December (January?) Vacation – Zambia (Round Two)

We got up early on the second to run some errands before going to the bus zoo to find a ride to Mchinji that is next to the Zambian boarder. We are traveling with two other Malawian PCVs who are going back to their sites. Four Zambian PCVs were going the same way and had arrived in Lilongwe yesterday, but we wouldn’t meet up with them for the rest of our trip. We went to the same bus parking area in town we had gone to with Dani’s family and found a bus that had Mchinji written on the front. We were the first five people so it would be a long wait. The first time we were here, we were the last three people to fill up the bus so we left relatively soon. This time, we got a long wait and came to appreciate the bus window vendors who walk around through the buses trying to sell things. To get your attention, the vendors make a sort of short hissing sound, the way you would imitate a snake, or slowly leaking gas line. So I’m sitting there, minding my own business when I hear a “tss… tss… tss…” over my shoulder. There is a guy standing there holding cell phone pouches and lanyards. I can definitely say at this point, I have no use for either of those. As the hours roll on, we would be offered everything from the normal (corn, water, candy, and bread) to the functional (toothbrush/toothpaste combos, cell phone chargers, pens) to the completely random (shower caps, umbrellas, girl’s underwear).

If you have read everything up to here (thank you, and I’m so sorry) you know that getting back into Zambia was going to be a problem for one of us. The other two had just enough days left on the multiple entry visas that we could get in, but one had expired back in December. Paul, who was supposed to make everything alright, was no where to be seen so we had to go with our powers of luck and charm. We filled out our entry forms all with the exact same information down to how much we estimated to be spending in Zambia. We would come up with our passports open in an order of one, two, and three. The first two people were supposed to get the boarder guard into a rhythm of stamping the visas, so when the third person got there the guard would, hopefully, not think twice and just stamp away. We approached the front with person one ready to go. There was a slight confusion with counting up to fourteen, but the guard figured out that the visa was good. Person number one had laid the ground work. Person number two came up with the exact same visa and turned on the charm. By the time person two’s visa had been stamped, the guard was laughing and joking like an old friend. Person three walked up and the guard glanced at the entry form only long enough to stamp it. It looked like we were in business. Holding the stamp up, he paged through person three’s passport. Then he put the stamp down. The three of us took a breath in and held it. He had turned back from the page person three had left open for him and was going through all the other visas. He came to a stop on the Malawian visa, grabbed the stamp, slammed it on the passport and told the three of us to have a nice day. You know in cartoons when people leave quickly and there is a cloud in the shape of their body still standing there? I think that’s what we left behind.

We walked across the border and were immediately offered a ride by a Zambian couple who were heading into Chipata. This was perfect, seeing as we had no money in Zambian kwacha and didn’t feel like dealing with money changers on the street, or negotiating yet another ride in rand. We got dropped in the middle of Chipata, across the street from the taxi corral we had stopped at the first time we came through. No one rushed us this time, but I think it was obvious we were heading the other direction. We went into a small change bureau to get some Zambian money. The other bureaus we had been at required a passport and had at least some sort of security at the front. This one was just a room with two women sitting behind desks with a large calculator (shared) and the current exchange rate written on a white board. They didn’t want our passports, and certainly had no way of giving us a receipt. I think we had just used the most official looking informal change bureau in the entire country. Whatever, we got our money and it was useable.

We walked to the place where we had ended up in the big bus taxi race from the previous week in hopes of finding a bus to Lilongwe. There was nothing in the parking area except coke (the drink) trucks. I asked one of the drivers, Moses, about what we should do for a ride. He gave us all the information we could need: the correct cost, where to buy tickets, when the next bus would leave (not till tomorrow) and where to stand out on the highway if we wanted to try and hitch. So a guy named Moses gave us all the information we would need to get out of this town. We followed Moses’ advice and walked for forty… minutes… down the road before a bus stopped and let us on. Hmm… someone should write a book about that, or something.

This bus was a full on long haul bus. Large, with room underneath for luggage and high backed seats that reclined straight into the lap of the person behind you. The bus did, however, follow the same pattern as the smaller buses. We still stopped every ten to twenty kilometers to load or unload people or things. This was a little nerve racking since our stuff was in the storage compartment and we couldn’t see what was going on while sitting inside. I have a preference of sitting either on my bag, or at least within sight of it when I’m hiking and breaking that rule had me pressing my forehead up against the window whenever we stopped to try and see what was happening.

Since we had such a late start, we wouldn’t get to Lusaka until ten at night. That’s fine by me though, since the road going through that section of the country is extremely narrow and winding. During the night, we passed an overturned semi and I think one other accident of some kind. We got to the bus station in Lusaka and got a taxi to the backpacker’s place we had stayed at before, Chachacha’s. Tent up, we bedded down for yet another night. The climate of Malawi and Zambia this time of year is hot and wet, which had made it difficult to dry anything. Our tents were starting to smell a little, and the clothes I had washed in Lilongwe hadn’t dried and were starting to mold inside my pack. The cleanest things I had were the things I had been wearing for three days and I was starting to appreciate the excruciatingly dry and hot climate of Namibia.

We got up the next day and realized we still hadn’t changed enough money to pay our bill, so it was back into the fun filled town center of Lusaka again to change money before we left. It seemed to be the pattern for this trip that we would always be about ten percent short of the last bill we had to pay whenever leaving a country. We got the money changed and went to the bus station. On this trip to the bus station, we were able to gain a full appreciation for the madness of it. The bus station in Lusaka more resembles a small airport terminal, but without the runway. Full size tour buses are everywhere, dwarfing the small minibuses we had grown accustomed to. I can tell that there’s some sort of system here since when we say, “Livingstone” we are taken to a specific area. The large buses want 65000 for each person, but we think we can get away with fifty. The ride is short and we have all day so we just keep walking along repeating “Livingstone, Livingstone, Livingstone” until someone comes up to us. At this point, we’ve figured out the most efficient method of negotiating is to agree on the max price between the three of us beforehand and then claim to have exactly that much and no more. Dishonest? Maybe, but not anymore than negotiating down to that same price (and we are on a budget.) The guy that has grabbed my arm after I said Livingstone is dragging me towards a bus. I tell him that we can only pay fifty each. He thinks this is a bargaining opportunity and says to just make it sixty-five.
“No, we only have fifty each. I’m not trying to talk you down, this is all we have”
“Oh, just make it sixty-three and we can go.” We are starting to attract a crowd of others who also want our money. Excellent.
“No, really. Fifty is all we have and that’s it.”
“Ah, you won’t find anyone who will take you for fifty” he says.
“I will, come with me” says another man. Ha! In yo face, other guy!

We get led to a small minibus where the guy who agreed with us starts talking to another man who is holding a receipt book. The second man writes us each a receipt takes our money and loads our bags in the back. We find seats inside the almost empty bus and start waiting. After getting the bags completely squashed in the luggage spot, the man with the receipt book comes back wanting another fifteen thousand for each bag. We repeat that all we have is the fifty each. He says he’ll knock it down to ten, then seven, then five. We get up and start to ask for our money back and magically it becomes no problem and we can stay. We are the masters of negotiation! Offer three quarters of what the cost should be and then threaten to walk every time more money is asked. The only problem is that we have to stick to our story which means we can’t buy water, toothpaste, shower caps or underwear from the vendors who come to our window for the next two hours while we wait.

When we finally do get going, we do the same bus thing that we’ve done the whole trip. Stop, unload, reload and start driving. Someone comes running up to the closing door, get them in, they don’t have enough money, slow down and push them out, close door and keep going. That last part only happened once, but it was entertaining. We got to Livingstone at nine-thirty at night. We seem doomed to always arrive at our destination after dark, regardless of how early we leave. We get dinner at one of the pubs in town. Tonight, they have a live band playing, of all things, Elvis and Bob Marley covers. Over our pizza dinner, we listen to four Zambians belt out remarkably good versions of ‘Jail House Rock’, ‘Hound Dog’, and some Marley songs. I can’t remember the Marley songs since they seemed normal when compared to hearing and seeing someone do an Elvis strut that would put many Vegas impersonators to shame. The best part: the band had the requisite blind old man sitting on the side with a cane, bobbing his head to the music.

