December Vacation – (Lilongwe to Nkhata Bay)

Waking on the twenty-fourth, we find the tent and half of the food covered with ants. After salvaging what is left of the food and brushing off the tent, we figure a cooked breakfast is in order and order from the kitchen at Kiboko. We have breakfast with Dani and her family and make a rough plan for the morning. The three of us need to change money since, as demonstrated by last night, it is dangerous for us to do these conversions and negotiations in a completely foreign currency. We decide that Dani-family will go to the bus depot and find a ride while we go to the exchange bureau and get our monetary woes sorted.

Lilongwe is a bustling condensed metropolis that is the stereotypical of a big African city. There are big buildings, some intact, some with entire sides missing. Most roads have a constant stream of buses, taxis, delivery trucks, and the odd private vehicle dodging everywhere. Most people who are outside are either walking or manning one of the hundreds of informal street vendor stalls that line the roads. It is obvious that the city itself started out as a village on the banks of a small river and slowly ballooned, spreading into the wild network of roads and paths that became the capital.

Robin, Angie and I walk down the road to the roundabout at the edge of downtown. Turning left, we walk parallel to what is left of the river. There are several people bathing and doing laundry in the brown waters near the open market on the shore opposite from us. Since it’s a Sunday, the formal businesses are barred up and dark while the streets continue to be a buzz of activity. I think about the contrast to Namibia. Even in Windhoek, walking around downtown on a Sunday is like walking through at three in the morning, except without the fear of getting mugged. Everything is closed and no one is on the streets. In Namibia, I have written off being able to go anywhere except the market or a bar. Even then, the market is only open until mid day. So we walk up the street, turning down wooden craft offerings (despite the “good price”) and dodging buses in search of somewhere legal to change our money. We wander up to a change bureau but they’re closed. The guard asks what we need and says that his friend will be there soon and can help us. Not quite sure what the laws are about changing money on the streets, but wary even if it does turn out to be legal, we walk to the ATM and I use my bank card from Namibia. Thankfully, that works, though I’m scared to ask what the international withdraw fee will be. When I get back I’ll see that it wasn’t that bad and we got a decent exchange rate so it all turned out fine.

A huge wad of cash bulging out of my pocket, we turn to make our way to the bus station. We go back down past the same carving vendors we turned down before and reach the roundabout we originally turned on to run parallel to the river. This time we turn left and cross the river, waving at the naked men washing themselves in the water. How dirty do you have to be to consider washing in the murky waters of a major metropolitan city? I mean, this river makes Green Lake (for the Seattle crew) or Capitol Lake (for the Oly crowd) look like sterile bodies of water, fit for doing surgery in.

We cross the river and turn right towards the mass of engine sounds that are down at the end of the block. We are supposed to find Dani, her dad and her sister. Three white people waiting for a bus, no problem right? The road we are on runs straight and then makes a ninety degree turn left. At that turn is a dirt and mud patch about fifty yards by twenty yards full of minibuses (similar to old Volkswagen vans) packed in tight. The outside of the turn is no better with more minibuses lining the road. Taxis are flying through with no regard for human life. Hey, if you’re outside the car, you are not a paying customer. Rounding the turn, we look down the block at more street vendors and a wall of taxis where the road meets another road at a t-junction. I can just make out that there are more minibuses around the corner. Think of the traffic after a big concert is over but everyone is driving a white minibus with some goofy tag line on the front like, Fast Hauler, Comfort Mover, Trust In God, or Cambodia Express. This might be difficult.

