to do with the Malawi Parliament giving themselves a big raise (I don’t remember the numbers exactly…maybe $120 a day, when an average Malawian makes maybe $1 a day).
Caitlin has schooled me in the standard greeting ritual:
“Mulibwanji”
“Delibwino. Kaya inu?
“Delibwino”
Which means: How are you? I am fine. How about you? I am fine also.
And sometimes “Zicomo”, which means “thank you”.
We topped up the petrol, and began the drive to Dedza Pottery in Dedza. This is about 2/3 of the way to Caitlin’s site at Sharpevalle in Ncheu district. We got a double standard room at Dedza Pottery (the superior room maybe included a tea kettle or something?) and had dinner there. The accommodations were rustic but pretty nice, with the cost being something like $40. Dinner and breakfast for two of us was around $25 or so. I have some photos. Before dinner we walked back along the dirt approach road (3 KM off the main paved road to Dedza) in search of carved nativity sets (one assignment from Mary). We found a carver, bought some napkins rings from him, and he directed us to his neighbor carver, who had one carved Nativity set. At Dedza pottery, they fire a variety of pottery items, including ceramic Nativity sets. They also make sinks and tiles, which we saw all over Malawi. We bought a cup and a vase when we checked out in the morning.
Dinner was good, but it included a fresh salad. So I immediately departed from the recommendation to stay away from locally grown produce. I wasn’t suffering from diarrhea YET. Breakfast was also good..continental but a bit pricey at $5.
Day 3 Saturday February 20.
After breakfast, we packed, paid the bill, and left Dedza. It had rained during the night. The parking area where we had left the car was marked with two arrows. One indicated parking for dry times, which one indicated parking for wet times. Both arrows pointed at exactly the same place. No one knows what the intention really was, but there is mud everywhere.
We drove across the mountains to Ncheu district to meet Danielle and Jenn at Alycias’s house near Caitlin’s site. Caitlin drove because she thought she’d be better prepared for the potholes in the roads, having traveled this route in minibuses and hitch-rides numerous times. The road is generally paved, but there is no shoulder, and erosion makes for sharp drop-offs at the edge of the pavement. And then there are the potholes. They appear out of nowhere, and sometimes you can’t dodge them, so you have to slow down to practically nothing. This makes for some slow-going sometimes. The speed limit is usually 80 Km/Hr, but slows to 50 Km/Hr at population centers. These population centers are villages that pop up every 10 Km or so. Between them, there are people walking and biking on the roads everywhere. You have to beep the horn constantly to warn the people that you are approaching, and they oblige by stepping or biking off onto the dirt shoulder, even at their own risk. At one such village, Caitlin missed the slow-down warnings, and so she was caught in a radar speed trap by the traffic police. This ended up costing 10.000 MK on the spot…about $60. A waste of some of our well-budgetted money. But the trap had been cleverly set up to catch people coasting rapidly downhill.
We arrived at Alicia’s house, and I gave her the lens that I had begrudgingly squeezed into my carry-on bag. Both she and her mother had made a big to-do about the lens, which was nothing more than a 50-200 F 5.6 zoom. Even with a Nikon mount, the value was on the order of $170. I had a similar Canon lens with me also, for my own camera...so it seemed pretty ordinary, really. Alicia had invited us for lunch, which was chilli with chicken. It tasted good, but the chicken was undercooked, and I personally could chew none of it. There seemed to be an ulterior motive in play here; she wanted me to cart home a ton of her stuff, because she was approaching her Close of Service date in two months. The stuff she wanted me to cart home amounted to two suitcases full. I told her I had my own two bags to cart home, and that I couldn’t do it. This put a damper on our visit, for sure. But to be honest, the fact that she had carried home Caitlin’s Christmas presents in December, and we hadn’t heard word one about them until her mother wanted me to carry her “precious” lens to her on my flight out, put a real bad taste in my mouth. She and her mother seemed to be somewhat manipulative. At this time, Caitlin is planning to travel with Alicia to Zanzibar and Burkina Farso. (That eventually doesn’t pan out, and I suspect my refusal to be her mule to be part of the problem, although Caitlin thinks that are other issues related to Alicia’s interaction with Danielle, who is having a bit of a struggle adjusting to PC Malawi life.) We finally left Alycia’s, and drove to Caitlin’s site.
On the way, Caitlin wanted to stop by the market to buy some supplies for making food while we are there. We drove down the dirt road, which was filled with water-filled potholes. I can’t tell how deep the holes are, because of the water. The car bottomed-out, and we almost got stuck…some other bystanders thought it was quite entertaining, and laughed as we ploughed, fortunately, through the mud. We parked the car, and Caitlin asked a couple of kids to “watch” the car. We planned to give them 20 MK each (about 12 cents each). At the market, we bought eggs as one supply item, to give to her neighbor and headmaster, who had invited us to dinner that evening.
When walking back to the car, I found a stick to check the pothole water level before trying to drive through blindly again. As I approached the hole, the two kids watching the car started yelling and running, thinking I’m going to beat them with the stick. Tells you a lot about their home life, doesn’t it? When they saw me check the water level, they calmed down. Caitlin talked to them, and gave them money.
Finally at Caitlin’s site, we drove up the rutty dirty road (about 2 Km from the pavement) and parked the car in her neighbor’s yard, since she has no place to park in her yard. He eventually suggested that we move the car to the school yard, which is behind a brick wall and gate with a guard, and that turned out to be a fine place to leave the car for a few days. The guard even washed the car, and I had Caitlin pay him later, making it clear that the money came from me, and not Caitlin. The headmaster took us on a tour of the school, and we, later, after dark, we to his home, invited for dinner.
Wilfrid Kafaaiwoda (hope I spelled that right) is the headmaster. His home has solar power, and as we entered the home, he proudly had his boom box stereo playing a mix of American and African music. I personally could have done without the music, but he wanted to show off the fact that he had electricity, as well as to demonstrate his taste in music. There was a lone electric light bulb lit. The furnishings consisted of an overstuffed sectional sofa, maybe, and the dinner table was pretty large, with maybe 6 or 8 chairs. There was a TV in the corner of the room.. There was also an out-of-service TV antenna hanging from the ceiling. We had dinner, which consisted of hard-boiled eggs (the ones Caitlin had brought) in sauce, and nsima with vegetables. The dinner was preceeded with a hand-washing ritual: the wife brought a pan and water pitcher to each seat at the table and poured water over my hands as I washed them over the bowl. There was no place to dry your hands, so I shook them in air. The ritual was repeated after dinner, as the hands were used to handle the nsima, vegetables, and eggs. As for the food, I could handle one serving, and I courteously took a small, second serving, following Caitlin’s lead. She was able to finish hers, but I was not. As we ate, it was only the adult male and the two of us; the wife and children ate outback, outside, where the meal had been cooked. We had spoken only briefly to the wife as we had entered the house. We spent the evening talking about American culture, and Wilfrid mostly wanted to talk about musc and topics totally unrelated to education. We talked about politics, religion, and Malawian marriage customs: that the man is generally about 10 years older than his wife. The women are generally pretty young when they marry. The conversation after dinner was a bit awkward. Finally, after what seemed an eternity, we felt like it was safe to leave without the host being insulted. In accordance with the headmaster’s suggestion, I moved the car from his front yard to the gated schoolyard across the road.
Sunday February 21 Day 4.
I didn’t sleep well. At 1:30 a.m., exactly, there was some commotion outside Caitlin’s house. A truck drove up the road in front of Caitlin’s house, and there were flashlights shining onto and into the windows of our house. It was the flashlight more than anything that awoke me. I popped out of bed, grabbed my wind-up flashlight (leaving it ready, but “off”) and stiletto from under my pillow, and sneaked over to the window. I could hear voices across the road. Peering through a crack in the drape, so as not to be seen, I looked outside, my heart pounding wildly. There was the sound of low men’s voices, and then a truck drove off. I finally concluded that the guard at the school, across the road, was checking the teacher’s houses. I should mention that the school had been broken into about a week earlier, and its lone computer, printer, and uninterruptible power supply had been stolen. In that robbery, the armed thieves had high-tailed it up the hill behind Caitlin’s house, and the police, with a one hour delay, had started after them. The police had eventually recovered the electronics, all but the power supply, as the thieves dropped excess weight to make a clean escape. So the commotion of the guards’ checking the school and the teacher houses was related to this incident. As it turned out, there were reports of another break-in about 10 kilometers away, also. So all this commotion was a good thing, really. (The checking of the houses was repeated the next night, but without as much brandishing of flashlights.)
The rooster crowed before 5 a.m. I stayed in bed until 6:30, and Caitlin had slept soundly throughout the entire night. In the morning, the rains came with a vengeance. The noise of the water hitting the corrugated roof was deafening. I was beginning to feel a little weak and sick, and I had to make use of the poop hole in the outhouse out back.
After breakfast we went to the “Living Waters” church, but only after the rains ceased. The church itself was built of mud bricks, with a dirt floor, with wooden trusses supporting a corrugated tin roof. A collection was taken up for a future addition of concrete on the floor, and we contributed 1000 MK ($6).
We were seated on the second row, a place of honor, and the father one of Caitlin’s student’s, a tailor, loaned us his bible, which was in English. It was a “Gideon’s”, not surprisingly, I suppose. The service was then translated into English, apparently for my benefit. There was lots of singing and swaying, with the women taking the front of the church, and dancing. The leader of the singing and swaying women would generally begin her rhythmic dancing before beginning the singing and clapping. It was like something from a movie or record; I wished that I had a tape recorder going. In the service, we followed along the scripture readings. Finally it came time for the sermon. The preacher announced that he was going to, for the first time, deliver the sermon in English, but that, for the benefit of the lay parishioners, his assistant would translate into Chichewa. The whole effect was somewhat surreal. It was apparent that he was reading from a Chichewa bible, and translating in his head to English. Then, after he delivered a passage, his assistant would, in a rather animated fashion, deliver the passage in Chichewa. There were times that the assistant would get stumped. And there were other times when the assistant would excitedly get ahead of the preacher, and the preacher would give him a glance of displeasure. It was almost comical. During the sermon, as had been the case during other parts of the service, the congregation would exhort out calls of “Up, Up Jesus”, as they pointed their hands upward and slightly to one side. It was all very moving.
After what seemed like an eternity, the 5 minute sermon… repeated, stretched, and emphasized for over 30 minutes… was over. As more than 1 ½ hour had passed since we had come into the church, we finally left, since my stomach was feeling queezy. I ended up having to ask a villager if I could use their outhouse, which I did, using our emergency toilet paper that was always with us.