We stayed one more day in Livingstone to get our bus tickets for Intercape (the South African bus company that runs all over South Africa and parts of Namibia). And, of course, we had to go to Subway one last time. Subway had just opened when we were there the first time, so we excused the fact that they were missing at least a third of their menu. We were hoping for a little more selection this time, since they had now been open for a couple of weeks. When we got there, though, they had even less. Lettuce, tomato, pickles, any cheese except parmesan, cookies, chips, oil and vinegar were all missing. Not only that, when we tried to get them to compensate for the lack of lettuce and tomato by putting extra olives on, they refused! We are only allowed six olives per foot-long. This is a crock! They aren’t YOUR olives! Some things I’ve grown to appreciate in America are the little benefits to working for “The Man”. When you work for The Man, nothing you are selling is yours and the customer is always right. If the store ran out of a staple like lettuce, something that goes on each and every sandwich, it is your duty as the corporate worker to dump an entire olive tree on that sandwich to quell the frustrations of the customer. The Man won’t come in and make sure there are the exact number of olives on that sandwich, but you know that the customer is feeling gypped already and you have the power to decide where your relationship goes from there. You can pledge allegiance to The Man and deny olives, or you can be the hero and create a solid five minute bond with that customer and pile on olives even though both of you know you’re not supposed to. I think this is yet another skill that must be transferred to developing nations, so starting next year, I will have a few mini-lessons on the concept of The Man in western culture. If these countries are going to have places like Subway and KFC, they need the training that we, in our teenage years, take for granted: the power of the lowly food service worker to make or break any person’s day with something as simple as a hand (or fist) full of olives.

We boarded our Intercape bus on the fifth and rode that all the way back to Namibia. I got to Megan’s at a little before three in the morning to find the gate locked. So there I am, tired, dirty, and smelling fairly rank staring up at the fence I had jumped back at the start of this vacation. It’s appropriate that this is where this story will end and I will return to the ‘normal’ routine I’ve come to appreciate here in Namibia. Yes, it’s an expensive, corrupt, hot, sandy country with an unforgiving climate and could possibly have a massive overpopulation of volunteers, but it’s mine. I complain and make snide comments on most every detail, but deep down I appreciate what the country has to offer, what it has done for me and what it has changed within me.

With a running start, I javelin my bag over the top of the fence, snagging the waist belt, and sending it into a flip before crashing to the ground. I climb up and over, gingerly negotiating the two overhanging rows of barbed wire and descending the other side. If a guy with a thirty pound pack can get into this place in under two minutes, who exactly are they keeping out? Crippled old women and paraplegics? The back door is open and I quietly sneak in and crash on the floor.

Acknowledgements:
I’d like to thank Silas again for unknowingly loaning the tent, sleeping pad, and guide book. Thanks to Carl for organizing the first half of the trip and continuing to join me in doing stupid extreme sports in Africa. Thanks to the Malawi PCVs for letting us crash the New Years at their place. As their shirts say, “Quite possibly the best volunteers on the planet” (second of course to Namibia!). Thanks to Megan for letting me stay at her house for the past week to type all this madness (and letting me watch the first two seasons of ‘Lost’). Special thanks to Angie and Robin for sharing in this experience. I had a blast and I hope you did too. Finally, thanks to my parents, family, and friends back home for staying in touch and giving me the best reasons to count the days in this final year. I hope you’ve enjoyed this and I’m sorry for any and all errors, offenses, shocks and/or awes I may have caused or included. It takes me long enough to write this that I have no desire to proof read. Hats watt spell checks are four. Please submit any complaints by yelling them into the screen now. See ya!

December Vacation – Nkhata Bay to Lilongwe (The Other Way)

We left Nkhata bay on the morning of the thirtieth. We don’t have to wait too long for the bus to load, and when we leave there’s the requisite eighteen people crammed inside but with a little more luggage than our earlier rides. This time we have two large baskets of fish sitting up front and a guy in the back who has to large jugs of gasoline. With the bus stopped, the gasoline smell is bad enough that I think we would have blown up if someone had struck a match. This is relieved by the wonderful smell of rotten fish when the bus is moving with the wind pushing the petroleum smell out the back. During the seventy kilometer trip along the Lake Malawi coast line we have about an even mixture of these two, since the bus stops every two kilometers to either pick someone up, or drop them off. During the course of the trip, a wide range of people embark and disembark from our aquatic-fossil-fuel scented interior including business men, evangelicals, mothers with babies, and one old woman carrying a live chicken. I think this is a requirement of a minibus ride in Malawi. At some point on every bus, there will be a live chicken, whether you know it or not.

We had paid the cost to get all the way to Nkhotakota which is half way between Nkhata Bay and Lilongwe along the coast road. About two thirds of the way through our trip, we get to Dwangwa. We pull up to the bus stop, which is little more than a turn out with a picture of a bus next to it in the middle of town, and the bus driver says that we need to unload. Our bus is out of fuel and Dwangwa is out of fuel too. An entire town out of gasoline? No problem, we are being transferred to another vehicle that does have fuel and an additional ten people already in it. Another compact pick up ride with no canopy for the bed. To fit all the people and stuff, we have the tail gate lowered with stuff tied down to make the bed a little longer. Half of the makeshift wall is a huge basket of tomatoes and the other half is our three packs piled up. Oh, and it’s starting to rain. So the truck that was already loaded with ten people is now loaded with an additional twelve plus a baby or two. No chicken though, but this isn’t a minibus, so is not a requirement.

Before leaving, I notice something a little strange about Dwangwa. Although the town is extremely small and appears to exist within an area about two hundred yards long, most of which is an open market on one side and bottle stores on the other, there are a lot of bikes. I guess this makes sense because the town obviously runs out of gas often enough. It’s just shocking to see so many people riding bikes, and an entire rank of bike taxis. Oh, bike taxis are the same as normal bikes, but with a rack on the back equipped with a cushion for the comfort of someone precariously perched, trying not to get anything caught in the chain or the wheels while in motion.

The rest of the ride to Nkhotakota goes the same as when we were in the minibus, although the transfers of passengers are a little easier since there aren’t any walls to hold us in or out. At its fullest, I think we had twenty-three in the back and four in the cab plus a baby here or there. The rain stopped though, which was nice.

Nkhotakota is spread out over several kilometers and set, mostly, inland from the shore. We got dropped in what I can only assume was the town center, though we walked for at least a kilometer towards the shore and the town never really got more or less dense. Nkhotakota seems to be the last major town that hasn’t been over run with the tourist scene yet. This is fairly easy to gauge based on people’s reaction to us. In places like Nkhata Bay and Livingstone, we didn’t get a second glance since we were just another group of white people passing through. In Nkhotakota, we were stared at by several people and enough kids pointed at us that I’m pretty sure tourists are a rarity here.

We stayed at a place called Pick and Pay Lodge and Restaurant. Pick & Pay is the name of one of the supermarket chains that span across southern Africa. This is a little like calling your place the Safeway Select Motel. The rooms are… rustic. The rooms have a sort of perma-dirtiness and the mattresses need to be fumigated (by incineration). Still, a bed and a mosquito net are better than a tent since the camping area is in the parking lot and there’s high volume of trucker traffic that stays there.

Our options for eating were either the Pick and Pay Restaurant or the adjoining restaurant. We had dinner at Pick and Pay and wanted to try something new for breakfast. We sat down ready to try whatever the ‘Continental’ was and the waiter/chef/owner told us that he would be happy to make it and just wanted to know when we wanted to have it. Um… now, or in the next hour would be nice. That was a problem since he had to take our order and then go to town to buy the food, then cook it, then we could eat. So if we wanted to tell him when we wanted to eat, he’d be happy to go and get the food. We were touched, but (as politely as possible) we told him that we were leaving that morning and so kind of wanted to eat soon, like before twelve, so we went back to Pick and Pay. Breakfast was two fried eggs, toast, rice porridge and coffee. It was good, and didn’t involve waiting for someone to drive into town and buy the food.

Back out for more joys of hiking. We arrive at the bus stop to find a mostly full bus. Two guys rush us to say there’s room. The Pick and Pay manager (owner?) told us that the price should be 650 to Lilongwe. The bus initially says 750 and we say 600. They agree to 650 but when we get to the bus, there isn’t even room for just one person with a bag. That isn’t to say that all the seats are full and we’ll have to cram. No, that line was crossed long ago. There physically is not room for the three of us. Never the less, the driver tells me to sit on a seat (which has a kid on it) and then sit with my bag on my lap. The passengers start to make groaning sounds and I make it apparent that I agree with them. There is no way all of us will fit. We get out and go wait under a tree on the other side of the street. Sitting there, a kid about twelve years old starts asking us for money, then clothes, then shoes, then food. He’s selling frozen drink packets out of a cooler and I start getting irritated since ‘asking’ is more of demanding. He’s not even bothering with an attempt at looking sad and desperate and instead is just looking at us straight faced and saying, “Give me money.” I look him straight in the eye and say in my most stern teacher voice, “We will not give you anything. Stop talking.” And I stare him down until he looks away. I am a well-meaning volunteer in Africa… fear me.