We ask one of the drivers where the buses are that are going to Mzuzu or Nkhata Bay in hopes that there might be some method to this madness. He leads us away from the large mass of minibuses and towards the t-junction with the taxi rank. Around the corner from the taxi rank is another mass of minibuses lining the road, but these have signs on the front telling where they are going. By some miracle, we find Dani waiting outside one of the buses. Thankfully, the bus is getting full so we probably won’t have much time to wait. Looking inside the bus, I can barely make out Dani’s dad and her sister sitting in the back rows. I briefly entertain the idea of what it would be like to take my parents and sister on a trip like this and quickly decide they’d probably rather read about it. The driver, or at least one of his lackeys, stuffs my bag under a couple of seats, Angie’s is crushed under the back door, which is tied shut with a cut fan belt, and Robin’s becomes padding inside the door once all twenty of us are inside. The minibuses have three rows of seats that fit four people across each. The front row is another four person row, but it is a bench facing backwards. This is a difficult row because to fit all four people across both rows that face each other, you have to alternate knees similar to how gears mesh. So everyone gets to put their knee in the crotch of the stranger they face for the next five hours. The front consists of the driver and two passengers. But wait, that’s only nineteen people! The twentieth guy is the money man who sits next to the door and deals with the fares and whether or not the door opens. He will sort of crouch or stand sideways in the step depending on how full the minibus is.

Since we are some of the last people to show up, Angie, Robin and I get to fill the front row facing backwards. This seat is especially fun, not only because of the knee-crotch meshing action, but because this particular bus has a small storage compartment for the driver over our heads. This reduces head room enough that my options are to lean way back until my head can stick up next to the driver, cock my head sideways like a confused dog or lean way forward and put my face into the big burlap sack sitting on my neighbor’s lap. I end up alternating between all three for the duration of the trip.

We took the main north-south highway through Malawi driving north from Lilongwe to Mzuzu. The homes in Malawi are mostly brick with thatched grass roofs or circular mud huts made out of large tree limbs. There are some large forests here with, I was so excited about this, pine trees! Logging in this section of the country seemed to make up a large part of the economy. I wonder about if the timber management is better than what we see a lot of in the states. It is obvious that the Malawians are using more of the trees that are cut down. I see fences made from the small curved section of the tree that is cut off to make the board flat on both sides and the scraps are used for cooking fires.

When we reach Mzuzu, we pull into the bus station and start unloading. As we stand next to our bags deciding the next move, the last woman gets out of the bus and I hear someone squawking. I turn around and see that the woman is carrying a chicken. She had had it on the bus the whole time. Dani’s sister had actually stepped on it when she got on, but that was long before we had arrived.

We wanted to get straight to Nkhata Bay which means we didn’t get to see any of Mzuzu except the bus station. The bus station is an open parking area with shops around the outside and a covered strip down the middle. It smells a like a combination of a bus station toilet and a rotting garbage heap, probably because it serves both of those purposes in addition to being the transportation hub of the area.

A bus was going straight to Nkhata Bay but only had room for two so we opted to wait for the next one. It was about an hour wait, but it gave us time to buy bananas and corn from kids for lunch and I picked up a SIM card for my phone. Once we filled our bus, we started the decent from the mountains around Mzuzu down to the shores of Lake Malawi. The farms along the way are tucked up onto hill sides so the crops are all on small terraced rows. Most of the crops look like corn with an occasional banana or mango grove. I’m slightly frustrated by the fact that we have to pay exorbitant prices for mangoes and bananas in Namibia while they are literally falling from the sky here. It’s the same as my frustration with our cheese situation. We can get all forms of cow meat and milk, even sour milk, and yet our cheese selection is limited to expensive cheddar or really expensive imports. Moving on, we get to a police road block and we have to open the back so they can check… I haven’t the foggiest, but they really like checking it, whatever it is. Being in the back seat this time, with much more head room I might add, we have to hold the bags in while the back is opened. With the back open, the officer asks where we are going.
“Nkhata Bay” I proudly declare, attempting to appear like the ideal harmless, friendly, tourist. I don’t know why, but this is the first time I’ve been questioned by one of these check point officers and I really have no idea what they are supposed to be doing.
“You’re in Nkhata Bay. Where are you going from here?”
Oh. Crap, this is a tough one… I wasn’t expecting this level of conversation and we certainly haven’t planned that far ahead. “A backpacker’s place…?” Must have been the right answer because he grunted, adjusted the machine gun on his shoulder and the driver tied the back hatch shut again.