Caitlin made a fruit salad for lunch, and it hit the spot for me. Alicia stopped by to chat. Caitlin’s closest Malawian friend, Eliza, stopped by and chatted with Caitlin while I napped. We were invited to stop by Eliza’s house for tea and cake, which she was baking in my honor.
We went to Eliza’s family compound, consisting of a couple of mud brick and grass- roofed huts. Her grandmother had raised her after her mother had died during her birth, and her father had died in 2004. At 21, Eliza ran a day care center for children, and therefore had some income aside from the family plot of corn and vegetables. The cake she served had been cooked somehow in a wood-fired outdoor oven, and was home-made. It was pretty good. The tea that was brewed was from some tea that Caitlin had previously given her. I was seated in the guest’s wicker seat in the Grandmother’s house, which was pretty dark inside. It turns out that the house had been standing for some 30 years. This longevity was due primarily to the foundation and floor, which was made of raised concrete, and so wasn’t affected by the rains. While we had tea and cake, we discussed culture in Malawi vs. culture in the U.S. The grandmother sat on a mat on the concrete floor and read the bible pretty much the entire time we were visiting.
At nighttime, Caitlin and I worked the crossword puzzle book, and then went to sleep after Caitlin’s phone announced, by its going-to-sleep music byte, that it was 9:30.
Monday February 22 Day 5
After one of my best night’s sleep yet, I awoke. We had a breakfast of oatmeal with strawberry jam and coffee (it was notable that Caitlin now drinks coffee in addition to the tea that she has long been drinking).
We drove to the Mua Cultural Center, less than an hour away, and toured the three “houses” that comprise the cultural center. The houses depict the various cultures of Malawi, including the Chewa, the Ngoni, and the Yao. The Chewa are the indigenous tribe, with the Ngoni being offspring of the Nguni tribe, which had been driven out of S. Africa by Shaka Zulu. This tribe made up most of the peoples in the Ncheu district in which Caitlin was located. The Ngoni language was the “click” talking that I had heard so much about. But their language is long forgotten, and “Chi Chewa” is the widely spoken language of the area. The Yau tribe is situated mainly near the Lake to the east. Christianity is widely practiced in most of Malawi and Zambia, with some Islam being practiced, primarily by the Yao. There are many more mosques near the lake than in Lilongwe, say. There are also quite a few mosques in Blantyre, the second main city of Malawi.
At the Mua center, our guide was “Robert”, who claimed to remember Caitlin from a visit one year before. He spent about 2 hours guiding us through the three houses on the 40-minute tour. Photos were only allowed in the first house, which concentrated mainly on the bringing of Christianity to the region by the white missionaries. The missionaries were called “white” because of their white robes, not their white skin. The other two houses concentrated on adolescent rites of passage into adulthood, with a strong emphasis on fertility and sex. Robert rather relished this part of his lecture, and was rather lecherous, actually. We later asked Caitlin’s PCV friend Kristin and her sister Shannon, both of whom were rather buxom young women, if Robert had emphasized sex on their tour of the same facility, and it was reported that he had. So he apparently had a second agenda, but to no avail. But the talk was fascinating, and I wished that I had been able to audio record it. Of interested is that the Ngoni culture is based on BEER. Caitlin had said that she had previously been told this, and Robert confirmed this. Their culture had evolved to revolve around the brewing, and subsequent drinking, of beer. The Guli Wankuli dancers, which I would see later, were Ngoni-based also.
The Guli dancers came to Caitlin’s village later that afternoon. Caitlin had pre-paid for them to come and perform, and the entire village turned out to witness the spectacle. We set up a row of chairs for us in the field next to the school across from her house, and waited as the Gulis began to arrive. The drum carriers arrived first, and dropped off the drums. Then the dancers began to arrive, disappearing into the woods to change into their costumes. The costumes are supposedly animal-based, but are made of whatever materials the dancers can obtain, including what appeared to be paper mache and shredded plastic bags. There were maybe 500 kids and adults that turned out, and the performance lasted from about 2 pm until dark (6 pm). The drums were roasted over an open fire to tighten the skins, and various waves of single or double dancers came out. It was hard sometimes to tell what the intended animal was, but at one point, it was apparent that the animal was a snake, and that the dancer was imitating Caitlin. This later brought Caitlin to tears, as she lamented that the snake is a symbol for a woman of questionable morals. The reason for this portrayal apparently goes back to Caitlin’s poor decision of having had her boyfriend Devin stay at her house. Such behaviour is not proper in the Malawian culture, and so, although Caitlin is upset, she had brought this upon herself, although she protests by saying that she isn’t going to change her behaviour totally just to satisfy the Malawian cultural standards. So, she apparently can’t stand on both sides of the cultural divide. Personally, I got the impression that in general the village people all like and respect Caitlin, but they don’t really know what to make of this strong-willed woman who is sometimes more at ease dealing with the men of the village than the women. This is consistent with Caitlin’s having complained of hearing the women talk about her when they don’t believe she can understand them, with the women essentially expressing their not really knowing what to make of her. This was also a great strength, from what I could see, and it appears to serve her well in a lot of her dealings with the public, because she is, indeed, a bit of a curiosity. The total cost that Caitlin had prepaid, incidentally, was 2500 MK, or $15. During the ceremony, we periodically arose to give tips to “the big man”, the apparent Guli “manager”. There are photos from this entire afternoon. (I heard later that Caitlin additionally had to pay a fine to the village elder or chief, because expressions of the Guli culture were somewhat discouraged and prohibited.)
After the Guli performance, I took some photos of Caitlin with Eliza, and we prepared to go to dinner at a fellow teacher’s (male) house two doors away. The dinner was (not surprisingly) nsima and eggs and diced vegetable vines of unknown origin. I had an upset stomach, and ate what I could, but could not finish the meal. The conversation centered on differences between Malawian and American culture, as well as a discussion on proof that the earth was round and not fat. This teacher struck me as more interested in education than the headmaster, who had been more interested in showing off his electricity and musical tastes than in discussing education.
During the night, I had a fitful sleep. I heard two distant gunshots, probably someone hunting monkeys, and at 2 am (exactly) at truck (police?) drove up and stopped at the guard house at the school. But there were no flashlights checking out the front of the house on this evening.
Tuesday February 23, Day 6.
I arose early, having gotten practically no sleep. Maybe because we had had coffee the night before? In any case, after breakfast, we went to the Catholic mission and had tea, and lunch, actually, with Sister Rose. Sister Rose, an older nun, maybe 40 or so, had befriended Caitlin, particularly when she was feeling pretty vulnerable after her second robbery attempt months earlier. The sisters had taken her in and had provided her with a place to live while the Peace Corp looked for better living conditions for her. She eventually ended up in the house she is in now, a teacher’s house that was directly across the road from the school. But on this day, we had tea and lunch with Sister Rose and two other, older, sisters. The conversation varied, and I asked about racial harmony between the various tribes. It sounded like there were some tribal/racial problems, but there was no elaboration. At one point, Sister Rose asked me what I liked best about Malawi. I had to think for a moment, before I told her I liked the way people treated each other with civility. (What I didn’t say was that the thing I liked most was that I had an airplane reservation that allowed me to return to the first world.) I took some photos of Rose and also the mission, and thanked her for her kindness toward Caitlin. Then we went back to the village, for it was Market Day.
Market Day apparently is every Tuesday. We talked to several marketers, I took lots of pictures. Some people got angry that I was taking photos but not buying. We bought some “chippies” and Fantas for snacks to eat on the way to the Zomba Plateau. Chippies are French fried potatoes, and they are very popular. We spent a lot of time talking to the medicine man, who explained his remedies at length to Caitlin as she interpreted to me. They were very interested to talk to Caitlin, and everywhere we went, people seemed delighted to talk with her. The “big man” from the Guli dance was also there, and we spoke briefly with him. After we left, we packed up the car and drove toward Zomba.
Caitlin wanted to go to the Zomba plateau…I didn’t know what the attraction was, but off we went. I think it was just a part of Malawi that she had not yet visited. On the way, the stopped at Chifundo Artisans, and bought some batik gifts for the family. Caitlin also bought a table runner for Rachael Hauser, who was getting married in June. I hope I remember to wrap it!
We drove on to Zomba, which turned out to be a mountainous area that seemed like a tourist draw of some magnitude, judging from the signs for lodgings and camping facilities. Caitlin, at some urging, had called ahead to the Forest Lodge, which she had heard was a nice place to stay. We got instructions for how to get there…more on that to come….and the price was conveyed to Caitlin as $75 for the two of us, including a three course dinner and breakfast. We expected to get there in plenty of time before darkness.
The drive to the Lodge was dauntingl. It was 5 kilometers off the paved road, with a “gravel” road going up the mountain. The “gravel” was really rocks about 6 inches in diameter, dumped at strategic locations, such as at switchbacks. The road was steep and very narrow, and was overgrown with grass and other ground cover. You really needed a 4-wheel drive for this, and I was sure the Toyota wouldn’t make it. But as I studied the road at the bottom before attempting a go, a man in a hut at the bottom came out and asked if I was lost. When I told him we were driving to the Forest Lodge, he confirmed that it was up that road, which he described as “a good road”. He said this numerous times, and maybe this was a lot of what he usually said to English-speaking passers-by. With some trepidation, and realizing that we didn’t otherwise have a place to stay with darkness approaching, we started up the road. I figured I’d be backing down it in a few minutes, but as it turned out, we made it all the way up. The grass and fauna scraped the car’s undercarriage mercilessly, and on occasion trees would scratch the side. I wondered how much the damage to the car was going to cost me. After what seemed like an eternity, and in reality was over an hour at the speed we were going, using low gear only, we got to the top of the mountain, and arrived at the Lodge. I took a lot of photos of the Lodge and its proprietor. Just after we arrived, a second Toyota, a taxi from town, arrived behind us, with three Japanese passengers. So apparently the road was not as awful and daunting to the local taxi drivers as it appeared to me to be.
The Japanese family was comprised of a retired gentleman who worked for JAICO, a Japanese equivalent to the Peace Corps, and his wife, and his daughter. He, like the PC, had a 2 year commitment, and had started at exactly the same month that Caitlin had started her service commitment. His daughter, Caitlin’s age (named Kamiko, the same as Paula’s pen pal when we were in high school), was visiting. Both the father and daughter spoke amazingly good English, and once again, I felt like a pretty stupid American in a foreign land with loads of multi-linguals. Dinner was a Chicken curry, and we had wine, which ended up costing extra. The chef was a 70 year-old Malawian with a 20 or so year-old female helper, who also ran the Reception.