After waiting about five minutes, a truck pulls up and one of the passengers comes over. We do our introductions in English and then he starts gesturing at the truck and speaking in Chichewa. Another man comes over and says that this one is insane and they want 600 for a ride to the Salima junction. The Salima junction is on the way, but still seventy kilometers from Lilongwe. We won’t pay more than 400. They blow us off and go back to the other side of the street. Five minutes later, another guy comes back and says we can go for 300. Wait, what? No, never mind. We’ll take it.

We don’t get any chickens on this ride either, but we do get six goats further down the road. At the Salima junction, we switched to another open truck and continue on to Lilongwe. This last ride is probably the smallest truck we’ve been in yet and so I’m sitting high up on our bags with most of my upper torso above the height of the cab. Since the truck is so small and we have it packed past capacity, it isn’t moving all that fast, which is good because the bugs in Malawi are big and hurt really bad when they hit you in the face.

When we get to Lilongwe, we use a map drawn by Dani to find the Peace Corps Transit House. In most other countries in southern Africa, Peace Corps has houses in hub towns where volunteers can stay for free while they are traveling. A splendid idea, especially with how dangerous it is to travel at night. Namibia, of course, has nothing like this so we stay at volunteers’ places when we travel, crashing on the floors of one bedroom apartments. Or, we get stuck and have to stay at B&Bs that have racist guard dogs… stupid Outjo. Anyway, we’re winding down a few side streets trying to find this PC House and find the corner where we think it should be. The only thing on the corner is a huge blue concrete wall ten feet high with spirals of razor wire and electrical fencing across the top. We bang on the fence and say we’re looking for the PC house. The guard has an American flag patch on his sleeve and there are signs saying that all volunteers must sign in. Must be the place.

The PC House has two wings, each with a sitting area and two bedrooms with six bunk beds in each of those. There is a kitchen, a couple porches, and enough spare mattresses and couches that the house could easily sleep twice this many. Everyone was extremely welcoming, and we quickly got into the socializing scene, being that it was New Year’s Eve and all. I think that pirated movie watching and Beer Pong are constants for Peace Corps world wide, though the Namibian Beer Pong table is probably the only one made out of a cell phone antenna.

We went out for Chinese food for dinner. I wanted to get the “Fried Crispy Pigeon” but that must be seasonal because they didn’t have it so I settled on some normal beef thing with steamed rice. After dinner, we go to a club for new years. The club is only three blocks away, but we have to take a cab because we are guaranteed to be mugged at this time of night. What is it with Peace Corps and renting buildings in dangerous parts of town? Rent must be too high in the safe areas. We dance the night away and into the morning. Two Malawi PCVs and I get a cab back to the PC house. Once there, Bethany realizes that she left her purse back at the club so we have to go back. I wait in the parking lot with the driver as a sort of deposit while she goes back inside to look for her bag. I don’t think the driver really understands my purpose there as he constantly complains that he is missing business standing there with me. I tell him to go, so he leaves his brother with me. Eventually, Bethany comes back outside saying she still hasn’t found it, but she did find some money in one of her pockets so she can pay the driver. We go back in to look one last time. Another ‘white privilege’: on our way in, we blow past the security guard and the guy taking the cover charge. I don’t think Bethany had her bag at all, but she is adamant that she never goes out without it. She goes to check the bathroom while I ask the two bartenders, who haven’t seen anything. With my mind on things getting stolen, I’m happy that I didn’t bring anything with me except my phone… which, check the pocket, is gone. It had been in my front pocket around midnight, but some time between then and now (it was probably two or three at that point) it got stolen. I’m upset for about ten seconds. Then I realize that it had a Malawian SIM card in it, so all my numbers are safely back at the house and the phone was a piece of junk anyway. I meet up with Bethany again and she has had no luck. I tell her about my phone, which was a mistake since it just got her more upset, which made me laugh more since I really didn’t care about the phone and I still didn’t think she brought the bag. We go back to the house and she checks her room. She comes back out saying that the bag was sitting on the bed. I’m sworn to secrecy, which is immediately made irrelevant as she goes out and tells everyone sitting outside. So now I might as well put it on the internet.

During the night, the pipe in the bathroom burst so the New Year started with two or three inches of standing water. This was all but cleaned up by mid-day and the rest of the day was spent watching movies and lazing about.

Next time: We make the mistake of trying to get to Lusaka in a day and how to cross a border with an expired visa (or maybe it was all a hallucination).

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!

December Vacation – Zambia (Round 1)

This is part two of many, so if you are not up to speed, don’t worry because none of this story really depends on the previous parts.

Fawlty Towers in Livingstone is a large set of buildings located about five minutes from the town center and about an hour walk from Victoria Falls which, unlike Popa Falls, are real, full on, no joke, falls. Fawlty Towers has a few dorm rooms set inside the one real “tower” which is really only two stories tall. Each dorm room has four beds and a little space to cram all the junk you brought with you. There are single and double bed rooms set around a courtyard that has a swimming pool and doubles as the camping area. One danger with camping in the Fawlty Towers courtyard: those nice shady trees overhead have mangoes about thirty feet up. A fully ripe mango falling from thirty feet is not something that many tent manufacturers plan for. Robin had set up her tent out of the blast radius so was safe and we were staying in the dorm rooms making the only mango problems the occasional ‘WHAM!’ sound from one of the neighboring corrugated metal roofs.

The next morning it was time for our rafting adventure. We had signed up for a full day of white water rafting on the Zambezi starting right after Vic Falls. We were picked up at Fawlty Towers in the morning and driven down to a different lodge where we were served breakfast, outfitted, and given the “scary talk.” The scary talk was what to do if we got into a bad place outside of the boat. Throughout the day, we would be going through everything from calm waters to class five rapids. We were in a group of about twenty five people divided between four rafts with three or four chase kayaks, a boat of other guides who were just along for the fun of it, and six other customers who were doing the river boarding deal where they spent most of the day going down on boogey boards. They were referred to as the “crocodile biscuits”.

We walked down the long hill to the start point which was an eddy pool around the corner from the base of the falls. Looking up stream you could make out the end of Victoria Falls at her full height and down stream was the bridge where the bungee jumpers were losing their lunch into the river. After getting into the boat and going over the commands with our guide, Babyface, our first task was to cross the rapids that made up our eddy pool. After the falls, the river went down a long rapid that gained speed through a narrow canal and then continued through a more open area before running smack into the wall of the canyon. When the water hit, the current split off to the left and the right. The left water came back and circled in a calm pool about ten to fifteen meters in radius, which is where we were getting into the boats. The right water continued down stream. We had to paddle up to the end of the canal and paddle like mad across the current to get far enough that the rapid would spit us out going down the river instead of circling back around in the left side pool and having to start over again.

We started out with our first attempt and failed miserably. Circling back around, we gave it another go. It was Robin, Carl, Angie, a South African guy, an Australian girl, and myself at the hollering voice of our guide saying, “Go! Go!” and then silence. We were about half way down the rapid and making no progress across it when all the other boats started yelling at us and waving. We looked behind us and Babyface had fallen out. Our first rapid of the day and we fail once and lose our guide on the second try. This is going to be good. Carl takes charge of the situation and starts saying commands, but we are at the mercy of the current at this point so it’s back into the calm waters of the left side pool for us. Third time was a charm with none of us wanting to go through that again.

The first rapid of the day was an intentional flip by all the guides. We went into the first wave sideways and the boat came up high on the left and dumped us all in and spat us out at the other end. We could read the body language of the guides so had a pretty good idea it was coming and it was probably good to get us used to the process of getting flipped and then getting back into the boat. We went through another easy rapid after that, which warmed us up for the big show. We approached the third rapid, a 4+ or 5 and got flipped at the second wave. I had been coughing water out from the previous wave when I went under so didn’t have much air in my lungs in the first place. At first, it was all dark over my head. I gulped once, and yes it is true that I cannot breathe underwater. Still dark over my head, I must be under the boat so I start flailing. Suddenly, it’s light overhead so I start swimming. Another gulp to confirm my previous hypothesis. The surface seems like a mile away. Finally my head comes up and I cough back what I took from the Zambezi only to get another mouthful from the next wave. I’m bobbing around going through more rapids. Every time I come up on the crest of a rapid I can see a little bit of what’s going on around me before I get smacked in the face with another wave. The boat is upside down behind me. Carl and Angie are holding a couple of the kayaks to my right. There are two oars around me, which I grab. Don’t really know what I was going to use those for since the boat was upside down behind me and all of my boat-mates were coughing out water and looking equally as panicked and confused as me. One of the kayakers is telling me to get my feet up and face down stream. He asks me if I’m alright. Compared to thirty seconds ago, I reply with a whole hearted, yes! I think that exchange kicked my head back into gear because I realized my sunglasses were attached to my forehead. Put those back on to help hide the dying terror that was probably still plastered to my face. I got into a rhythm of breathing before the waves and rode out the rest of the rapid, letting the river decide when I could get back to the boat.