We get dropped in the middle of town next to the markets and the maize grinding shop. Nkhata Bay is a village that is set down between two ridge lines that run down to the water. There is a small stream that flows out of the mountain and I imagine was responsible for carving out this much flat land next to the water. Like much of the country, the town is extremely densly populated with only four or five of the roads wide enough to accommodate a compact car, and only two or three could fit the delivery trucks driving through. The majority of the town lies in the basin between the two ridges with some houses and other facilities like the post office and bank extending up the northern ridge along the main road. There is a spit of land that extends out from the town center into the bay and has a few of the upper end hotels, some high income houses, a scuba diving place, and the dock that serves the Ilala ferry which runs up and down Lake Malawi. All the roads are dirt except for the main one that runs into town from the ridge and even that turns to dirt after it hits the town center. With the town center occupied by small shops and markets, the lodging places are mostly at the north and south ends of town pushed into the hill sides next to the water.

Angie, Robin and I are planning on staying at a place near town called Big Blue on the main road and Dani and her family are heading south to a place outside of town called Myoka Village. We bid our goodbyes although we’ll probably see each other in town later. We walk the five minutes down up the hill to Big Blue and make the long decent down the stony staircase to the water. There’s no camping available so we get a little grass chalet at camping rates. The chalets are set on wooden stilts on the rocks along the shore. The walls are made of grass reeds woven into a wood frame. It’s a decent place but we decide to check out some of the other places around. We walk south through town and down to the other places that dot the water front. We walk past Myoka Village because the outside just looks pretty expensive and head down to Butterfly Lodge which isn’t a lodge at all. Spread out over a long section of the shore, Butterfly is a series of small huts with a few grassy areas to camp right next to the water. We decide that this is a better place and will move over tomorrow night. We have dinner at Big Blue and crash for the night.

Merry Christmas! We pack our stuff and walk through town to Butterfly and set up our tents. It’s a pretty lazy day for us so we walk through town to see the sites and get some credit for my phone. Nkhata Bay is a nice little town that seems to have two sides. One, in town, is a quiet village with people going about life. Not much for the normal tourist to do. There are none of the museums or cultural centers that we had seen in many of the other towns. In that way, it feels much more authentic and a nice place to visit. The other side of Nkhata Bay is caused by the lack of high end lodges and influx of budget establishments. This has caused Nkhata to attract only one type of traveler: the Backpacker.

The Typical Backpacker – A description inspired by Nkhata Bay and co-written by Megan Kenny. The typical Backpacker is usually in their twenties to early thirties (or at least acts this age). Both genders usually wear sandals (more-likely-than-not Chacos, Birkenstocks won’t handle the aqueous terrain…), if any shoes at all, and there is a fifty-fifty chance of their hair being either in dreadlocks or “traditionally” braided, or some messed up combination of both, covered by a piece of ethnic looking cloth. The male will usually have a tattoo of some Celtic print on a shoulder or his upper back so as to be easily covered by a button down shirt when he returns home. His facial hair will be slightly grown out in one part of his face, but it should be obvious that he has done no beard management in the past week. If he wears a shirt at all, it will have the sleeves cut off. Shorts or pants must have cargo pockets to carry his papers (not the travel visas) and his leather bound mini-notebook (preferably the Moleskine notebook, a la Hemingway but bought at Barnes & Noble) where he’s writing his memoir. The female Backpacker will have “freed” herself from any sort of body hair regimens, though nothing will yet be long enough to braid or dread. She will have at least one piercing on her face that she fiddles with incessantly. She wears exclusively tank tops and traditional print fabric wraps, which were made in China. Since she doesn’t have any pockets, she is always carrying her abnormally large hemp purse, displaying the logo of some philanthropic organization and patches from half a dozen countries (few of which she has spent more than one night in). Inside, she carries her favorite pipe and ‘stash’ in the hidden pocket along with her herbal lip balm and sketch book. Both male and female are always ready with a ten minute description of how they are traveling through (insert continent or region) after studying (literature/philosophy/southwestern Chinese history of the Ming to Wong dynasties) before heading back to work at their (father/mother/uncle)’s (company/firm/warehouse). They can say ‘hello’ in fifteen languages but know nothing about the history of where they are, or have been, beyond how “the western colonialists came in and ruined these beautiful native lands.” They love getting immersed in the native culture by watching a staged traditional dance while having a meal of vegetarian pizza and imported beer. Unlike the more widely known Tourist, the Backpacker is rarely seen in town, as they prefer to reside at the bar of wherever they are staying to work on their (memoir/poetry/tennis-ball-on-string spinning).