Wednesday February 24 Day 7
I awoke to stomach pains. Guess I’ll never get used to the water. We had coffee, bundled up against the cool mountain air, on the veranda before breakfast, and chatted with the propriator Ronald. Breakfast was nice, with granola, fruit, juice, omelet, sausage, and toast. As we chatted with Ronald, it became apparent that he envisioned himself as an environmentalist whose goal was to save the forest surrounding his lodge, but he admitted that after three years he was about ready to give up fighting against the commercial loggers that wanted to rape the mountainside. Not really dedicated, I guess, except to milking a living for himself with his B&B. The furnishings, I admit, were cozy and typically African. Ronald himself was from S. Africa, and had only been there 5 years. This would turn out to be a theme through my entire month’s visit. Every lodge/campground that we stayed at was owned by a S. African who had purchased the property within the past five years.
We made a change in travel plans for a couple of reasons. One was that a bridge on the way Caitlin wanted to go to the Lake, to Cape McClear, was reported to be out. And we needed to pick up our cash at the PC office before the weekend, to be assured that someone would be around who could open the safe. So we decided to head back to Lilongwe, pick up the cash, pay for the safari, and go on to the Lake at Senga Bay (instead of at Monkey Bay or Cape McClear) for a couple of days.
At check-out, it turned out that the bill was double what was expected. I was furious. The propriator, who had left the premises by now to run some errands in town, spoke to me by phone, and swore that he had made it clear to Caitlin that the $75 was per person. He eventually agreed to lower the price to $70 per person. So, what had been a delightful time for $75 had become a rather undelightful time for $150. And that $75 would have been enough for live on for three days. Out budgeting had not included such an extravagant error. Considering that Caitlin is paid $6 a day, that was a boat load of money. And that $6 daily wage is fairly generous by local Malawian standards.
We drove to Mount Mulanje, which took a couple of hours, and after checking in at the Mulanje Inn, we drove to the forestry lodge, which was about 10 km down a dirt road from the town. We passed by the tea planations on the way, and I took lots of photos. The tea workers did not like having their photos taken.
At the forestry station, we drove up a road toward the “pools”. When we got to where the car wasn’t going to make it any farther, I tried to back up and make a 3-point turn around in the narrow mud path. We got stuck in the mud, and couldn’t go either forward of backward. Two youngsters, maybe 10, stopped to offer help with a couple of rather large rocks. I asked them to help push the car while I instructed Caitlin which way to turn and how much to gun the engine. I and the two kids pushed the car sideways as the wheels spun in the mud. Eventually we were able to swing the car around to where it was facing downhill, and I gave each grateful youngster a 20 MK bill (about 12 cents). When we did finally hike to the Pools, we ran into Ben Chambers, with Kristin and her sister Shannon, who would later be on the Safari with us.
Ben Chambers is a former PCV that Mary and I had met about a year earlier in Washington, DC. I had ended up treating him to a very nice meal, at some expense, and I was still smarting a bit from that. So I was cordial, but wasn’t anxious to spend a lot of time with him. So we saw the pool, which was very flooded because of all the rains, and then left. It was getting on toward darkness.
The Mulanje Motel lodging cost the two of us 800 MK, or about $5. We had dinner for another $5, and the next morning, breakfast for maybe $2. The motel had a room with two beds, a single lightbulb, and community bathrooms and showers. There were mosquito nets. As we tried to sleep, a tape of Rober Schuler sermons was blasting from a room down the hall, which Caitlin explained was equivalent to using music to cover up the sounds of sex with a prostitute. I don’t know if that was the case or not, but later on, there was some disturbance in the hallway, during which Caitlin went out to converse in Chichewa. She described the noise makers as a hooker and a john, so what else can I say. But I will also say that there didn’t seem to be a lot of other choices in lodging in this area, and this is where Caitlin and friends had stayed previously when they had climbed the mountain.
When I got up in the middle of the night to take care of an attack of diarrhea, Caitlin apparently woke up, thinking someone had entered the room. She called out to me with the sounds of alarm and fear in her voice, and I answered from the bathroom (just next door) that I was in the bathroom and that it was me that she had heard. This is the only time that I heard Caitlin exhibit any fear on this entire trip. Also, when we first retired for the evening, there was a lot of loud calling of monkeys in the background, which kept me awake for a while. Finally, around 11 pm, it actually got quiet enough to sleep. I slept with my flashlight and stiletto under my pillow, next to the locked door.
Wednesday February 25 Day 8
We had breakfast at the hotel, which for me consisted of an egg scrambled with onions and sausage, plus toast, with “white” coffee. The coffee was particularly good, but because of my stomach issues, I couldn’t eat all the food. We drove back to the Forestry station, and the gate keeper recognized us from the day before, and so didn’t charge us for readmission to the park area. Caitlin wanted to climb partway up the mountain, to a falls that others she knew had talked about. While plenty of free-lance guides approached us, Caitlin insisted that we didn’t need a guide. It might have been worth the few dollars to have hired one.
I was pretty much exhausted, and apparently had not been drinking enough, considering the diarrhea that I now was experiencing. We climbed/walked for 1 ½ hours, and almost reached the falls, but eventually gave up when it looked like we were headed back downward, perhaps down a different trail. Apparently we were no more than ¼ mile away from the falls when we quit, but the trail had seemed to start downhill, and we were not sure we hadn’t missed a turn somewhere. We were also running out of time, since I had not been able to walk very quickly because I was not feeling well. On this hike, we came upon a woman and her young daughter collecting firewood. They were barefoot, and would later pass us as we went back down the mountain. The load of firewood on the woman’s head must have been pretty heavy…it was about 8 feet long and maybe 2 feet in diameter, no exaggeration. Caitlin conversed with the woman in Chichewa on the way up. I would have like to have taken their picture, but didn’t want to offend anyone, and wasn’t feeling particularly well, anyway. As we descended, we stopped to wash in a pipe-supplied fountain of water from the mountain water drainage. We were probably close to ½ up the mountain on this hike. After we washed, Caitlin ended up leaving her chitenge (spelling?), which she used as both a wrap and a towel. (After this, she ended up using my towel for every shower, so I usually had a second-hand towel to dry off with for the rest of my visit.)
On the way back to town, we stopped at “Pizzeria Basilico”, at which Caitlin had wanted to dine on the previous day (then were closed at 4) but were unable to do so (so we had eated at the Mulanje Motel). When we had stopped the previous afternoon, and the place was closed, a passer-by offered to phone the owner to come open up just for us, but we had courteously not accepted this generous offer. On this day, as we waited, I noted that the place was adtually pretty nice, and the pizxa was cooked in a brick oven as we waited. We had the “four seasons” pizza, which was divided into four quarters, each different. We took the leftovers with us.
After lunch, we headed back toward Lilongwe. We had gotten a late start, and it was raining the whole way. It appeared that we wouldn’t reach Lilongwe until maybe 9 pm. When it began to get dark, it became apparent that navigating the pothole-filled road through the mountains was going to be a problem, so I asked Caitlin to call Dedza Pottery to make a reservation for the night. They agreed to leave the key with the bartender, as we were arriving late. The drive was every bit as frightening as I had imagined, and was a real challenge, with total darkness, rain, poorly functioning headlights, and potholes in the road filled with water not revealing their depth to us in the underpowered and small-wheeled Toyota. I was even worried that the dirt road to Dedza would be a problem, but that turned out to be only minor…there were washed-out areas, but we were able to navigate them successfully without getting stuck. We arrived about 8 in total darkness. We had bought pineapples and had the leftover pizza, along with cookies and potato chips, so we didn’t buy dinner.
It was the next morning that I noticed a big scratch in the side of the car. I could recall hearing a tree limb scrape down the side as we drove up the Zomba plateau, so I knew where it came from. So now I could worry about if we were going to have to pay for that. We had breakfast of toast and coffee, and continued toward Lilongwe.
At some point during this two-day drive, we stopped along the road so that I could take some photos. A woman walking with her two kids, carrying things on their head (I don’t remember exactly what) rehearsed with her kids what to say when they got to our auto.
So, what are the first words a Malawian child learns in English?
“Give me money”.
No joke. That’s what they were rehearsing. Caitlin claims this is actually taught in schools. The fact that we had a car, and a camera, gave them license to beg for money. They surrounded the car, and Caitlin argued with them in their native tongue to go away and leave us alone. It wasn’t really threatening, but it was uncomfortable, for sure.
We saw a curious sign along the road on this trip. There are police road-blocks maybe every 20 Km or so. Just exactly what they are looking for, I don’t know. We were never asked for a bribe on any of these stops (except later in Zambia…more on that later), so who knows. But at one point there was a sign that “Master Car Breakers” was a sponsor of a particular roadblock. I guessed that this was a junk yard, but the name implies something about the road itself. Most of the pothole-filled roads are car breakers themselves.
On the road to Senga Bay, the road was so bad, there was a pothole probably every 10 feet. I took a picture of the road, but apparently this one didn’t come out. Battery died? But it was truly like a video game, navigating that part of the road. But more about that later.
Friday February 26, Day 9.
We awoke early to a rooster’s crowing, around 5:30 a.m. ( I actually have a photo of this particular rooster, now that I think about it.) We took the remaining pineapple to the restaurant area and ordered coffee and toast. We left Dedza by 7 am, and continued to Lilongwe. I drove at higher speeds than normal, when the car, going downhill, would actually hit 90 KPH (close to 60 MPH). We arrived at the Peace Corp office at 8:45. We rearranged bags, leaving one the office. I met a lot of Caitlin’s friends at the office, including Megan, a Californian who was pretty personable. We were supposed to take another friend, Natalie, to her site, but she didn’t want to go there a few days early, so we ended up not having to do that. We calculated how much more cash needed, and went to the black market to make an exchange for $1500. Interspersed within our $50 bills was a “small head” bill. They wouldn’t give us the 176 rate on that one, offering only 150, so the transaction became confusing. We all agreed on the end exchange, and we left, with a huge wad of 500MK bills (picture $1500 in three dollar bills). As we were turning out of the parking lot, the money changer approached us, and said that an error had been made, and that we had shorted him $100. Caitlin insisted that he had added incorrectly. For my part, I’m not sure if an error had been made or not. But we left without giving him the extra $100 he asked for. When I thought about it later, I concluded that there was a fair chance that he was correct. If that was the case, his profit had been eroded somewhat. I hoped that this wouldn’t be a problem for Caitlin at some later time. But in reality, there were lots and lots of competing money changers. So we left with a boatload of bills, and went straight to the Kiboko Tours office to unload the $1300 we owed on the tour.