After we reached calmer water, we regrouped and get back in the boat. It took two kayakers and a few minutes of searching to get all our paddles back. We had flipped early in the rapid and when the boat came over, the big South African guy had hit Angie in the cheek, knocking her glasses off. I must have been under the boat at first and was probably under water for only ten seconds or so, though it felt like ten minutes. Though exciting that first time, we were all in agreement that flipping sucked and we would do all we could to avoid it for the rest of the day. After that rapid, which many people either fell out or flipped on, a few decided that they would opt out after lunch and one guy bailed for the rest of the trip. That was the most difficult rapid we would run that day. We almost got into a bad spot on a different rapid where we had to stay right and then cut back left to avoid a big boulder that had the “washing machine” on the other side. We stayed right but didn’t make the turn to cut back left so we had to back paddle and get ourselves stuck up on some rocks above and to the right of the “washing machine”. Walking around, we saw what we were trying to avoid. The washing machine was a big curl of water falling about six feet high and eight feet at its widest point which curled back on a wave on the other side, sucking you right back in. It looked like it would just bounce you around in circles next to the rock until someone pulled you out from the side.

We had lunch next to the river. The company we were with brought lunch down from the rim and we ate in the sun, and attempted to reapply sunscreen, though this would prove to be futile by the end of the day. The half-day people left after lunch for the long walk back up to the road while the rest of us got back in the boats. In total, only one boat was out so we still had a fair line of people going down the rest of the river which was much tamer than the first half. That isn’t to say that I didn’t end up in the drink a few more times. I was in the middle of paddling when the boat tipped a little too much and I went over the side all alone. And for the not so accidental times, let’s just say that you shouldn’t turn your back on a river guide in calm water, especially if you splashed him with your paddle earlier in the day.

At the end of the day, we didn’t have to walk all the way up the hill. The full day trip ends where a cable car will take everyone up the steepest three quarters of the canyon, but I couldn’t see anything that would realistically stop us if the cable broke or the engine seized up. Well, I suppose the river would eventually stop us, but that’s only after crashing through a barricade of rocks and trees and then flying off a thirty foot cliff. But I’ll take it since I’m sure not walking up this stupid hill!

Back at the lodge again for dinner, we watched the raw video they had been taping all day that would be put into a DVD anyone could buy. We got to see our first (and easiest) flip but the camera stopped before our bad flip happened. The washing machine part was taped from right above where we got stuck, which was pretty cool, but we just sort of stop and then look around at each other. Being cheap, we opted out of purchasing the DVD and got a ride back to Fawlty Towers.

The next day was a laze about day to nurse our sunburns and sore limbs. We watched TV all day in the lounge and wandered around the town of Livingstone. Livingstone has a small town center with a hotel and a lot of little shops and booking places that you would expect in a tourist town. There is an open market next to the bus station that caters to the local crowd more than the tourist and was a welcome change from the open markets we were used to. The markets in Namibia usually consist of a dozen people coming up and telling you how good a price they will give you and you should come and have a look. The good price is usually twice what it should be and you are coming to have a look at the same stuff you saw at the other eleven places. This open market was different. It was a real market and not a bunch of little trinkets and souvenirs. There was a guy selling bolts and screws and a toilet next to the place selling pirated DVDs right across from the place that sold paraffin oil in plastic coke bottles. You could buy fruit, fabric, alcohol, flour, shoes, hats, phones, bath stuff, and the occasional TV or used stereo speakers. The locals looked at us not as tourists to try and hawk stuff to, but as tourists who were obviously out of place and just passing through.

That night, we went to what could be the most exciting restaurant we’ve been to yet. We were all looking forward to… Subway. That’s right, Livingstone had just opened its first Subway sandwich shop. And, oh, the beauty of corporate America! The menu was exactly the same as any Subway in the states. Granted, since they had just opened, some things were missing. Like the sun chips, cookies, and parmesan oregano bread, but we can look past that. I was still able to get a steak and cheese foot-long on honey oat bread.

We were up early the next day to try and get a hike to Lusaka. Carl took the bus back to Namibia that day since he had to get to Merry Ol’ England for his vacation. Angie, Robin and I had to move on through Zambia. The transport in Zambia is a little different than the transport in Namibia. In Namibia, there are few enough people that the mini bus drivers will pack the bus full for one destination and then leave with no room for others. In Zambia, there are enough people going to enough places that the buses we found would leave seventy-five to ninety percent full and then cram the other twenty-five to forty percent in as they pick people up on the way. Yes, that does add up to the buses being filled to only 130% capacity, but I’m not counting babies and livestock. Since any bus will stop on its way out of town, we had to walk way out of town before we could start to look for a ride. This was about a thirty minute walk with an extra ten minutes taken sitting in the doorway to a bank waiting for a downpour to pass. We eventually got a ride with a Zambian in his luxury Toyota Land Cruiser with A/C and leather interior. Tough times. It was a long way to Lusaka, but very nice to see more of Zambia. We watched the green hills and large corn farms pass and then got into the more mountainous country in the last hour heading into Lusaka.

Lusaka is a city. A big city. A really big, densely populated, bustling city with traffic jams, big buildings, buses, trucks, cars, bikes, people, fumes, and all the other things that big cities have. And it took a minute to adjust. We got dropped at Chachacha Backpackers a few blocks from the main strip. We got our tents set up and went out to change our money since the only thing we had was South African Rand. Since Angie’s glasses were sitting at the bottom of the mighty Zambezi, we had gone to an eye place in Livingstone for new glasses. They had them made in Lusaka, so she was able to do the eye exam there and choose the frames then we could pick them up in Lusaka the next day, which was today. We had the street name and a small map of the city so we set out on our errands. The main strip of Lusaka is set on the other side of the railroad tracks from the residential zone we were staying in. We walked to the nearest main road and crossed the rails to get to Cairo Road where the money changing places were. As we descended the other side of the bridge, headed for Cairo, a man walked right at Angie and ran into her. She checked her pockets and still had everything so we went on. When we reached Cairo, we headed north and had our second incident in less than a block. A man, who appeared to be a few cards short of a full deck, fell into step right next to Robin, the only person in our trio with a bag. She would slow down, he would slow down. We were all staying close so she wasn’t alone in this. Finally, after a few more speed adjustments, we all just stopped in the middle of the busy sidewalk and told him to keep moving. He started gesturing up the street and shaking his head, saying something that was unintelligible but ultimately irrelevant. After playing the slow walk game for another ten feet, we ducked into the nearest shop which was a stamp making place. The woman looked kind of surprised to see customers, but then we tried to explain that we were avoiding a mugging. We stood there for a minute or two while the guy waited outside. I started getting frustrated that we couldn’t get on with the things we wanted to do so I went and stood outside staring at him. He went back to his story about the other end of the street and kept walking. Eventually, he started to cross the street so we moved on past him. He met up with some other guy, probably his partner, and they crossed together. Two attempted robberies in one block. I suddenly don’t like Lusaka.

We had originally been trying to find this place to pick up Angie’s glasses but shouldn’t have crossed the tracks. We decided that we could just see more of the town by walking up to the next main cross street and going back across the tracks to the east and then down the street we were supposed to be on in the first place. We crossed back over and turned right down a different street but had gone too far back so we had to go in a side road to find the road we were supposed to be on. Even then, everywhere we asked had no idea of where Optic-lab was. We eventually found it tucked back behind another building within sight of the first main street we had taken to cross the railway. I’m sure that last part was pretty boring, but it was really just so that I can challenge Amy’s Dad to find out how far we walked that day.

The next morning, we got a taxi to the north end of town so we could look for a hike to the border. A security company car picked us up and said we’d have better luck at the police check point so we rode with them there. At the checkpoint the “police” (none of which were wearing uniforms) got a ride for us to the next police check point which was, again, supposed to be a better place to wait. This place at least had police who were in uniforms. Angie and I sat next to the road waiting for a ride while Robin tried to convince the police that we did, in truth, not have enough money to spend on a bus ticket all the way to Malawi. This was mostly the truth. We probably had enough money to get TO Malawi, but paying the full fare for every ride would mean that we wouldn’t have enough money on the ride back. Plus, after paying the bill at Chachacha’s, we really were running out of Zambian kwacha and didn’t want to change money again.

After about an hour, a bus from the Chipata College of Education pulled up and said we could go with him. It was an empty bus and we agreed to pay him a hundred rand total for the three of us. No where near the right amount, but when the prices are in the tens of thousands in kwacha, a hundred of just about any other currency sounds good. (Incidentally, I still have a fifty kwacha note that I use as a book mark since it’s worth about a penny.) He asked what the conversion was and we told him that it was worth about sixty thousand kwacha, depending on the day. He was fine with it, especially since the police gave him a form that said he was allowed to have passengers as he went through other checkpoints. This was the green light for him since from then on we were picking up and dropping off people right and left. It made the trip longer, but we always had enough room to lie down and nap.

