(Written in Dar es Salaam)

As I write this the sun is setting, the muezzin is calling the faithful to prayer here in central Dar es Salaam, and Alison, having done a load of hand washing (we have not seen a washing machine since Tsumeb, Namibia, several sighs all round), is parceling out the sweet meats bought from the small (about the size of a single garage, with the door to match) shop in Mosque Street, just off Libya Street where we are staying.

Alison is also testing the might of her flip flops against various sized cockroaches. Apparently this only gets worse.

Travelling from Lilongwe to Dar es Salaam went from the totally absurd (although not nearly as bad the Lusaka to Lilongwe leg) to the sublimely easy with a magnificently timed rescue by a universe-sent angel and inspirational information source – who goes by the name of Clive.

Some facts about Malawi: It is one of the smallest African countries we have passed through, 118,484 square km, at least a third of which is claimed by its lake –Lake Malawi – which stretches 500km along its eastern border with Mozambique. It is also one of the poorest countries we have travelled through so far, and ranks far below its neighbours on the United Nations development index.

Having said that though, the supermarkets (we found one or two in Lilongwe) were much better stocked that those of Zambia and the village markets had more of a variety on offer than the usual cabbage, onion and tomato spiced up with fish. Most of the products available (other than the fresh fruit and vegetables from the markets) are manufactured in South Africa – and, as in Zambia, cost twice as much as a result.

Lake Malawi, Nkhata Bay

Malawi is cleaner than Zambia too.

The most famous (and most famously lost) colonial explorer to visit Malawi was David Livingstone. He reached Lake Malawi in 1859, and named it Lake Nyasa. The Christian missionaries (they have had a huge effect in Africa – Christianity is profuse and loudly sung, kind of like what I imagine the Baptists to be like in the south of the United States, it’s all hellfire and brimstone and sin) followed soon after.

South African mining magnate Cecil John Rhodes administered the area until 1907, when the British government decided that one man ruling land rightfully theirs (Rhodes also ruled the then Rhodesia) was not the way forward. The government annexed the land, naming it the colony of Nyasaland. Malawi gained its independence in 1964. Then president Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda declared himself president for life in 1971. He ruled until 2001 and died three years later.

Lilongwe is a maze of dusty roads, the ends of which are slowly beginning to break off into the surrounding red sand, dilapidated buildings and hot, hot air. The roads connecting towns were better than in Zambia (speak to any Zambian and they have the same opening line: “What do you think of Zambia? It is a good place but our roads are terrible”), tarred, two lanes for traffic in either direction. Thin plastic bags litter the roadsides and melt into the red sand in the heat of the day.

The city had its usual array of begging children and old women. As well as those people I call the “polio beggars”, those with such deformed limbs and backs (from a disease that is so easily preventable) that the only thing they are able to do is crawl (literally) through the streets and beg. I have seen one or two here in Dar as well, and several beggars obviously affected by leprosy (another disease that is easily curable).

Some of the vehicles though… As in Zambia most of the buses are Chinese buses – the shorter, beige models with the Chinese characters on the sides, which no one can read anyway. The buses, having travelling on them in China, are often the only vehicles on the roads in rural China. They are often the only vehicles on the roads in rural Malawi.

Which is REALLY rural – green green bush, hills of it, broken by absolutely nothing. You can almost imagine the great explorers of the colonial age brandishing their pangas and slicing their way through to discover settlements of small, square reed huts, the earth flattened in front of it, the young girls collecting containers of water (which they carry on their heads, or if they are lucky in a wheel barrow) from the nearby river, the young boys out herding their father’s goats, or sole cow. In reality, not much has changed.

Bicycles are really big in Malawi; the old-style black ones that are still manufactured in production lines in India and China. Bicycles are often the main transport for villagers, who pedal with their produce in two or four sacks (balanced either side) at least half their height into the towns. The sacks are loaded to bursting with mangos, coconuts or bananas, and the men stand up on the pedals to get more leverage to move their load. I have seen a man transport planks of wood as long as me tied to the back of his bike, his head just showing over the stack. Alison loves that people get lifts on bikes here – one pedaling, one on the seat at the back and one sitting on the bar in front, no worries.

For food we often buy hard boiled eggs (which come with little paper-wrapped cones of salt) from men carrying cardboard trays of them, stacked on top of each other and held above their heads, above the crowds, above the dust and dirt and cows. Or just placed on the side of the road in the dust and dirt and whatever the wandering cows leave behind. Women sell bananas and mangos from plastic tubs balanced on their heads. Young boys sell braaied (barbequed) meilies (corn cobs) on piles of glowing coals they have set up near markets and busy intersections. Young women sell fried balls of bread (that taste like unsweetened doughnuts), which Alison loves. Sometimes we buy these sweet bread rolls from the bus touts and fill them with salty eggs for the road ahead. This is my favourite.