The drive to Senga Bay was relatively uneventful, and we didn’t run over anybody. We stopped for gas and oil. The road to Salima was a good road, but after that, the turn off for the “Wheelhouse Marina”, recommended by Lonely Planet, was bloody awful. That was the road with a pothole every 10 feet, for about 5 Km. Caitlin had wanted to stay at a lodge called “Cool Runnings”, but the owners were on vacation during this time, it being rainy season.
The Wheelhouse Marina looked like it might have been nice 50 years earlier, but was in dire need of some rehabilitation. The bar, for example, was at the end of a dock constructed with cement pier posts. It had sunk at least 4 feet over the years. I have photos of this to show that this was no exagaration. Inside the bar area, which we visited at night, it was sturdy, but slanted. We had a dinner of cheesburger, fries, and salad, served at the bar, but which we had ordered at the kitchen with instructions to deliver it to us at the bar. While we ate and drank a few Carlsberg (the Malawian standard) beers, a couple from South Africa came in. The young man, maybe 25, asked if we minded if they set up their Ipod speakers, and confessed that his girlfriend’s musical tastes were not that great. But he ended up playing Bob Marley tunes for starters, and eventually the Black Missionaries, a Malawian group. A third couple, black African, later came in, and remarked that they liked the music. We left around 10.
The Wheelhouse room was a Chalet, and it was offered at ½ price…about $20 for the night. It wasn’t bad, but when Caitlin went into the bathroom, the lock handle broke off in her hand. We didn’t think anything of it, and just set it aside. We took the key from the lock box next to the bathroom entrance, locked the camera inside (as we sat out under the shaded areas in the late afternoon), and put that key on the key chain with the room key. The importance of this will become apparent later. Other than the young S.African couple, there seemed to be no one else staying there.
Saturday February 27, day 10.
It had rained during the night, and was still raining in the morning. The noisy fan in the chalet had kept me awake a lot of the night, and so I hadn’t slept that well. The permanently set-up tents next door, which apparently were an option for accommodations also, were soaked from the rain, and I wondered what it would have been like to have stayed in them.
We sat on the chalet porch and had coffee, made from the coffee maker in the room and the instant coffee that we had with us. Caitlin observed that monkeys were in the trees. I recalled that I had heard them on the roof during the early morning hours. There wss a pleasant breeze, with the temperature maybe a pleasant 70 degrees. Caitlin was chilly. The three dogs, two of which are prominent in some of the photos of Caitlin under the beach veranda, followed us around. The dogs looked like they might be Rhodesian Ridge Backs, which I guess would make sense, since we were in what would have been Rhodesia. A few randomn observations:
Caitlin is definitely not starving, and in fact, when she had her money belt on, looks a little puffy and paunchy. She at one point acknowledges that she should lose a little weight when she gets back to the states, but that she’s in the habit of eating whenever there is food available…a reasonable habit to be in.
Hitching a ride is really probably safer than riding a mini-bus. This is because there aren’t that many cars to begin with, and the people who own cars are generally pretty well-off. The privately owned cars are definitely in better mechanical shape than the mini-buses, and a lot less crowded. The human factor is still present, and you don’t know what motives a ride-giver might ultimately have, but people are generally just curious about this Chichewa-speaking white girl,and enjoy talking to her.
My impression of Natalie, who we were supposed to give a ride to the previous day but did not after she had decided not to return so early to her site, was not necessarily good. My feeling is that the PC volounteers are the face of America for a lot of Malawians, and that there is some responsibility for dressing properly that comes with the job. Natalie’s choice in clothing was a bit too casual for me, having selected shorts and a tee-shirt, badly in need of a bra. Looking like a hippie from 1965 just doesn’t go over well in Malawi, or so I thought. I brought this up with Caitlin, and she agreed that the PCV’s should abide by some dress code acceptable in the Malawian environment. This was also a complaint applicable to Ben Chambers, who, when we had run into him at Mulanje, was wearing flip-flops, a tee-shirt, a pony-tail with rubber band, and hadn’t shaved for maybe a week or two. It just looks bad. Most of the other volunteers I met went through more trouble to look a bit neater.
In circumstances when we had been surrounded by young men, I would normally have felt threatened, particularly in the US. Here in Malawi, I can’t say that I felt threatened. The young men were always very polite, as they hawked their goods at the obvious westerner who so obviously could afford to buy whatever they had to sell at whatever price they sold it. Even if we weren’t interested in what they had to sell, they were never threatening. Maybe a bit pushy, but never threatening. Always civil. Even during the uncomfortable discussion with the moneychangers, as I described earlier, was civil. And later when Caitlin negotiated for carvings, the negotiations were intense, perhaps, but always civil and polite.
We decided to check out of the Wheelhouse Marina, because Caitlin felt like the bar and restaurant at the Carolina Inn were nicer. So we usee the weather as an excuse, payed the Zimbabwean expat 80 year-old proprietess (with a bad mixture of skin lesions from on both her arms and face) give her the key(s), and leave. She was a bit surprised, expecting us to stay two days as we had originally suggested that we would, but the weather made for agood excuse. The cost/night ended up as $27…not a great price, but OK. (Didn’t I say earlier that the negotiated cost was $20 per night?) If this was ½ the regular price, then I’d have to say that $54 a night was definitely not a great price.
After we left, we stopped at the roadside shops along the paved road at the intersection with the turn-off for the Marina. We found a “restaurant”, which I would not have set foot into, except for Caitlin’s urging. We had parked the car, and in quick time were approached by a young man urging us to come to his mother’s restaurant. He agreed to keep an eye on the car, and then he excorted us to the shack.
When we walked into the shack, the interior was a single room of block walls, about 10 feet in length, 6 feet in width, with a bench seat the whole length. The woman took our order for fish and rice and beans, and sent her son to purchase fish from a local fish vendor. We had a couple of Cokes as she cooked the rice on an open firepit through a back door, behind the building. Other children were playing in mud puddles in the area behind this building. It took close to an hour..maybe 45 minutes..to cook the rice, beans, and fish. The fish were small, maybe 5 inches in length, and were deep-fried. When we ate, we ate the fish whole, bones, scales, and all. I made a point to chew it all very well, to avoid swallowing a bone. The fish could have just as well been a piece of wood; having been fat-fried, you could not tell really what it was. But the rice and beans were well-cooked, and the oily fish was a garnishment or sorts. As we ate, Caitlin conversed with the restauranteur and a young man, maybe 20 or so, who was also eating in there. As was the usual case, they were very interested in Caitlin’s reasons for being there (Malawi).
As we ate, I noticed a white woman about 35 or so outside talking to a couple of kids. I had seen her when we had walked along the storefronts to get to the restaurant, and had picked up her southern US accent. So when she was outside this particular building, I walked out, and introduced myself. She turned out to be from North Carolina, and was there in Lilongwe for three years with her husband, who was a doctor with Doctors Without Borders, or something similar.
Just as we were almost finished eating, a 4-wheel drive Toyota came to a screaming halt right in front of the building. The Wheelhouse battle-axe proprietess jumped out (as best as she could for 80) and stormed into the doorway, where she proceeded to accuse the two of us of breaking her door lock and stealing the bathroom key. We calmly explained that the door handle had broken on its own, and that we were not responsible for her upkeep on her run-down property. And we explained to her that the missing key of which she spoke was the key to the lock-box, and not the bathroom, and that the seemingly stolen key was actually on the same keyring with the chalet door key. This seemed to calm her down a bit, and I admitted that perhaps we might have mentioned the broken door handle, but that it had happened within the first 5 minutes that we were in the room, and so we hadn’t thought a lot about it since that time. She finally left after she calmed down a bit. Another black eye for South Africa, seemingly…except that this woman was apparently from Zimbabwe.
We continued on to the Carolina Lodge after lunch. We found a sign, and headed down the dirt road that the sign implied (implicitely) that the Lodge was located on. As we drove a ways, we weren’t completely sure we were headed the right direction, so we asked a young man walking along the road for directions. He said he was going to the same place, so I invited him to ride with us. It turned out that he was from Sharpevalle, and had attended Caitlin’s school, and that his brother was still a student there. He said that he was studying engineering, now in college. What “engineering” meant, as we found during the discussion, was welding and fabrication…engineering of materials for use in construction or repairs. So, as a trade, more than as a profession. In any case, this meeting, so far from Ncheu district, was quite a coincidence. The young man’s name was Joseph, and he was on his way to see his girlfriend, who worked at the Lodge.
At the Carolina Lodge, which was quite busy with a full parking lot when we arrived, cleared out by nightfall. We booked two dorm room beds for 3000 MK…about $15…and we ended up being the only ones there. So we could sit out on the porch off the 2nd floor room, and enjoy the views. We went to the lake, and Caitlin swam and soaked up the sun while I sat, old-man style, under an umbrella. We ordered dinner at 5, to be served at 7 in the bar, and I took some pictures. Dinner was 1500MK ($9) and we had two beers (each was $2). We played cards and bao in the bar, and Caitlin talked to the bartender, Mathews. (Yes, with an “s”.) His story was that he had long been unemployed, and had recently just acquired this job. He was paid the equivalent of $1 a day, and one nsima-based meal.
The night was a bit noisy, as a couple of other families arrived to take chalet rooms below and across from our porch. I slept with flashlight and stiletto handy. In the morning, I surprisingly awoke with a familiar pain in my lower back…kidney stones! I kept quiet, hoping it was pass quickly. It did…in about half an hour. And later I had my first normal bowel movement in a week….the antibiotic I was taking for a stomach bacteria had kicked in.
Sunday February 28 Day 11.
We had morning coffee, from Caitlin’s bag, at the bar, using the hot water intended for tea. He talked to Mathews who was there at this early hour, even though he had been there the previous night. He told us he works 6 am to 10 pm, as it turns out, for his $1 a day.
We left the lodge, and drove back to Lilongwe. We stopped for rolls at a roadside shop. Caitlin wanted to call these scones, but they were really just rolls, and they weren’t all that fresh. But we could eat them. At a cost of 100MK…60 cents. We got to Lilongwe about 11:30, checked into Mufasa, at which the dorms rooms were full. We got a “bwana”, or twin, room for $24 with the PC discount. The room included a private toilet and shower. We counted out 36000 MK to pay for the car, and went to Caitlin’s bank ATM for more spending cash.