We rode to Chipata and the bus driver let us off at the taxi rank that takes you the last ten minutes to the border. Worst possible place I’ve been as a white person with a bag: Chipata taxi rank. Most places the taxi drivers, souvenir salesmen, or money changers will just wave and yell to you. Here, they come runnin. One shoves a stack of bank notes in your face while another pulls your bag towards a car that is running on two spares and faith. All the while, ten others are trying to do the same thing. We had a routine down by now where we would agree on the highest price the three of us would pay before we got to the mayhem and then wait for someone to agree. If by some miracle, someone offered less than what we expected, we would go with them. In the midst of the crowd, I grabbed the nearest guy and said that we were going to the border but only had 19000 kwacha left and didn’t want to change more. The normal fair, we were told, was 10k per person, leaving us 11k short or the 30 they wanted. As usual, it took two tries to get across the idea that this was all we had and we would ride with the first person who agreed. The guy I had grabbed walked me over to a car and said it was fine. We put our stuff in and started waiting. The car never goes until there are so many people inside that it takes a collective breath in to get the doors shut. So now we had to wait as the only three customers in a frighteningly aggressive taxi rank. Angie and Robin sit inside the back seat while I occupy the money changers with both real and feigned stupidity. “Now why would I get more money with him than with you? And is this even real? Look at that eagle; it looks like a child drew it! And your money is so dirty, he’s got cleaner money.” And then some guy runs up and gets in the driver’s seat and starts the car. This isn’t the guy we talked to before. There are four other taxis that have started their engines and we are in a mad dash out of the parking lot.
“Wha? What’s going on?”
“We must get to the bus before they do” is the driver’s reply.
We’re in a race to the bus station which is three blocks away. A bus from somewhere just pulled up and we need to get every person who is going to the border. We slam out of the parking lot and cut down a side road. We turn off in between a few street vendors and splash down a potholed alley way and round the back of a building to come to a sliding halt behind a big bus. Before the car has stopped, the driver is out and repeating the same thing as before, only with Africans he is more aggressive. With us, the drivers would only pull the bags. With these passengers, they are actually taking them out of their hands. It might have helped that ours were strapped to us, but I still think that they would have dragged one of these poor souls had the bag been attached. We weren’t the first to arrive, but we have a trump card: the three of us are already in the car which means that this will be the first car to go. We cram the luggage into the back end and stuff one more (big) lady in the back with us and two more people in the front. The driver shoves the door shut on the lady sitting next to me and gets back in with a ‘clunk’ verifying that we have bottomed out the car.

On the way to the border, the driver leans out the window and starts hollering at kids and adults who are coming the other direction. One thing that translates in most languages is, ‘police’. We are overloaded and the one thing that police will write a ticket for is an overloaded car. So we turn around and go back to town. Part way back, the driver talks to another person who says something that causes the big lady next to me to say something else and we turn around again. Hey, whatever works. We turn back around and fly like the wind up to the border. It was about 4:55 when we left and 5:00 when we turned around so I think the back tracking was just to give the police enough time to go off duty and leave the checkpoint. We got to the border and untangled ourselves, spilling out of the car. After getting our bags, we hand the driver our money. He wants the other eleven thousand. We are slowly attracting a new set of money changers who hang out near the border and have to go through the same negotiation we did before with the first guy. “This is all the money we have and he put us in your car and said that it was fine. If you want your eleven thousand, you should go back and get it from him because that is all we have in kwacha.” I really did feel bad for the guy. He assumed we had the money and his friend didn’t make it clear otherwise. For better or for worse, one of the new money changers understood what I was saying and took our side in the discussion. We gave the driver every last kwacha we had down to the last note. I think it turned out to be 19,400 or something and he seemed satisfied.

We went into the Zambia exit post and filled out our exit forms. “Reason for leaving Zambia:” Chipata money changers. Two of the three of us had enough days left on our visas to get back into Zambia in January. The one other person didn’t have enough and we asked the border person if there would be a problem. He said no and we just had to talk to him next time. Okay, so the next time we go through we just have to say, “oh yeah, that hundred US dollar visa? Paul said it’d be no problem.” We decided we could figure something out in Malawi. So no visa to get one person through Zambia on the way back. And we can’t go around because Zimbabwe is a no-go for PCVs. And we don’t have time or money to go all the way to Mozambique and around through South Africa. I love these vacations…

On with the taxis! We get our passports stamped by the Malawian border post, which is infinitely more friendly than the Zambian. With no Malawian kwacha (yes, Zambia and Malawi both use kwacha, but at different values) and only rand, we have to negotiate our taxi ride to Mchinji in kwacha and then convert that to rand, subtract from the hundred rand bill (which is all we have) and convert the change back to kwacha and then convey all of this to the driver. He’s patient with it as I show him on my cell phone calculator and agrees that the change we get will be correct. Now all we need are four other people. We pack the car much in the same way as before, but this time we have eight people total instead of seven so it’s four in the back and four in the front, two of which are in the driver’s seat. I think the driver was doing most of the driving, but someone else might have been shifting for him. We get to Mchinji and reserve our place in the next bus going to Lusaka. It’s getting dark out now and we’re all pretty hungry. The taxi driver tells us what the correct fare should be in kwacha and I’m trying to do the exchange in my head to rand but not all the pistons are firing and I accidentally offer double what we should pay. It was supposed to be fifty rand for the three of us and I agree to pay a hundred though. We waited for the bus to get full, which took about a half hour and then the ride was another hour after that. We stopped every few kilometers to let someone on or off, which gave me enough time to do the math again and figure out the problem. I don’t pay up front as a rule so as we got closer to Lilongwe I did the math again with the driver and proved that we should only pay fifty rand. Thankfully, money talks and he followed the math as I showed it so agreed that we should only be paying fifty rand with a little bit of kwacha extra. We got to the bus station and had no desire to deal with more taxi drivers so we paid the other fifty rand for a ride directly to Kiboko Camp where we would stay the night. We got there a little before nine in the evening and the desk woman came out to greet us. She verified that we had paid a fair amount for the whole trip. A little over, but nothing to haggle about. After twelve or more hours of traveling, we were ready for a break. The kitchen was closed, but those peanut butter sandwiches tasted so good. We met up with Dani (from Group 24 in Namibia) who was traveling through with her dad and sister on their way up to Lake Malawi and just happened to be staying in Kiboko camp as well. Since we were all going the same way, it made sense to enjoy fun of the minibus transport system of Malawi together, and resolved to go to the buses together tomorrow morning. We set the tents up (on an ant nest, but we’ll realize that tomorrow) and slept.

Next time: we learn the connection between chickens and Malawian buses.

December Vacation – Khorixas to Livingstone

This being the first installment in what will most likely be a long and tiresome read, I would like to set the stage. What follows will be the tale of one man (boy?) on a journey across southern Africa. The trip has been broken up into stages as it took a month to do and will most likely take many pages to describe. I’ll take intermittent breaks from my droning narration to delve into my slightly less monotonous, however significantly more distorted and cynical, observations on different aspects of the region, culture, the ‘whitey’ presence, or just life in general. Feel free to skip these, or the whole thing, though I do think most people will enjoy laughing at the trials of others. As far as Peace Corps and the US Government are concerned, anything described here that could get me (or anyone else) in trouble was just a Larium induced hallucination and never actually happened. By the way, Larium is the Malaria prophylaxis we take. Google it or “Mefloquin” for a fun list of side effects.

The vacation started with what else but waiting for transport to PC training in Windhoek at the mountaintop hideaway of Greiter’s Conference Center. After an uneventful drive crammed into the front seat of a mini-bus with a number of other Khorixasians… Khorixasites? Khorixasans? I met up with two other volunteers, Matt and Amy. Always fans of the Free Hike, we went to the south end of town to wait for a ride. This is usually a successful place to wait, though with Amy going to the states and Matt carrying his laptop and guitar, we had more luggage than normal and I’m sure we were pretty intimidating sitting under the “Windhoek 245km” sign. So intimidating that a car full of tourists slowed down to video tape us as they drove past. Somewhere, stuck between the clip of a baboon eating a mango and a Himba woman crossing the street, there is a video of Matt and Amy sitting on a bunch of luggage in the sliver of shade provided by a metal sign at midday and me standing, waving a thumb. Come to Africa to see all the white volunteers sitting with their stuff!

We finally got a ride in the back of a compact pickup with a guy who said he was opening a new coffee shop/internet café in Otjiwarongo. We tried to shade ourselves from the sun using Matt’s guitar case and my rain coat, but we were still pretty burned when we got to the PC office in Windhoek.