The Backpacker prefers to stay at a place run by ex-patriots of some western country. This is a place where they can feel validated by other similarly shallow, like minded people. The typical backpacker establishment boasts much Bob Marley paraphernalia because he is apparently the backpacker icon. The backpacker may claim a special preference to reggae as a genre but usually can only quote from Bob Marley Legend and has no idea about what Rastafarianism really entails. (Not that I do either, but that’s not the point ‘cause I’m not trying to emulate the lifestyle…) Similar to the Backpacker, these managers can be identified by their abnormally dark complexion and leathery skin caused by five to seven years of sitting in the sun. Beyond that, they generally fit the description of the typical backpacker, though they may appear slightly less out of touch with the local people. This, however, is an illusion since most of the local people they interact with are the stoned craftsmen who sell ‘traditional herbs’ and things hanging from hemp string. In reality, the manager of the backpacker establishment is really just a Backpacker who has stayed so long at one place that he or she was given a job. When the previous manager realized they had wasted over half a decade sitting on a rock, smoking pot and listening to drum circles, they grabbed their stuff and fled. The locals working at the establishment looked to the next white person who had been there the longest and assumed that person was in charge. Thus the vicious cycle of the backpacker establishment continues. Beware in these establishments, however enjoyable they may be. Like Never-Never Land, these places can cause you to revert back to a juvenile state of mind and forget that you are becoming a leach that promotes an equally bad, albeit slightly different, view of the typical western traveler.

But let’s forget about all that for a moment. Lake Malawi is used mainly as a source of fish for the residents. In town, there are all sorts of different dried fish sitting in small piles with flies crawling across them. You can get everything from a handful of tiny silver fish no bigger than a pea pod all the way up to a raw Chombo which is about as long as your fore-arm but much more boney. The fish are caught by Malawians in dug out wooden canoes that dot the water most hours of the day. The Dani crew had moved over from Myoka Village to Butterfly since Myoka was booked for the following week. With nothing else to do the day after Christmas, Dani and I thought it would be a good idea to swim out to some of the fishermen to see if they would let us paddle around with them. A series of rocks jut above the surface of the water off the shore next to Butterfly and a few fishermen were near there so we decided to give it a shot. We swam out to the nearest boat and said, ‘hi’. The man in the boat seemed happy to see us, but I think he didn’t quite understand our motives. Plus, after holding onto the side of the boat, I was unsure as to whether or not it would support all of us inside and whether or not we would tip it. It was a fun little swim anyway. I got up on one of the rocks that was just peaking above the surface and dove in. Now, I had worn my sunglasses skydiving over Swakopmund and rafting on the Zambezi and they had stayed on without incident so I had been swimming with them for the past two days, also without incident. Then I was an idiot and dove. Arching my back to come up to the surface, they came off and sank like the little metal frames they are. Cursing myself, we swam back to shore, stopping off at another set of rocks to say hi to another kid standing and fishing.

That night, we go to dinner at a restaurant in town called Mr. and Mrs. Restaurant. The menu consists of fish, meat, or chicken served on either rice or nsima (think about an ‘n’ sound and say ‘see-ma’). Nsima is a pounded corn meal heated with water to make something similar to grits, only much more firm. You eat with your hands by pulling off a part of the nsima and making it into a ball and then dip it in the juices of whatever you are eating. Anything not picked up by the nsima is also eaten by hand, though I try to eat the solid food faster so that I make sure to have enough nsima to get everything off my plate. Two big helpings of nsima with three hunks of well seasoned meat and a pile of boiled spinach was more than enough to fill me and cost about $1. After the meal, the owner wants to meet us. He says he is really happy to have Americans in his restaurant and would like to show us his house. We arrange to have breakfast with him the day after tomorrow and will meet at his restaurant. We take a picture with his wife and some of the staff before leaving.