We went to meet the car rental man at his office at 1. We got there a little early, and he appeared exactly on time…sort of surprising, according to Caitlin. We parked in the spot that Caitlin had first seen the car, and we had cleaned the interior, exterior, and had filled it to maybe 3/8 full (originally it had been ¼ full). I was concerned about the scratch, but didn’t turn out to be problem. The rental man drove up with a second man in a new-looking Mitsubishi 4WD SUV. (I inquired about the flat rate for this…which ended up at $80/day…a bargain, really). It turned out that Caitlin’s memory on what we owed on the car was wrong. The receipt clearly indicated that we owed 47000 MK. Fortunately, the cash from the ATM was enough to pay for the car balance, with little margin. But the car rental people were happy, and so was I, since we didn’t have to pay for any cosmetic damage to the car.
Being suddenly broke, we went back to the ATM, which by now was empty of bills. We had to go to another bank, another ATM, to get money. We then walked to the Shopright and exchanged a single $20 for 3400 MK. We were able to eat lunch and go to the open-air market to buy supplies (beans, vegetables, spices) for making chilli that night at Mufasa. We bought the actual minced beef at the grocery store.
During the activities of the day, we stopped by the PC office, and I met some more of Caitlin’s fellow volounteers, include Enrique. It seemed like Mufasa would be crowded tonight. At Mufasa, we shared the 5 burners of the stove with others also preparing similar meals (stews, chillis, etc). The chilli was ultimately pretty good, and we had made way too much for our own consumption, even though we both wolfed down multiple bowls ful. Caitlin tried to give the rest away, and I don’t know how successful she really was. Afterwards, she visited friends while I showered and got ready for bed. Mary had called at 6:30, and at our request, she called back an hour later. The connection was poor, and we eventually got cut off. It was raining cats and dogs at the time. We imagined the connection quality was affected by the ongoing rainstorm. The warm shower in the Bwana room, with a large shower head above, was wonderful.
Monday March 1 Day 12
Safari day.
I had slept fitfully, and was awakened by Islamic prayers blasting over a loudspeaker at one of the two downtown mosques at 4:45 a.m. I eventually got up at 6, as did Caitlin. We had breakfast with others, including Kristin and her sister Shannon, who would be on our safari. At 7 we walked to Kiboko Tours office, dropped off luggage, and walked up to “McDoud’s”, to look in at prices. McDoud’s was an Indian-run fast food restaurant modeled after McDonald’s, complete with golden arches and hamburgers with special sauce. We agreed to eat there when we returned from the safari.
In addition to the 4 of us on the 9-day tour, there are two others booked for the 4 day animal-only portion of the tour. The other two are Case, a retired Dutch teacher from Ghana, and Karen Peters, a recent medical student graduate from Aberdeen, Scotland, who had paid her own way to Malawi to work in a clinic for a month or so.
The safari travel car was a Land Rover with a roof rack, which was loaded with our luggage and covered with tarps. We had a driver and guide in the front, and had 8 other seats…so we had two spares. Our hostess, or guide, was Eenis, a young girl about 30 or so from Holland. Mike, the driver, handed us informational packets. For the later drive on to Livingstone, after the animal park, we would be changing cars and drivers. We’re told it’s a 7 hour drive to S. Luangwa Park in Zambia.
We reached the border stop in about two hours. We exited Malawi, with no problem, and drove the 100 meters to the Zambian border entrance station. While Caitlin and Kristin argued that they were permanent residents of Malawi and shouldn’t have to pay the $50 visa fee for Americans, their arguments fell on deaf ears, with the border immigration agent explaining that it was all about their passports, not their residency. He issued visas for 7 days, which was not enough time. We all protested, and he responded simply by x-ing out the date and adding 10 days, rather sloppily. It looked unofficial, for sure. But it didn’t turn out to be a problem on the return trip, although it might have been.
Chipata was the first town in Zambia that we came to. It looked almost like all the towns in Malawi, but slightly nicer, like someone had actually had access to some paint somewhere along the line. We stopped to exchange money, at 4200 ZK per $1. ( Closer to Livingstone, near Victoria Falls, this would increase to a better rate of 4750 ZK per $1.) Caitlin and Kristin bought Sim cards for their phones, which ultimately turned out not to really work.
For lunch, we stopped at a typical backpacker lodge called Mama Rula’s B and B. It was 2 Km off the main paved road, and looked just like every other backpacker lodge we saw…a walled installation with a guard operating the gate, offereing chalets, camp sites, and dormitory beds. There was a nice bar/restaurant, at which we dined on food which had been brought in the vehicle with us. The lunch consisted of bread sandwiches…three layers of bread, with lettuce, tomato, onion, and cheese. And, yes, the central portion of the sandwich was, well, bread. So truly, this was a bread sandwich. We also had potato chips, fruit, and juice.
After lunch, we got back to the main road, and continued, eventually turning off onto an unpaved road. We were on this unpaved road for 4 hours, and so, at an average speed of maybe 50 KM/hr, it had to be close to 200 KM long. The Land Rover took this road pretty well, although it rattled a lot. Certainly the Toyota we had previously rented would not have done well on this road.
Finally, at Mfuwe, we hit a paved road, which eventually led into the park and the camp site. We saw an elephant as we turned onto the road to the campsite. The campsite, right along the river, was nice, and wais like every other backpacker camp, and had permanently errected tents. The tents were quite nice, with cots and a roof high enough to stand up in. There was an electric lamp in each tent. We found out later that the electricity was unreliable at times. But the site had toilets, showers, a bar/restaurant, a swimming pool, and a weight/exercise area. We were told that hippos graze through the camp site, and this turns out to be the case. Drinks at the bar are equivalent to US prices, at $3.50 a pop. So the girls pulled out their sachets (bags of spirits) and we mixed drinks at the bar.
Some random thoughts. I met more of Caitlin’s friends at Mufaas’s, including Devin, who was quite personable. It was pretty clear that he still had a thing for Caitlin. One guy, Greg, from Orlando, had developed an affected British accent which sounded pretty contrived. I pointed this out to Caitlin, and she didn’t know what I was talking about. But that’s how I saw (heard) it. As for Devin, it later occurred to me that he reminded me a bit of my former work partner Mike Pascale…not necessarily a good thing. But I guess that’s my problem. He really did seem nice and seemed genuinely interested in Caitlin, as he showed when he called Caitlin several times during our trip to check up on her welfare.
Tuesday March 2. Day 13
It rained during the night, starting about 10 pm. By 3 in the morning, it was pouring. The sound of the rain on the fly of the tent was very relaxing; we felt cozy and dry. When we awoke, it was still raining, as we ate breakfast in the open but covered dining area next to the Luangwa River. We had been warned that hippos liked to graze in the campground area. During the night, Kristin and Shannon had been awakened by noises outside their tent, and had peered through the door flap to see hippos right outside. Sorry I missed that, light sleeper that I am.
Breakfast was pancakes, toast, and Canadian bacon. Emmanuel, our guide/driver, then arrived with full-length rain panchos for everyone, since the safari 4WD was open…no roof. The panchos covered us down to our ankles, but I was concerned about the camera nonetheless.
The rain held off until we entered the park, a drive of only about 10 minutes. The park was just across the river, so we just had to drive to a bridge up river a short distance, and then cross the bridge. Each time we did this, Emmanuel had to go inside the guard house, apparently having to pay an entry fee for us.
My solution for protecting the camera was to keep it under the pancho, and to use a plastic sandwich/freezer bag to protect it. This turned out not to work that well I later came up with a better solution. But as I took the camera in and out from under the pancho, the controls got moved accidentally to manual mode, and I didn’t know this. So I ended up overexposing all the shots after this, on this morning drive. Needless to say, I was terribly disappointed. We saw a lot of animals, including lions at the dead hippo. The hippo apparently had died the previous night, probably as part of a territorial dispute. We would visit his carcass several times over this and the next day, and it was a great place to see animals. The vultures waiting in a tree across from the hippo…maybe 100 to 200 of them. Big and ugly. But none of these photos was properly exposed, so I was disappointed. Caitlin didn’t understand why I didn’t check the video screen on the back of the digital SLR after every shot, but having had the camera for years, there becomes a point where you just trust what you’re doing, and don’t look at the ½ second preview of the just-taken picture. So it was disappointing, but there would be other opportunities.
Case, the retired Dutch teacher who had taught in Ghana, seemed mostly interested in the birds. He seemed to know a lot about African bird species, as did Emmanual, our guide. He turned out to have quite an array of equipment with him…a camera, an audio recorder, a video recorder.
We played Uno at the bar with Kristin and Shannon, after lunch, when we got back. Then we had tea, and then relaxed away the afternoon as we got ready for the afternoon/night drive.
In the afternoon, after I had reviewed my photo mistakes, and came up with a better water-proofing solution. I put the sunshade on the end of the long lens, left the lens cap off, and cut a hole just big enough for the lens to poke through in the freezer bag that I had. That way, I could keep the camera in the bag, with the lens sun hood keeping the rain from hitting the lens glass. That worked fine, and came in handy later at Victoria Falls. But it didn’t rain much in the afternoon, anyway. The photos from the afternoon were pretty good, with the lions, again, and lots of birds, and other animals, like zebras, elephants, impala. We also saw a leopard out of the bush, which apparently was pretty rare. We stopped for tea, and then began the night drive portion of the night ask it got dark. A second Zambian rode shotgun in the safari car, with a pretty powerful light connected to a car battery. As we drove along on the return ride after dark, he shone the light in the trees and along the side of the road. Occassionally he’d spot something, and we’d stop. Not a single photo from this portion of the drive is worth mentioning, since the light wasn’t bright enough to allow a fast enough shutter speed to overcome the shake of the camera with the long lens. I had the camera’s ISO sensitivity up the the max (1600) and the aperture pretty wide open (5.6 or 6.3…much wider than I normally shoot) to allow a fast shutter speed. This had worked in bright light, but not with the night torch. Truthfully, though, we didn’t see anything on the night portion of the drive that we hadn’t seen during the daylight, except a chamelion lizard (which the spotter, Mike, had somehow spotted). We did see a porcupine and two mongoose during the daylight, but I was unable to photograph them because they moved too quickly. We also briefly saw a ring-tailed cerval, but the light was dim and the cat was too quick.