The training at Greiter’s was one of the better ones we’ve had. There was enough structure to make it worth while, but enough flexibility that we could get something useful out of it. The main highlight for me was that our group falls on the five year review period for the PC Namibia goals. We spent the better part of one day going through the goals of PC Namibia and if they were realistic. We had some big changes to a few and we wanted to cut out others. As a whole, we found that teaching was useful, but not something that was sustainable, especially in the grade 8 to 10 range. Development of libraries, computer labs, and science labs usually resulted in a volunteer being tied to those. That is to say, the library or lab will be left to collect dust until the next volunteer shows up to try and revive it again. But I’ve been on this tirade before. I’ll just leave it that most, if not all, volunteers here have a fairly pessimistic view on the sustainability of the current volunteer system. We made some suggestions on how to change that, but who knows if that will translate back to Washington D.C.

On with the vacation! (I’ll have plenty of time to see the greener grass of other PC countries later.) After the training was done and I had run a few errands in Windhoek, it was time to try and get outta dodge. Grossly overestimating my abilities to get a free ride, and underestimating the distance from the PC office to the highway, I started walking. All the PCVs reading this (who are probably only Jason, Will, Megan, and Amy’s Dad) can stop laughing at me now. The B1, the only real North-South highway in Namibia, is not just “over the next hill” as I kept telling myself. It’s not even over the next three or four hills. In the mid-afternoon heat, I came around and around what felt like the eighty-fifth bend in the road and looked out to the horizon. Cars were whizzing past, and even the little desert lizards didn’t dare step foot on the black tarmac. Waaaaay out in the distance there was a tiny little grey line with tiny little colored dots moving across it. I looked around me and told the empty beer bottle lying in the ditch that I had had enough and the unrelenting sun could go and… well let’s just say I was a little peeved with my choice of transport. I hailed the next cab that drove past and happily watched the kilometers whiz past me until I was dropped at the proper hike point and zoned out on my paid ride to Otjiwarongo. Oh well, one way for free isn’t that bad. Plus I got shotgun on the way north.

I had Megan’s keys since I would be staying at her place with Wendy and Christine. The three of us were headed to “The North” in Ongwediva to help with model school for the new group of volunteers, Group 26. Wendy had left earlier in the day and Christine would leave about two hours after me so when I arrived at Megan’s place, Wendy was waiting out on the back porch for me to open the door. Christine arrived later that night at about 3am.

Up and time to head up to The Diva as they call it. First things first, we have to get out of Megan’s house. In case I didn’t mention it before, Megan lives in a flat within the Ministry of Education compound in Otjiwarongo. There is a locked fence surrounding the grounds of three or four flats similar to Megan’s and two large ministry buildings that contain offices where people may or may not be doing work on a given weekday. The gate is locked in the evening for security reasons and the lock has been unlocked and relocked so many times that it usually takes anywhere between five and fifty minutes to open with the key. Impatient, we stash the keys for Megan in the agreed location and decide to hop the fence. The barbed wire across the top is overhanging on the outside so climbing up and throwing our bags over is no problem. It’s the down climbing on the other side that takes some creativity. The fence is about six feet tall with an extra foot to two feet of barbed wire across the top. We choose the spot where the hinge of the gate is since that is missing the top row of barbed wire and there are existing holes where other people, who didn’t feel like dealing with the temperamental lock either, placed their feet. I was in shorts and could just hear the sounds of the doctor saying, “now why do you need a tetanus shot?” so I took my time. Christine was wearing flip flops and a skirt and has some issues with heights and rickety fences with pointy things all over the top. Wendy was the only one with the forethought to wear jeans and light hiking boots. How many government compounds does she have to break out of on a given holiday?

We walked to the supermarket to stock up on the regulation junk food needed for any good hitch hiking experience. I waited with the packs outside while Wendy and Christine went in. Sitting in the shade of the building, I had full view of all the parking lot happenings. Normal people coming and going from their cars. Nearest the entrance to the market, parked in the handicapped spot, a woman wearing camo pants got out of the front seat of a covered truck and walked to the back carrying an AK-47. She passed into another man in the back who was in full camo gear and he handed her another which she took back into the front seat with her. This whole exchange doesn’t strike me as totally unordinary, since I have seen similar before, but it’s still comical. Another man in full camo leaves the market and climbs in the back of the truck. He has to move the other man’s gun, and his own out of the way to make room for himself. Shortly after, Christine and Wendy come back out. Christine convinces me that it’s fine to ask to take a picture with them so we head over. Something must have been lost in the translation since they thought we wanted them to get out and have the picture, not just take a shot of them lounging in the back of a truck with their guns. But the conversation was cut off as the driver came out and started up the truck. The driver was dressed different though. Instead of full camo gear, he was wearing a blue jumpsuit with DeBeers written across the breast pocket. So DeBeers drives around with the army, fully armed, and parks in handicapped zones… Mmmhmmm… I’m sure both parties had legitimate and totally ethical reasons for that scene to come about. I’m also hoping for a white Christmas.

With more than enough time to reach Ongwediva by nightfall, we walk to the north end of Otjiwarongo to wait for a ride. We drop our stuff next to the tree and Christine steps out by the road to try and flag down a ride. We wait across the street from a family who are obviously trying the same thing we are and they were there first, so ethics dictate that we wait. We all get passed-by for about twenty minutes and Christine decides she’ll kill a little time by walking back into town. After all, the family will get first dibs on the first ride anyway. Christine is gone for about a half hour when a truck pulls up. Inside are Christine, Matt, Janet, and a free ride all the way to Ongwediva in an air conditioned double cab. The driver, Jean (pronounced the French way), is a Namibian who works and studies in Norway and is home for the holidays. And he drives pretty fast.

We drop Janet and Matt in Tsumeb where they’ll go on to Grootfontein where the other teachers from Group 26 are having their training. We continue on to Ongwediva, cruising at about 150kph the whole time. We are having a conversation with Jean about road regulations, comparing Namibia and the US. He asks if we would pass a police officer. Of course not! That’s asking for a ticket. He points to the car in front of us, which we are approaching rapidly.
“That’s the Chief of Police for Namibia.”
What part of Namibia?
“No, the whole country” he says as he pulls out to pass. Crossing a solid line. On a curve. Doing 160. The speed limit is 120. I think he’s pulling our collective leg, but when we pull up to the next police checkpoint, the truck is still behind us and whoever the guy is, all the police at that point know him. Later on in the week, we would meet up with Jean again and have a few beers at the Police Cantina in Oshakati. Upon leaving, Jean will pay the bill and buy another beer to go.

Ongwediva is the second largest town in The North. The North is an area in the northern edge of Namibia which stretches between Ondongwa and the Angolan border. Driving from Tsumeb north, you cross what is called the Red Line. The Red Line is the disease control point that prevents the free range cattle from the north from mixing with the farmed cattle of the south. No meat products can cross the line going from the north to the south in an effort to prevent the spread of hoof and mouth disease, though I’ve never heard of any cases in either region. When you cross the Red Line, the whole of the scenery changes from developed farmland with fences and land plots to community land where a donkey, goat, cow, or any other animal might wander onto the highway at any time. Most people live on what are called Homesteads which are small collections of wood and mud huts that are clustered within a fenced in area. The fence is usually made out of sun bleached tree limbs that are buried into the ground and wired together. The surrounding bush also changes from the scrub brush and low grasses in the south to perpetual sand and palm trees. Any grasses are quickly reduced to nothing by the constant movement of livestock and there are no green leaves less than six feet off the ground. Imagine that part of the coast where the forest stops, the sand starts but you can’t see the ocean yet. Keep that picture in your mind and then put your face over a boiling kettle of water. That’s a little like The North this time of year.

Our job at Model School was to observe classes taught by the trainees in Group 26. There were thirty trainees around Ongwediva in small schools. The three schools were all about a twenty minute drive from our central point at the Ongwediva Rural Development Centre. The RDC is a place that does crop development and farming training for the surrounding lands. They have a series of storage areas where they grow seedlings of… whatever… to distribute to farmers and they also must hold trainings of some kind because there are small two person dorm rooms where we stayed. Being the only guy, I got one whole room all to myself. And it’s a good thing since two people would be crawling over each other with how small the rooms were. Our rooms consisted of two small beds, a hot water kettle and a TV with two channels: the Namibian Broadcasting Channel, and TBN, affectionately known as “the bible network”. NBC it is! Though, I have seen Mr. T from “The A-Team” on TBN before, which was wildly entertaining.

