Malawi

September 11 , 2006: Travels

Where have I been? Well, for starters: Lilongwe, Nkhudzi Bay, and Thyolo. Then after that: Nkhotakota, Chinteche, Mzuzu, Vwaaza, Luwawa, Senga Bay, and Mua. What have I been doing? For starters: working. Also riding bikes, running, hiking, sailing and encountering fighting elephants.

I have been racking my brain trying to come up with excuses for why I have not posted for so long, so I thought I would first divert your attention with fancy sounding names, then once you got bored of that, with danger, excitement and exotic animals. I could also try to justify my online absence by blaming Connell and Ryan, who are here for a month from San Francisco. Or my internet connection, but that one’s getting, like, really old.

Frankly, as I was walking back to work from town today, I realized that the main reason I have not been posting regularly is nothing so interesting as Connell and Ryan, but simply a matter of life itself. It turns out that I have now been here long enough that I feel like I actually live here, as opposed to seeing everything with an outsiders’ eye. This has the fortunate effect of making me feel more at home, and the unfortunate effect of making it seem more difficult to notice small, interesting details for the true stories that they are.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not too comfortable yet. I still feel absolutely and unequivocally unfamiliar with everything around me, completely flummoxed by how things work and why they don’t, awed by the massive number of things I don’t understand, and – frankly – glowingly and exasperatingly white.

But I guess what I mean is that I sense a certain absence of the discomfort that has traveled with me for the last 6 months, a discomfort that I didn’t even notice until it was gone. The change is like feeling more comfortable in your own skin, and I can only liken it to when you are training for a marathon (sorry, non-runners) and you suddenly fall effortlessly into a “zone,” where things just seem to move more fluidly and easily. These days, life in Malawi feels more, well, “Ziguyenda,” a common Chichewa term that more or less means, “Things are moving.” As in the informal greeting, “Ziguyenda?” and its affirmative response, “Yes. Ziguyenda.”   

Maybe it was the trip around the country that helped things feel more comfy. I am going to let (read: force) Connell and Ryan to illuminate all the details in their soon-to-be-posted guest update, but suffice it to say I just spent one of the coolest vacations of my life traveling around Malawi with my husband and two of my best friends. (Photos soon. Promise.)

For the past 10 days, I got to be a tourist like I have never yet been here. The interesting thing? Instead of making me feel more like a traveler, it made me feel more at home. It also made me realize how justified I am in cajoling and pressuring (“pressurizing,” as the Malawian press likes to say) all of you to come and visit. It is a more spectacular place than I even realized.

In addition to the lake and the mountains and the wildlife and the sunsets and the full moon and the grasslands and the 8,000 interesting people we met, here are some quirky highlights that I am thinking about today:

Renting a car: The adventure began on day 1 with our attempt to rent a car. Because my and Jimmy’s sporty but crappy Mitsubishi RVR is still in its always-broken phase, we ended up renting a car from a “rental car company,” which was basically a few cars at the house of the owners’ mother. When Jimmy and Ryan went to pick the car up, they discovered it had four different sized tires on it (quick tire change!), and was a little banged up (i.e. every time you open the driver’s side door it seems to bend the wheel well). This allowed us to negotiate an incredibly cheap deal on the car – with no receipt, records, or name of the poor mother whose car we had taken – and gave us a solid engine, double cab, and covered bed to travel around Malawi for more than 1,000 kilometers. I now want to own this car. But I think someone’s mother might be pissed.   

Making trouble: Before the first weekend ended, we were reprimanded twice, in the course of 30 minutes, by a park guard at Liwonde National Park for, first, sneaking into the exclusive “lodge” area to examine the outdoor bathtub in the honeymoon suite, and then wandering guide-less through the dangerous surrounds of the park itself. In the second encounter, an exasperated manager (also doubling as a safari guide for the “lodge” guests) spotted us walking on the path, stopped his vehicle, turned off the ignition, took the keys from the car, walked around it to where we were standing, and said, “For the second time…..(loooooooong exasperated pause and roll of the eyes here, with several hoity-toity Brits looking down on us from their perches in the safari vehicle)…..  I will ask you to return to your camp.” When questioned why (by me), the man with the gun in the front seat mumbled something about us causing problems for the Government of Malawi. Never knew a bathtub or a walk could be so radical? Visit Malawi.

80 elephants: On our first safari, which was a fantastic early-morning boat ride down the Shire River, one of our traveling companions – who appeared to be a professional safari-er of American or Canadian stock – kept a tally out loud of every elephant we saw. (He also had the habit of shooting video with his digital camera and then immediately foisting the camera off to his traveling companion to watch, thus causing her to miss everything going around her since she was perpetually watching videos of things she had just seen.) Three days later, upon arriving at Vwazaa Wildlife Preserve, 2 more elephants were fighting in our campsite, so we had to sit tight for 30 minutes or so before we set up our tents. The next morning, we saw herds of elephants that numbered more than 50; one of them lumbered up to the chalets and stuck his trunk in one. By my count, we saw 80 elephants last week.

Luwawa: Not just a pretty name, but truly a real place. The highlands of Malawi are seldom visited, but spectacular, and we spent 2 glorious days biking, hiking and relaxing in forests and woodland that really gives an idea of what Malawi was like before all the trees disappeared. Okay, that’s a little unnecessarily passive aggressive. Before all the people chopped them down for charcoal, I mean.

A funny thing about the place we stayed, the Luwawa Lodge, was that it had these trust games, like obstacle courses for Outward Bound or corporate retreats. The owner of the lodge was a little surprised that we didn’t need any instruction or direction on how to navigate the course, so the first night saw a table-full of people watching Jimmy and I compete against Ryan and Connell to see who could make the most passes on a balance beam without falling off and who could use two boards to cross between 4 concrete blocks without touching the ground the quickest. (We settled at 1-1 once we realized we’d rather be drinking beers).

Earthquake: On Monday night, we arrived at the Nkhotakota Safari Lodge, which is a nearly empty beach on the shores of Lake Malawi. We checked into a round chalet with 4 beds, discovered (as we did a number of nights) that we had the entire lodge to ourselves, ordered drinks and climbed up the already-rickety moon tower – which was about 14 feet off the ground – to watch the almost-full moon rise. About an hour later, we felt the tower shake. Being from San Francisco, Connell and Ryan chalked it up to shoddy construction, but sure enough, 4 nights later as we watched the moon rise across Senga Bay, the owner of the lodge there confirmed that in fact an earthquake had been felt all the way up the coast. 

Nothing like a little tremor to remind you that you are trodding on a little noticed, out of the way geological feature named the African Rift Valley.