We returned about 8:30, and the camp electricity was out. We ate dinner until 9 or so, and then we washed retired. It had been an awesome day; seeing the animals, and so close up, had been pretty neat. The lions had been as close as two feet away…right next to the open safari car.
At night, the sound of the frogs was like that of clay or wooden bells. We also heard the sounds of larger animals, maybe elephants, across the river. The monkeys in the trees also made sounds.
Wednesday March 3, Day 14.
It only briefly sprinkled during the night. I got up to use the bathroom, about 100 yards away from our tent. We had been instructed to call out in the dark to ask for an escort to make that walk, and that the escorts would watch over us all night. Well, I think I made enough noise unzipping the tent and using my flashlight, but I still didn’t see any escort. I don’t know if the reason to rely on the escorts was because of the hippos, or because of snakes, or what else. In any case, although there were reports that hippos had been in the area at the time I was up, but I hadn’t seen any. I may have heard them, but I didn’t see them.
At 5 we were awakened for breakfast, and we left for the morning drive at 6:15. It was cloudy, and sprinkled just a bit, but the rain held off. As we ate breakfast, a monkey ran across the table and grabbed a pancake, even though we tried to shoo him off. He appeared to want even more, but we managed to keep him at bay and eventually chased him up a tree.
Once in the park, we returned to the hippo carcass. The vultures had picked the neck area clean, and a lone spotted hyena was competing with them for the remains. I got lots of shots of the hyena.
Still looking for the giraffes, Emanuel took us on a long drive to a hilly area, obviously up land and at higher ground. We did encounter wart hogs and buffalo, another of the big 5 mammals, and eventually we came upon a group of 5 lions, including a young dominant male. Emmanuel made a point to stay away from the male, at at distance of at least 15 feet or so. There were impala and zebra nearby, but the lions seemed only mildly interested. If we had hoped for a view to a kill, it didn’t happen this morning. I got lots of lion shots.
On the drive back to exit the park, we stopped for snacks, and encountered elephants. We also saw a spotted antelope, and came across another hyena in a field that wanted nothing more than to be left alone to nap. The closest we came to seeing a giraffe was seeing bones from a giraffe carcass, which Emmanuel held up for us. All in all it was a great drive, though.
After lunch it became a beautiful partly-cloudy day, around 83 degrees. I sat around the pool while Caitlin napped in the tent…she reported that she was not feeling completely well. Maybe she had caught the virus that I probably had had earlier. I was feeling better, although I had amassed a number of insect bites. I used the weight machines a little, until one of the bar workers kept preasuring me to trade his small-head Jefferson $20 for a big-headed one (worth more at the money exchange, as I should have previously mentioned).
We had tea at 3:30 and left for the afternoon/night drive. While there were storms in the area, with interesting skies and rainbows, we never got wet. We had to take a different road from our campsite to the park, because the normal one was underwater. We drove through the forest, and our spotter spent a lot of time searching the trees before we entered parts of this path on the way back. We were told later that cobras had been seen in the trees, although we didn’t see any. We did see some sort of poisonous snake on this drive, near the park entrance. This light green snake was standing up. I don’t remember what its species was, but Emmanual described it as carrying neurotoxins that would cause heart failure within maybe 15 minutes. After the snake disappeared into the brush (I wasn’t fast enough to get a photo), Emmanual very carefully examined the ground and road before continuing, I believe to make sure there weren’t other snakes of the same variety that might enter the vehicle as we drove by. For the night drive, I just put the camera away; it had been a waste the previous night. We again saw little that we hadn’t seen with daylight. So most of us on the safari agreed that the night drive portion had been a bit of a waste, even though the evening drive in the dark had been pleasant.
Thursday March 4 Day 15.
We left the bridge camp after breakfast, and drove along the pothole-filled dirt road shortcut back toward Lilongwe. We stopped at Tribal Textiles, a textile factory that made batik and other patterned textiles. We took a tour to see how they made the products; photos were taken as part of the record. We changed cars at Chipata, really about halfway back to Lilongwe. The four of us continuing on, Kristin, Shannon, Caitlin, and myself, began the drive to Victoria Falls about noon. The car for this drive was another Land Rover, but this vehicle was towing a trailer that carried the tents and cooking equipment. The two Kiboko employees stuffed our luggage into that trailer, which was small but was covered and rainproof. The two were our driver, Edson, and our cook, Soup. Both spoke English, but not as well as others associated with the safari tour. Edson would turn out to be pretty talkative, after he warmed up to his tour participants, although he spoke his English quite slowly.
We made “Bridge Camp” just before dark, after a scary and fast drive through the mountains. We saw a recently crashed double semi in the mountains, surrounded by loca villagers, and surely someone had been killed in this accident. We averaged 120 Km/hr, or around 75 MPH, when we weren’t slowed by potholes and speed bumps. The speedbumps in Zambia were serious….at each population center, a series of speed bumps got progressively bigger and bigger, until the last one, at the center, forced each driver to slow to maybe 5 MPH. So that cost a fair amount of time, since there were population centers, or villages, about every 10 Km. The road, though, was generally better than roads in Malawi, in that it did have a shoulder and fewer potholes.
Edson and Soup pitched our tents in the camp, although we offered, and did, help a bit. The tents were substantially smaller than the ones at the River Camp, but they were waterproof, if not ant-proof, as we later discovered. The River Camp, right next to the same (Luengwa) river but farther downstream, was just like every other backpacker camp we stayed at. There were showers and toilets, lights until 9 pm, and a bar/restaurant. It was, of course, owned by a South African couple. The man of the two had no intercommunication with us, while his more conversant wife made a point to go on a rant about how stupid U.S. Peace Corp volunteers were, and how stupid it was of the U.S. to try to help countries in Africa. Meanwhile, she and her husband are taking advantage of the tourism boom for personal gain, and were not the least concerned about giving anything back to the country she had migrated to. So the South Africans I met on this tour were still batting 100% for being assholes. We had a couple of Cokes at the bar, which we mixed with Sachets of alcohol, again. We also had a couple of beers, maybe. We heard bush babies in the trees next to the bar, and when I shined my wind-up flashlight into the tree, I saw the eyes of the animal, and then the animal moved farther up the tree before I could make out its actual shape.
As we lay trying to sleep, Shannon and Kristin in the next tent, just 10 feet away, wanted to yak all night. Finally about 11, after close to two hours, I asked them to hold down the noise and try going to sleep. They had pretty much slept the whole time in the car, so, even though we knew we were going to be awakenedd at 5 a.m. for our 12 hour remaining drive to Livingstone, they were not very interested in sleeping.
An interesting anecdote. Earlier in the day, at Tribal Textiles, the parking lot was mostly covered with more than a foot of water. A safari car from Land and Lake Safaris, also out of Lilongwe and a more expensive competitor to Kiboko, got stuck in the mud. Our Kiboko car pulled them out with a rope…I took a photo of this.
Friday March 5 Day 16.
Up at 5, we were on the road by 6:20. Edson and Soup took down the tents. At the first population center, Soup bought a fish for the evening meal. I don’t really remember eating this fish, but I do remember his buying it. It rained on the morning part of the drive. At one point we stopped to pee, and there was nothing around but trees and grass. No people, no other roads, no nothing. But I did see a farm tractor somewhere along this drive….something I hadn’t seen in Malawi.
We got to the capital, Lusaka, by 9:45. It was pretty close to looking like a normal mid-sized American town, with traffic, landscaped road medians, taller (maybe 20 stories) buildings. We stopped to buy gas, change money, and shop a little bit at a shopping center. It was pretty much like an American shopping center, and was still under construction. There was a diversity of cultures there…whites, blacks, Indian, Muslims, you name it. Some white people stopped to ask us if we needed directions…I guess we looked like tourists, particularly since I had on my bwana outfit of khaki with khaki. We bought a BMT at Subway, for the equivalent of $2.50. Yes, it was a Subway, but the sandwich was short on topping choices. After we continued on, we stopped for lunch by the road side, and had bananas and rice/vegetable salad.
Masabuka was the next big town after Lusaka. It looked nicer than most of Malawi had looked. We were there around 1:15. Finally, we arrived at Livingstone around 6:15. Although the roads had been generally good, the last 40 Km or so were pretty awful, with lots of potholes and detours to dirt sections. The detours were because parts of the road were being repaved (something I hadn’t seen in Malawi). It was raining quite a bit during this part of the trip, and so it was very muddy. When we finally got to Livingstone, there was a Police roadblock. For the first time, considering all the road blocks we’d been through in previous weeks, it became apparent that the police officer was probing for a bribe, trying to hassle Edson. Edson apparently was accustomed to this, and we eventually were allowed to pass. This happened on the return trip, but to a lesser degree, also.
Finding a place to pitch a tent at the Riverside Campground (the River being the Zambezi) was tricky. It was very wet, and finding a puddle-free area was tough. We finally selected a spot under a tree, because the root swell made the ground slightly higher. We stayed dry that night. We all went to the bar while Edson and Soup pitched the tents in our chosen locations. The bar was full of young, noisy, well-heeled S Africans and Europeans on holiday. I hadn’t really expected Victoria Falls to be so touristy, so I guess I wasn’t really thinking. At the bar/restaurant, we later tried to use the internet, but the internet café had closed at 5:30. We would use it on subsequent days. It appeared, from the large number of people on laptops, that wi-fi was available. Guess I could have brought my netbook, but who knew? Later on, Caitlin left her phone to charge in the lady’s bathroom. Although the girls had bought SIM cards for the Zambian arm of their cell phone provider, the phones never worked. This turned out to be a problem later on for Kristin.
Saturday March 6 Day 17.
I got my best night’s sleep since being in Africa. The noises were very relaxing…the roar of the falls in the background, with the calls of the bush babies, frogs, and the sounds of the insects or frogs that sounded like clay or wooden bells. Soup had made a breakfast of fried eggs, sunny side up, with sausage, toast, and coffee.
At the prompting of Edson, who apparently was financially incentivized, we went to the Reception desk to arrange for “activites”. I personally wasn’t interested in such things, but the three girls were. Caitlin mostly wanted to go bungie jumping, but was afraid that her glasses would fall off. Kristin and Shannon wanted to do lots of things…white water rafting, elephant riding, sunset cruise, and maybe other things. By my tally, their activities expenses approached $1000. As for Caitlin and myself, I agreed to do the Abselling activities with her, although it was not exactly clear what that entailed. Part of the lack of clarity was the language barrier, while parts were probably purposely unclear. I felt forced to sign up for these commitments; it turned out that we could have picked the activities a-la-carte, at the site, rather than through the hotel/campsite. This would have been a lot more sensible, since you could have seen exactly what the “abselling” activities really were. In any case, I truly intended to do these things with Caitlin, which included rapelling frontwards and backwards down the gorge wall, zipping across the gorge face-down, and swinging across the gorge on the “gorge swing”. But this had not been explained very well; all I had heard was that we would be zipping across the gorge four times. Anyhow, this ended up costing $180. And we were committed, rain or shine.