The days at model school went like this: Leave late from the RDC, drive to whatever school we would observe that day, observe all day, give observations and suggestions to the trainees at the end of the day, and finally go back and complain about the heat. I mean, it was really hot there. In Khorixas, I could accept the heat because it was dry and the nights were usually down to a comfortable 80F. In the North, it was 90 or more all the time and constantly humid. One night, I woke up drenched in sweat and decided it was time to see if the water was finally cold. Nope, the water wasn’t even on. The power was out so the pump was off and that meant no water. Frustrated, I laid down on the tile floor in hopes that it could somehow sap my heat out of me. Nope, even the floor was hot. Accepting that I was going to melt away, I just went back and laid on my sweaty bed.

Since school was out at about noon every day, we had the rest of the day to poke around town. We only made this mistake once. It’s too hot in the afternoon to poke around town, so we would poke around in the evening instead. Of course the only things open in the evening are bars. The bar nearest the RDC was a nice place called “Bushbar” (one word) which is down the street from Al Queda Bar. Bushbar is far superior to Al Queda Bar since the Al Queda Bar doesn’t even have a refrigerator and Bushbar sells t-shirts. I got one. We went to Bushbar a few nights, one with some of the other training staff and discussed what it was like to work for Peace Corps, what Southern Africa would be like without colonization, the puzzling fact that many American’s first language is English, and all the different ways to open a bottle. My personal favorite is teeth.

One afternoon, we decided to brave the heat and go to the latest addition to Ongwediva: The Water Park!! The water park is one of the most out of place things the whole town. There are two pools, a classy restaurant, a water slide, free roaming springbok, and two pet monkeys you can hold. This was a bustling place full of screaming kids and worried parents. The water slide was extra, but totally worth one ride, and the pool was pretty full so we stayed out. Most of our time was spent gawking at how strange it was to have something you wouldn’t see in most cities of equal size in the states and playing with the monkeys, of course. Just in case anyone was wondering, monkeys are fun to play with, they do bite, and it does hurt. And don’t try to take your orange back from them.

We finished model school on Friday at about noon and had a brief session with one of the schools to get feedback. We took the feedback back to the trainers and grabbed our stuff to start making our way south. We could have stayed an extra night, but the heat was getting to everyone and it was time to start the real vacation. Angie, who lives near Oshakati, took a taxi down to the RDC and the four of us rode with one of the Peace Corps staff, Edward, down to Ondongwa to try and get a hike. Now, Edward is about six feet tall and must way over 300 pounds. Edward is a big man. Ondongwa is a fifteen minute drive south of the RDC and as we are driving down the highway, a truck with Windhoek plates passes. When hiking here, you identify possible rides based on where their plates say they are from. If you are hiking out of Windhoek to the north, you look for plates that are from Otjiwarongo or Oshakati. Since we were heading south, we wanted plates that were from Windhoek or Tsumeb. This truck looked like a good bet, but we were still in the car and groaned that we wish we could see if they could give us a ride.
“You want that truck?” Edward asked.
“Well, it’d be nice to see if they can take us”
“I’ll get you that truck” and Edward stomped on the gas and started flashing his lights. We flew down the road in our high speed pursuit of this truck (we’re in a rented car by the way) for about three minutes before Edward caught up enough to get the guy to pull over. No sooner had the car stopped rolling than all 300 pounds of Edward flew out the side and rumbled up to the driver. They had exchanged pleasantries and found that the truck was just staying in town. It was a nice gesture, and I’ve never seen that man move so fast.

The place to hike out of The North is informally known as the Magic Speed Bump. In Ondongwa, the southernmost main town, there are three speed bumps heading out of town. Everyone has to slow down to about 20kph or else risk blowing out what is left of their suspension system. So you sit next to this section of highway and every car slowly drives past you with its window down and you can just yell into the car where you’re going. If they want to take you, they are already slowed to almost a full stop and only need to pull off the road. So that’s where we waited. Before too long, a cargo truck pulling a trailer stopped. The truck was kind of like a small U-Haul but with a slightly larger cab to accommodate the cot needed for long haul trucking. The trailer was empty, as was the cargo area, so plenty of room for four people. The driver said two would fit up front so, being the only guy, I was selected along with Christine. Wendy and Angie would nap in the back on the tarps.

Christine climbs in first, and then I follow. The first thing that hits me is the smell. It’s not like a little bit of body stink. It was like letting a pile of sweaty gym socks ferment for a few weeks in raw egg and strong enough that I could taste it clogging my throat. Okay, this will be a trip done with the window down. With the truck stopped, I turn my head left and breathe in the fresh air and slowly let it out inside as to do as little breathing inside as possible. The driver gets back in and we are off. The moving air helps enough that I don’t have to do the typewriter thing with my head anymore, but this only lasts for about two minutes because he slows down again and stops saying, “Well, if these guys get in the back, your two friends can come up here.” What? What guys? He says something in another language, slaps the curtain hanging behind our heads, and jumps out. A head pops out from behind the curtain and a young guy jumps out, followed by another. The three of them are outside for a couple minutes then they all get back in. Wendy and Angie had turned them down, saying they were happy to ride in back and get some sleep. The truck starts out again and through the long slow ride down to the red line, we learn that our driver normally drives cheap Chinese imports to the North from Windhoek and then goes back for more. On this trip, he is smuggling two Angolans down to Windhoek. We have a long time to exchange our stories since the truck is crawling along at a whopping 60kph.

Random cultural tangent brought to you by Megan Kenny: The import business of Asian goods to Namibia has resulted in all people of Asian decent to be referred to as “Chinas” and occasionally as, “China shops”. That’s not only the places that sell imported goods, but sometimes to the people themselves. It is not unheard of for a child, or adult, to point at an Asian person and say, “China shop! Ching chong choong chung!” It is also always assumed that the Asian person knows kung fu so these incredibly offensive comments are usually kept in check until the target is out of hearing range.

We pull off the road about 300 meters before each police checkpoint, he gets out, and ties the back door shut with Angie and Wendy inside. 300 meters past, he gets out again and ties it open so they have a little air and light. So we repeat this process until we get down to the last bend before the Red Line. The Red Line check point is much more major compared to the others. There is a covered area and plenty of room to search multiple vehicles at the same time, though I’ve never seen a vehicle searched. At a bend in the road, still out of site of the check point, the driver gets out for his usual routine, but this time after closing the back, he continues around the truck and goes to talk to some other guy who has just walked out of a nearby shebeen (informal bar). They talk for a minute then the driver gets back in. He says that the guy he was talking to was one of the police officers and he wanted to know if his “friends” were working. The “friends” were there so everything is okay. We drive up to the checkpoint and stop behind a minibus. While one officer is talking to the minibus driver, another comes up to our driver and they start talking in what I think is some form Oshiwambo, the main northern language. The minibus moves on so we pull up to the officer at the crossing. She hands the driver a clipboard and says, “You have people in the back.”
“Bah, what people? I have no people in the back!” he replies while filling out the papers.
“You are lying. You have white people in the back”
“Ack, how can I put people in the back?” He finishes with the clipboard, shoves it back in her hand and drives off. Were we the distraction for the Angolans? I know I don’t have the whole story, but it still makes me curious.

When we got to Tsumeb, the truck driver found a van for us to take to Grootfontein where we would stay at Beth’s place. The van ride was as far from our truck ride as possible. Individual high backed seats with personal vents and plenty of room. It was like our own little space shuttle. We got to Grootfontein and met Beth and Carl at a pizza place for dinner. Then back to Beth’s place, which is very similar to a garage, because it is a garage. But it’s a really nice garage.

The next morning, Carl, Wendy, Angie and I (Christine stayed with a friend in Tsumeb) walked out to the end of town for our next ride attempt. With four people each with stuff for a month long vacation, we were looking for long haul trucks, pickups, and tourist vehicles, which are easily identified by the tent attached to the top. A big trucker had stopped, but we had too much stuff and people to fit in his tiny cab so we had to pass that. A full size pickup with a covered bed pulling a trailer pulled up and asked where we were going. We told him Rundu or further and he said he could take us to the Red Line. Let me clarify, the Red Line is country wide and as such, crosses every north-south road in Namibia. We were headed on a highway roughly northeast today toward Rundu. This is different from the highway going northwest/southeast that we were on yesterday coming from Ondongwa. Both have a Red Line post, but in far different places. The trip to the Red Line got us about 120km closer to our destination so we took it. We piled into the back with packs to lean on and started driving out of town. On the way out of any major city, the distances to the next towns are listed. Our destination for tomorrow was Katima Mulilo at the far end of the Caprivi Strip. Distance listed on the sign: almost 800km.