The next morning, the water is pretty calm so I borrow some snorkeling gear with the intention of looking for my glasses. While I change into swim wear and get out to the rocks, the weather picks up and it takes a lot of energy just to stay in the general area where I lost the glasses. In addition, I still have a little left over fear from the Zambezi incident and have no desire to dive the ten or twelve feet down under water and feel around on the rocks. I swim back to the shore, tired and discouraged. I resolve to try again tomorrow early before the waves pick up. We ran out of money again so we have to go into town to the bank. This is a hot and sticky walk in the middle of the day, but we are rewarded with a long wait in an air conditioned building. On the way back from the bank, I stopped off at the scuba diving place in town called Aqua Africa. The dive instructors there said that it was a possibility and I should come back tomorrow at ten to see if someone would be available.

The next morning, the waves were even worse than the previous day so we go into town to meet up at the Mr. and Mrs. Restaurant again. Robert (Mr.) is there and we have breakfast with him at the restaurant. We are just waiting for his wife to come back and then we’ll go. Time continues to pass and it becomes apparent that I won’t have time if I expect to get back to Aqua Africa in time to catch the divers between lessons. We reschedule for that night and I head back to Aqua Africa while Angie and Robin go back to Butterfly. I’m sitting at Aqua Africa for about two hours when the instructors get back and then another hour sitting on the picnic table outside waiting for their lesson to be over. All of the sudden both are outside and say, “Ok, ready to go?” Of course! They suit up and I go with them into the boat. Since I have no qualifications, I’m essentially paying for what it would cost for me to go (if I had qualifications) with one of them but in my place, the other instructor is going. Whatever, works for me. We buzz out to the rocks and I show them where I dove in, what direction I was facing, and which direction the waves were going at the time. They roll in and I watch the bubbles on the surface to see where they are. We are about twenty feet from the rock I dove off. Their bubbles slowly go to it, turn around, and come back to the boat. One surfaces and holds my sunglasses up! Yes! Matt 1, Lake Malawi 0! The lenses are fine aside from a little nick next to the nose piece. The ear pieces took the most beating though they are still comfortable. Lesson learned: skydiving? Fine. Rafting? Slightly more risky. Swimming? Not with glasses on. It seems like the slower the movement, the higher the likelihood of my glasses will come off.

Spirits high, I head back to Butterfly to change and get ready for our dinner with Robert and Mercy. The three of us walk into town and start to get followed by a skinny little white dog. The dog follows us to meet Robert at his restaurant and after some brief ‘hellos’, we start the walk to his house, dog following at our heels. During the walk, he tells us that the restaurant is his small business and his main job is becoming a pastor with their local church. A small bell goes off in my head. Another ten feet and he asks it: “So what religion are you?” After spending a year in Namibia, I feel like I could politely fend off Pat Robertson on the religion questions. I tell him the truth that I don’t follow a specific religion. I think he respected my answers, but the conversation would continue to revert back this way for most of the evening. At one point before dinner, he had me read a section out of the bible about how people who don’t believe Jesus is the son of god are heathens. Honestly, Robert impressed me because it was apparent from his house that he was a deeply religious man, with the gospel music playing, the Jesus pictures on the wall, and bibles in two or three languages within arms reach. But he wanted nothing more than to present what he thought, briefly, and then hear my honest answer. And when I gave it, he didn’t try to poke holes in it, he just accepted it as my view and that was all.

Anyway, we got to meet his family and all his kids and grandkids. The dog slept on the floor through dinner, which was meat and nsima. After dinner, we took a few more pictures with the family, woke the dog up, and walked back to town. Robert and Mercy live on the northern ridge going out of town so they walked us back to the town center where we continued, with the dog, back to Butterfly. When we got to butterfly, the dog split off and disappeared into the night. Mysterious? A little. But I didn’t spend enough time in Nkhata Bay to make it poetic or symbolic.

We would stay one more day in Nkhata Bay before heading south. It was a lazy day and uneventful. Although our time there was a lot of fun and I would recommend visiting Nkhata Bay, it was getting old. Time to move on with our vacation!