Edson took us to the park around 9. It was cloudy, and the falls were throwing up a lot of mist. The entry guard would not accept my slightly torn $20 bill (a tear about ½ inch long, not affecting anything), which was pretty irritating. We walked around the falls, got wet, took photos, and walked down to the “boiling pot” below the falls to watch the bungie jumpers from the gorge bridge as we ate our lunch (which Soup had prepared for us). I used the baggie trick to protect the camera. In the final analysis, the photos were pretty uninteresting, since the view from Zambia is somewhat restrictive. We were told that the Zimbabwe view was better, but there were complications and extra expenses associated with going across. Since it was still an unknown, and the water flow was really causing a lot of mist and view problems, we didn’t cross over. We were soaked by the time we walked out of the park to wait for Edson to pick us up.
Back at camp, our tent had been invaded by ants...thousands of them. I tried combating them by sweeping and smashing them, but that did not work. We went to the maintenance shacks behind the community bathroom, where some workers were doing laundry, and asked them if they had any bug spray. One young man managed to located a can of “Doom”, a heavy-duty insectiside. I sprayed the tent in and out, especially in the corners. With Edson’s assistance, we picked up the tent and moved it to an area away from the trees, and on a patch of sand. This area was a bit away from the rest of the campsite, across the drive in road, but was in the sun, away from trees. After we got rid of all the ants (and ant carcasses), we didn’t have any more insect problems. Meanwhile, the other two girls were having similar problems, and ended up moving their tent, also. But not near us.
Caitlin and I went to the bar, had some drinks, cokes, and beers. After dinner, we returned to the bar area/internet café and checked email. Eventually I began to not feel well, and retired early. Caitlin hung out with the other two young girls, and came to the tent around 11.
An interesting observation that Caitlin had made in Livingstone was the large number of baby-blue cars. That’s a color we haven’t seen in the US since about 1970. All I could picture when I saw one of these was Chris Schwerdt’s 1970-s era Pinto that he had had Bondo-ized by Mickey Goshaney at the same time I’d had the same done to my 1973 240-Z. As it turns out, all the taxis in Zambia are apparently required to be that color. We found this out when we were leaving the park, and various taxi drivers, waiting for fares, tried to sell their services to us.
Sunday March 7 Day 18.
Not surprisingly, I awoke with diarrhea at 2 a.m. When we got up at 7 for breakfast, the sisters went off for their rafting trip, and we just hung around camp. Caitlin cut her hair. Later, Edson drove us into Livingstone so that Caitlin could look for postcards (she thought the ones at the reception area of the Waterfront Lodge were overpriced). Edson waited for us in the car (we expected him just to drop us off), and we went through a couple of the markets in town. As it was Sunday, some places weren’t open. Church was going on in a couple of locations, and we could hear the singing. While we were shopping for cards and walking around, a Zimbabwean approached and offered to sell us a 100 trillion Zimbabwean dollar bill. I’ve never seen as many zeroes as on that bill. He wanted $20 US, but we didn’t bite. This salesman also had copper bracelets for sale, just like the two Zimbabweans we had run into at the park on the previous day.
In the afternoon, we were picked up to go to the gorge “abseiling” site. I was not feeling well. The thought of doing anything the least bit physical was totally unappealing. When we arrived at the site, the activities were explained more clearly. I don’t know what I would have done had I felt well, but I took one look at the gorge, looked at the cabling and structural integrity of the zip line towers, etc, and decided I wasn’t going to do any of what I’d paid for. Part of the problem for me was not wanting to climb back up the gorge after rapelling or being lowered to the floor after the swing jump; I didn’t feel like I had the strength.
Admittedly, when Caitlin began the face-down rapelling, it looked scary. But after she had gone 20 feet or so, it didn’t look that bad. And the length of the wall she was walking down, which had looked like a mile when she started, looked a lot shorter as she neared the bottom. I thought at that time that I probably could have done that, except that by that time I had already cancelled. Oh well. I was glad I didn’t have to make the steep hike to get back to the top.
The second activity was running off a platform to coast across the gorge on a zip line. Caitlin only got about ½ way across, and then was pulled back. She did this a second time. There was absolutely no compelling reason for me to want to do this; there was no view of anything except the bottom of the gorge, and the thought of being suspended from the middle of my back, with the spinal issues I’d had for the past year, didn’t sound very appealing. But I give Caitlin a lot of credit for wanting to do this, as well as for doing the rapelling and hiking she had already done.
The gorge swing was even worse. At the reception, when we had been coerced into signing up for these things, the impression I had of the gorge swing was that it was just a swing across the gorge. As explained at the site, the first part of the swing was a 53 meter free fall, before the harness and cable from you, the swinger, to the pivot point at the middle of a cable across the gorge, became taut. So the jerk at the end of the free-fall was going to be a problem. Caitlin later remarked about the whiplash she got when she did this, bless her soul, and she ended up with bruise marks from the harness on both sides of her neck and chest. This might have easily completely paralyzed me, especially considering the two bulging and one collapsed disk in my cervical spine that had been causing problems for me for the past year. So, I wimped out. At least I’m no worse off than I was.
But Caitlin must be fearless. She said later she had no fear at all for doing these things, and in fact, was a bit surprised by this realization. She rationalized that other experiences she had been through in the past year in Malawi overshadowed any man-made thrill-seeker fears from these activities. My thoughts were that starting her on roller coasters at age 4 had probably had a hand in getting her to this point. I also realized that this lack of fear was what had allowed her to make the commitment to join the Peace Corps in the first place. It was a revelation to see how far she had come from the little girl who just a few years earlier had been afraid to go into a High’s store by herself to buy milk. While she was getting ready for the gorge swing and jump, a group of four Australian buddies came to the gorge site, and were contemplating doing these activities. One of them eventually did the “flying fox” and the gorge swing. But another one of the Australians remarked to me as Caitlin jumped, “She has more balls that the rest of us”.
As we rode back to the lodge, along with all the workers from the gorge site, I felt very cold. When I got back to the tent, Caitlin went off to the bar, when she eventually met up with the sisters. I began to shake uncontrollably, and I figured I had a fever. So I put on more clothes and got into my sleeping bag, and was finally able to stop shaking. Caitlin returned in a couple of hours, and took my temperature….which measured 103. I took four aspirin, and in about an hour, felt significantly better. I was able to eat part of dinner, and then later accompanied Caitlin to the bar.
This was the night we met the overlanders. Shannon and Kristin had had quite a time at rafting, and had formed bonds with some of the other participants. Two of their co-rafters were a man, about 50, with a son, 12, who were from London. Two other rafters were a young man from New Zealand, and his girl friend, a recent college graduate from Washington State, who, quite honestly, seemed a bit of a spoiled brat. These last two had been on an overland tour, but had departed the tour, to spend more time at Livingstone before continuing. I talked to Craig, the New Zealand software engineer that wanted desperately to get a visa to the US (but probably wouldn’t, because of crowding in his job market). Eventually, my aspirin wore off, and I left to go to bed. Caitlin came back to the tent at maybe 11 pm or so.
So what are “overlanders?” “Overlanding” is an entire tourist industry, apparently quite prevalent in Africa. Overlanders sign on to a tour for up to 10 months or so, at a cost of $8000, to tour pretty much all of Africa. Travel is by RV-bus, with camping at the backpacker lodge/campsites, like we had stayed in everywhere. Two meals a day are including. The particular tour that these people had been on had begun in Spain (so there must have been a ferry trip across the Mediteranean involved).
Monday March 8 Day 19.
We leave to return to Lilongwe today. We were awakened by Edson at 5, because he wanted to get an early start. The sisters didn’t show up for breakfast, which was nothing but toast. Kristin couldn’t find her sister Shannon. It turned out that the two had had a bit of a tiff the night before, when Shannon had become a bit intoxicated. Kristin apparently had suggested that she stop drinking, and the younger sister responded by going off to sleep with some random stranger at the bar. I never found out the exact details, and if Caitlin did, she never filled me in. Eventually, when we were just getting ready to go knocking on doors and tent flaps all around the lodge area, Shannon walked into the campsite. It was around 7 a.m. by this time. So, we got a late start on the road trip back.
On the drive to Lusaka, our destination for this first day of the two-day drive back to Lilongwe, we stopped in Choma at a Zambia history museum. While few of us really wanted to go visit a museum, the cost was only 5000 ZK, or about $1, so we went it. It was more interesting that I had imagined, particularly the section outlining the history of government from colonial to modern times. I guess because he brought the modern world to Africa, and to Zambia in particular, David Livingstone is still regarded as a hero. We spent about 1 ½ hours there. Caitlin bought a basket or something; I don’t recall exactly.
We stopped on the road later for lunch, and I couldn’t stomach eating the egg sandwich that Soup had prepared; I was still suffering from fever and diarrhea. I forced myself to eat an apple, and had some of the peanut butter cookies that Caitlin had bought the week before, and that we still had with us. Later on, we passed by a coffee plantaion, which was one of the nicest collections of buildings I saw on this whole trip...excluding the expensive gated hotels that we passed by several times in the Livingstone area. We also passed by a nickel ore mine. So there seemed to be more industrial diversity in Zambia than Malawi.
When we got to Lusaka, we stopped at the same mall as we had on the way out. This day happened to be a national holiday…”Womens’ Day”… and so a lot of the stores (most, in fact) were closed. We did go to the grocery store in the mall, and I bought a chicken salad sandwich and a Pepsi (first one I’d seen) for a total of $2, because I was hungry by this time. This tasted a lot better to me than the lunch from earlier, but I was starving. Eating didn’t fix my other digestive problems, though.