We got to the Red Line and got dropped at the small shop that sells junk food and drinks to travelers. We walked across the check point and told the police officers manning the post our story. They were all very friendly and told us to just go sit under the shade of the nearby tree and they would ask every vehicle passing through if we could get a ride. So we sat for about five minutes under this tree, watching the police inspect and talk to every car, truck, van, or bus that drove through and got a one sentence description yelled across to us after the person moved on. “They are full!” or “They are just around!” meaning they are staying locally. We were impressed by how much effort the police are putting into finding us a ride, so I went back to the little corner store to buy them a big bottle of coke and some candy. When I got back, our new found ride had pulled up. A South African tour guide named Phil was driving his new modified tour truck up to Botswana via Katima. A nine person touring vehicle that was driving all the way to Katima, perfect! The “people lorry” as we called it (a ‘lorry’ is an Afrikaans word used to classify mid-size to large trucks in Namibia and South Africa) was an open truck that had the back wall of the cab cut off. On the bed of the truck, three rows of three seats each were welded above the bed and then the whole thing was enclosed using a metal frame with Plexiglas windows and synthetic canvas. Picture a Toyota Tacoma with nine chairs in the bed so the occupants would sit with their heads above the cab height and then make the interior all one enclosure. A little window is added above the cab so that the passengers can look out the front without having to duck down to knee level to see out the windshield.

So this is how we rode. Like the white tourists we were, we whizzed past the ever greening and flattening landscape of northern Namibia in our Plexiglas and simulated leather cocoon listening to the latest (for us anyway) American rock music. We dropped Wendy off in Rundu where she would spend some time with friends there, and the three of us with Phil continued on to Divundu where the Okavango River crosses into Botswana, marking the start of the Caprivi Strip. Phil dropped us at the Popa Falls camping area and would pick us up the next morning. The Popa Falls camp is right on the Okavango River at Popa Falls, which are not so much “falls” as they are water sliding over a series of one to two foot drops. I don’t want to put down the scenery of the area, but kids on a Slip and Slide move faster than anything going down these torrents of fury. I just think that calling it a “falls” is false advertising. Maybe the Popa Ledge, or the Popa Ripples, or the Popa Water Moving From One Slow Section To A Slightly Lower Slow Section. You’d pay money to see that, right?

Regardless of how exciting the river was, the area around the camp was an incredible change from all the other Namibian scenery I had been in. Tall trees with thick underbrush and hanging vines were all around us. This had the real “jungle” feel to it.

At this point it is important that this trip was unknowingly supplied by Silas Fincher, the beloved “suthun boy” of Group 25. Carl was using Silas’ sleeping pad and we borrowed (took) his tent from the volunteer lounge at the Peace Corps office in Windhoek. We were also using the guidebook that I took out of his cubby. So a big thank you to Silas and his family for the equipment needed for the trip. We’ll try to ask next time!

After setting up the tent, we went for a walk down one of the trails that takes you through the woods and along the river’s edge. We were admiring the scenery and were about to leave when a hippo showed up on the other side of the river. It was grazing and made for some hilarious entertainment, not because it did anything other than walk around eating, but because Carl tried to make “hippo sounds” at it. I don’t know what a hippo sounds like, but we figured out that they do not respond to a human making the noise of the compression brakes on a semi combined with the groaning of a humpback whale. So don’t even bother with that the next time you see a hippo.

We spent the night crammed three into the two person tent. We fit, but rolling over was usually an organized venture. Not a whole lot of sleep that night, but it made the other sleeping arrangements oh so much better.

We got picked up by Phil the next morning outside of the Popa Falls gate and drove down the Caprivi Strip. This is a long section of road that was a result of German colonialists trying to link their territories between the Indian and Atlantic oceans while the British colonialists were setting up shop over most of the rest of southern Africa. There was a conference held in Berlin in 1890 to determine most of what today’s boundaries are, though I don’t think many of the actual Africans were consulted on this. Maybe they couldn’t get time off work to make the trip, or didn’t get the meeting notice or something. At any rate, the Caprivi Strip is a thin section of land that cuts in between Angola and Botswana and follows absolutely no geographical or cultural pattern and is set at a seemingly arbitrary width of about 50km. The road is straight and long, passing through mostly woodland area. As we drove, we could see sections where it seemed that every third tree had been knocked over or at least bent at a strange angle. This is because the elephants in the area, which are a huge danger when driving at night, will lean up on and push over the trees. All along the highway there are big signs with an exclamation point and “ELEPHANTS” written underneath with an 80kph advised speed. Not much of a problem for us during the middle of the day, but when we passed through here a few weeks later in the evening, we would see why everyone from Caprivi says, “Don’t bump an elephant.”

In Katima, we stayed with a family that Carl had met on a previous vacation he had taken with his parents. They are the second and third generation of British ex-pats who started in Zimbabwe and moved to Namibia. They have a large ranch on the Zambezi River with four or five small guest houses that they rent out to different volunteer organizations in Katima. A family of animal lovers, one of the daughters is doing veterinary studies in South Africa and was nursing an injured owl back to health. This was the newest addition to the other animals of the ranch that included four horses, four dogs (one of which had been bit by a highly poisonous snake, run over by a car and shot in the face, but would still nuzzle up to any stranger), one cat, and a goat. And those were only the ones I saw personally.

Cultural tangent: The owl was being nursed back to health because it had been crushed by a brick that some kids had thrown on it. Why throw a brick on an owl? Because it’s a witch! [Insert ten minutes of Monty Python jokes here.] The only thing to do with a witch is to kill it from a distance. Lacking guns or other weaponry, the kids chose a brick. Keep in mind, the owl would fit in the palm of your hand and probably weighs less than a tenth of the weight of a brick. But let me explain the Namibia “witch thing”, or at least what I’ve been able to decipher.

Namibia has a wild mashing of two seemingly immiscible schools of thought on religion. One is the missionary induced Christian view. Nearly all of the country would classify itself as Christian in some sense. Most go to church on Sundays and every meeting, government function, school function, ceremony, and general gathering is started with a prayer where god and Jesus are both thanked for various things. Even those who do not attend church will say that they believe in the Christian idea of the god-Jesus relationship. But at the same time, there is the heavy superstition in witchcraft. Cats and owls are both viewed as ‘witches’ and anyone in their right mind would steer clear, though this is more true for owls than cats. Many people will go to a traditional witch doctor for help in various things. In the Namibian, the widely distributed national paper, the classifieds list several “doctors” in the Health & Beauty section. Here are some from today’s paper:
• DR AJANGU Is here to solve all your problems such as: Removing bad luck, gambling casino, job and promotion, pregnancy, binding property, penis enlargement. Contact: 081 336 2075
• MRS OKE-KE She is here to heal & solve each and every problem, such as: Employment, Court cases, Body massage, STD’s, Love affairs, Pregnancies, Penis enlargement and many more. Contact me @ 081 200 7849
• MRS FATIMA Have you tried them all, here is your solution. Come and get treated. Penis enlargement, bad luck, love problems, court cases, pregnancy, work problems and more. Cell: 081 211 1304.
The list goes on. Check out the Namibian website to see if they list their classifieds. One classic was similar to these but ended with the statement, “weak penis.” That was it. Another was good enough to post on the wall in our house. The title is, “Need bigger, fuller boobies?” Now if that doesn’t get the stamp of authenticity, I don’t know what will.

So there are witch doctors you can go to, they are in almost every town, to help with any of the above problems, and anything else I would imagine. High fever? Bad luck? Poor test scores? Lover left you? It couldn’t possibly be that you didn’t wash your hands, suck at playing cards, didn’t study, or cheated on your significant other. Nope, someone obviously put a ‘witch’ on you so you have to go to a witch doctor to get fixed. Isn’t there a big problem that Christianity has with going to people like witch doctors for help? And yet the connection isn’t made. It seems to be two totally separate issues: pray to god for good fortune. But if it doesn’t come, call up Dr. Ajangu to get that job. But back to the story.

Tired from three days of travel, we stayed an extra day in Katima before walking across the border to Zambia. The border was easy since we had our visas waived through the backpackers place, Fawlty Towers, we were staying at in Livingstone. Isn’t Fawlty Towers that old British sitcom with John Cleese that’s on PBS all the time? Anyway, we walked across the bridge that spans the Zambezi between Namibia and Zambia and were immediately picked up by a couple in their truck who were going back home to Livingstone. A nice easy ride in the back of the truck that would cause sun burns on our knees that would last for weeks to come. We got to Livingstone in the early afternoon and checked into our dorm room. We also met up with Robin who had been there for awhile and would be joining us on the rafting trip.

Next time, I have a new found fear of drowning and we find out what a really busy African town feels like.

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This is to let everyone know that if you call (or called) my Malawian phone number and some guy answers the phone speaking in Chichewa, it's because my phone was stolen on New Year's Eve. I'll still have the same number in Namibia, but I need to get a new phone when I get back. Not that anyone was able to call me here anyway, but at least now there is a tangible reason. I'll post again when I get a new phone. Happy New Year!