We arrived at “Pioneer Camp” about 20 Km east of Lusaka. Just like every other backpacker lodge, this place had a gated entrance, swimming pool, bar, restaurant, and camping area. It had been purchased a few years earlier by…surprise…a South African. This gentleman seemed fairly nice, though, and was quite young for such an investment…maybe early thirties. There was evidence that the owner was working to improve his investment…there were signs of landscaping activities going on, and the toilets and showers showed indications of recent upgrades and repairs. In the bar area, he had a collection of flags hanging down from the ceiling…US, Canada, New Zealand, Korea, and, oddly enough, Vermont, which had apparently been mail-ordered. So the owner was into his flags. At this lodge/campground, in the covered area where we took our meals, there was a pool table with two tipless cues. Caitlin and I played one game of pool on the wobbly, non-level table. The rest of the night, and a good part of the next morning, Edson and Soup played pool on this table. The defficiencies of the table seemed not to bother the two of them in the least.
We ended up with the other tent for the evening. It had not been swept of its ant carcasses, so we did what we could to clean it out. With the mats, it didn’t need to be perfect. Dinner was chicken and rice, and was actually pretty good. We had bought sodas at the bar and had mixed drinks with the remaining sachets of hard liquor. Did I mention that each sachet was about 4 ounces of spirits, at about 25 cents each? I had rum and coke on this night. We sat and enjoyed the pleasant weather in the open-air bar. I noted that there were generally fewer insects bothering us than would have been the case in Maryland. It was on this night that Kristin got the news that she may be getting kicked out of the Peace Corps. This was because she had misled the director, Vic ( who I have mentioned before), as to when she would be returning from this safari trip, since she was one day short on her vacation time. So when he found out about this, which had just happened on this day, he was none too happy. The truth had become known to Vic when Kristin’s father, being alarmed when he couldn’t contact her in Zambia because the phone SIM cards apparently didn’t work, reacted by contacting the Peace Corp offices. Each time he had tried to call her, he had gotten a man’s voice speaking Chichewa, and he had assumed the worst. The voice he got was probably an operator, but, rather than call the safari company directly (and he had been the one making the safari reservations), he called the Peace Corp office, first in Washington, and then in Malawi. So Kristin was threatened with termination. (As far as I know, this never happened.)
When we retired to the tents, the Jack Russell terrier that had earlier adopted Caitlin (he had jumped into her lap and had fallen asleep at the bar area) slept outside the door flap of our tent. He stayed there the whole night, even though there was a lot of dew. He was there when I got up in the middle of the night for a call of nature (still having diarrhea). (When he drove out in the morning, he followed the car to the gate, and I worried that he would follow us out of the compound. He did not.)
At night as we lay in the sleeping bags in the tents, we listened to the sounds of nature. There was a new sound…that of something flying through the camp site, and between the tents. The flying animal or insect emitted a repetitive beeping sound, and as it flew through the area, we could hear the Doppler shift of the beeping. It sounded like the bird or bat or insect flew through at maybe 30 mph or so. Several of these things flew through, one at a time, over the hour or so that I lay awake. The sisters heard this too, and remarked about the sounds the next morning. We had not heard this before.
Tuesday March 9 Day 20.
It was a bad night for diarrhea. I had to get up maybe 4 times; a bit embarrassing, too…since sound travels when it’s quiet. I finally took some anti-diarheals and my last Cipro antibiotic (Caitlin would later give me more for the trip home to the US). Breakfast was hard-boiled eggs and toast; I could take the toast, but not the eggs. The peanut butter made a decent protein substitute for me. This would be the last day of Soup’s cooking, which was maybe adequate to keep us from starving, but which lacked a bit of creativity. I wonder how things might have been had there been more than just the four of us on this leg of the tour. (Edson told us that they had had as many as 20 in some past tours).
We were on the road by 6:30, and passed by “Bridge Camp”, where we had stayed 5 days earlier on the way out, about 9. We got to Chipata by 1:30, and stopped because Caitlin wanted to mail a postcard from Zambia. We crossed into Malawi by 4 pm, with no real hassles (although Edson was hassled a bit about the license tag or the car’s markings indicating it had originated in South Africa). Back in Lilongwe, Caitlin got money from her stateside account, and we went to “Don Brioni’s”, an “Italian” restaurant within walking distance from the Mufasa. Caitlin had a hamburger, which tasted pretty good, while I had seafood pasta, which was OK, but not great. The host himself, who was maybe 70 with a British/SA accent, came out to mingle with his guests. He seemed nice.
Back at Mufasa, the inn was loaded with Danes, as we knew it would be (having been told this when we had last checked out and made these reservations). We were in a dorm room crammed with other PCV’s, and I ended up on a top bunk above Duncan, Caitlin’s friend who wants my Yamaha 650 motorcycle (I had promised it to him). Curiously, he wants it for the same reason I had kept it all these years…to convert it into a hard-tailed chopper. I liked Duncan, tattoos and all. We played Bao after dinner. It was a bit strange, being a middle-aged geezer among a hoard of 20-somethings of both sexes sharing the same sleeping dorm.
Wednesday March 10 Day 21
It was noisy in the morning, with all the crazy Danes. They were all leaving that day, and Caitlin and I ended up in a 6-person room for only the two of us that night...which was nice. After breakfast, we went to the market, bought a cloth, and went to a tailor to have a shirt made. Caitlin wanted this for me. The tailor finished the shirt at 4 o’clock, at a cost of $6. Caitlin had sketched out what she had in mind, and the tailor took measurements after agreeing on the price.
We went to the PC office, picked up the luggage bag I had left, and went to McDouds’ for lunch. McDoud’s was a ripoff copy of MacDonald’s, run by, an Indian entrepreneur. Lucky for him McDonald’s doesn’t have a franchise in Malawi. The food was pretty good, and was very reasonably priced. On the way back to the Lodge, we stopped at the wood carvers to negotiate for carved hippos. Caitlin eventually got the two for 1000 MK…or $6. The opening price had been 1200 MK each. Back at Mufasa, we packed the bag I had brought for souveniers, the one we used to carry scuba equipment in past years, with all the unbreakable items. I would keep the breakables with me (coffee cup and vase). I gave Caitlin my compact sleeping bag and windup flashlight, both of which she expressed an interest in. We retired around 10. I dumped my present shirt, and wrapped in in a plastic bag, because something, either insects or rash, was attacking the skin on my arm where the sleeve had been rolled up. I was concerned there was something on the shirt that was causing an allergic reaction, like poison ivy. I would end up with remnants of this rash or series of insect bites for weeks and weeks.
Thursday March 11 Day 22.
We arose around 7:30, had breakfast, and then carried all our stuff to the PC office. I assembled both of my backpack/suitcase bags together. Caitlin carried the souvenier bag for me most of the way. At the PC office, Caitlin checked email, and announced that Alicia had written her a lengthy tirade which eventually indicated that she didn’t want Caitlin accompanying her to Tanzania. Probably my resisting taking any of her belongings home with me to give to her mother had some affect on this whole relationship, but frankly, I’d be happy if Caitlin didn’t go to Tanzania because she would have had to return solo.
We walked to the minibus stop, and got on the second of two choices because it was ready to go. On the bus, the passenger next to me asked the usual questions, and complimented Caitlin on her Chichewa. This first leg cost 200MK…about $1.20…for both of us. On the bus was a large bag of fish, and a large basket of fruit that a woman had been carrying on her head before she boarded, as well as a mixture of men and women. At the transfer point for the next mini-bus, Caitlin suggested trying to hitch, since a bus wasn’t ready to depart for the direction of the airport yet. A Toyota or Lexus Suv stopped right away. Along with the two of us, a third man, dressed in a suit, climbed into the back seat beside me. I put my luggage in the middle of the seat. It turned out that the driver was an off-duty taxi driver. He took us all the way to the airport door (something the minibus would not have done) for 100 MK each…same as the minibus had cost. He carried on a conversation with Caitlin in English the whole way. (Note: normal taxi fare from Lilongwe to the airport is $15, according to Lonely Planet. So you can see what the PC volunteers do to save money).
At the airport, we wrapped the two bags I would check in saran wrap ($3 each), and I checked in. There was no $20 departure tax (one had been expected), so I gave Caitlin that $20, along with all the money I had left except for $100. We sat on the upstairs balcony, had ice cream and a couple of sodas, and waited for the plane to arrive. Caitlin mentioned that she had been surprised when I had arrived three weeks earlier at how gray my hair was, and I gave her my take on watching parents age when you only see them in snippets.
The plane to S.Africa arrived first, followed 5 minutes later by the plane to Kenya (mine). We hugged and said our goodbyes at the security gate, I told Caitlin to take care, be vigilant, and to try to be home for Christmas. I had trouble fighting back the tears; I couldn’t tell what her state of mind was, but I think it might have also been hard on her to see me go. I went downstairs, and waiting to board the plane. I ended up exchanging a few words with Shannon (Kristen’s sister from the safari trip) in the waiting area, who was on the SA plane, and then I boarded.
Nairobi looks very hot and dry from the air. The airport is quite larger than the Malawi airport, and was enclosed. As I had a long layover, the transfer process was not immediately obvious. I made my way to the British Airways lounge. While waiting, I had to use the bathroom. It was interesting to see the facilities in Nairobi. It was as if they had taken an ordinary toilet at sunk it until the lip was even with the ground. You had to squat to use it, similarly to the outhouses at Caitlin’s site in Malawi. But there was water and a flush mechanism. I guess it was done that way because that was what the people were used to.
The greeter at the British Airways lounge wouldn’t let me in, since I was (horrors) in steerage on the plane, but she did tell me where to go to check on my bags (being re-checked to get into the computerized tracking system). So I waited, had a coke, and wrote in my journal. Finally, at 6, I got a boarding pass and seat assignment, and at 9 I got new baggage claim tickets. The gate opened at 10, and after going through two x-ray machines and a pat-down, I waited in the boarding area. The plane left on time. On this BA flight, there was dinner (pasta chicken…OK) and breakfast (pancakes and the worst sausage I’ve ever seen). We got to London on time, and I got from terminal T5 to T1 (Heathrow is enormous) by bus. Because my flight was “Continental, operated by United”, I was unsure what the flight number would be. But I managed to check into the proper flight. The flight was uneventful, long, and uncomfortable. I had a window seat, and so had to ask the aisle seat holder (no middle seat) when I wanted to get up. I did watch a movie this leg of the trip.
Arriving 30 minutes early to Dulles, I wondered if Mary would be there yet. It turned out that she already knew this..she had checked the flight status on-line…and going through immigration took a long time (I had gone to the bathroom to brush my teeth and do other things, and so I ended up at the end of a 3-plane wave of people).
Mary, my wife, best friend, and soulmate, was faithfully waiting for me when we exited the immigration area. It was great to be home. I wanted to kiss the ground.
Saturday, April 10, 2010
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