From Lilongwe we were going to head out to Senga Bay and have some beach time (it is just like a beach) on the lake. Then we realised that, if we wanted to go north (which we obviously want to – the only way through Africa for us is up) we would have to backtrack (and we are NOT backtracking), so when this South African, Roy – from Muizenburg in Cape Town nogal, offered us a (albeit pricey) lift up to Kande Beach we decided to take it.

So began one of those journeys. Another one, so soon after the last. Remember those two American girls who had a worse time than us getting from Lusaka to Lilongwe? Well, they were involved in this one as well. And Ben, an ex-Zimbabwean born in Malawi but now living in England who had come to Malawi to get proof of his father’s birth for his daughter’s residence permit, had his passport confiscated by immigration officials, spent a month proving he was who he said he was (African bureaucracy, gotta love it), finally got his passport and return ticket back and was then persuaded by the two Americans to see a bit of the country before his flight. The three had signed on for a tour (at $50 a day – pricey generally, very pricey for Malawi) with Roy. Luckily we were just in it for the ride.

We were due to leave at 9am. The vehicle, a 4x4 which turned out to be borrowed from a friend, arrived at 2pm. It is 360km to Kande (pronounced Kunday) Beach from Lilongwe. As we leave Roy writes a reminder to himself on his hand in permanent black marker: “Wait before turning off.” The second police check point we get to Roy switches the engine off, spends ten minutes gossiping with the officers, gets back in and the car won’t start. Just a guttural clicking sound from under the bonnet. He and the other men (who, of course, this seems to a universal, gather around staring at the engine as if that will solve it) decide it is the battery (four of the five of us passengers agree that the sound is definitely not the battery). But a new battery is sent for and installed and seems to fix the problem; so we are off.

About 100km down the road and the car suddenly dies. It is dusk, and the road is deserted. There is nothing in sight – no market, no minibus taxi meeting point, no huts. It is just bush, and it is growing dark. There are no street lights. There is no cell phone signal. Roy swears a lot, throws up into the bush on the side of the road, and seems content to just sit and wait it out.

Ben, however, is convinced we are going to die out here. Muttering “we are going to die”, he waves down the first vehicle (approaching at about 180kph) that comes careering down the road. Thus saving our lives. The driver and his wife are happy to tow us (for an astronomical price that Roy has to agree to pay, they being our only option) to the nearest lodge, a rather upmarket and expensive affair overlooking the lake. Roy knows the manager – another South African, this one from Franschoek – and claims friendship rights in her giving us a discount.

It is 9pm when we limp into the reception area. We have no water, and no food. Alison and I are saved in that we had filled our water bottles in Lilongwe, and had bought food from the market while we were waiting for the battery to be installed at the police check point. The other four had nothing. Alison no longer mocks me when I insist on full water bottles at the start of each journey.

Discount at this place was needed. It charged Mk6,000 per person per night. That is R240; R480 for the two of us. More than we had paid for accommodation anywhere at any stage of this trip. But get this: The rooms looked like they had not been used in ages. The sheets were dirty, the floors scrunched under our feet, there were cobwebs in the corners, the mosquito proofing was full of holes and the whole place had an air of falling apart. The spiders were huge. It was worse (or no better) than the backpackers and cheap hotels we have stayed in so far. The only difference was that it was en suite, which we have now in Dar es Salaam in any case, for Tsh20,000 (about R120), and it is clean. Occasional cockroaches aside.

We decided that the woman was just not a good manager. But the discount was substantial – down to a backpacker price at any rate. I had a chance to talk to her. We were arbitrarily waiting for something (you do a lot of that in Africa) a while later. She had an interesting theory on Aids in Malawi. About 23 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are HIV-positive. Most refuse to get tested. It is culturally taboo (even among most of the white population in South Africa) to reveal that you are HIV-positive.

Her theory was that if people knew they had Aids, they would know they were dying. If they did not get tested and thus did not know they could go on, they were living, even if they were not and were passing the disease onto others, including their children. She said that at least one child died in the village nearest the lodge every week. As the only one with a vehicle, she was often asked to take the body to the nearest hospital for a death certificate. She said most of the children died from malaria, their depleted immune systems unable to fight off the virus.

By 11am the next morning we were on the road again, a new battery having arrived and been installed. Although I really don’t get this. The problem was not the battery but the alternator, so why keep replacing the battery. This is African style.

We arrived in Kande Beach (which had been recommended to us by the Student Flight guy in Cape Town who sold us our travel insurance) shortly after noon. It was about 3km from the Kande trading post on the main road. The beach camp was set right alongside the lake, which was crystal clear and lapped at beach sand like the ocean. There were palm trees and coconuts, mangos, islands in the distance. We set up our tent about 20m away from the shoreline (with an unrivalled view of the sunrise – yes, I did get to see it – over the lake) and stayed put for three days.

Alison swam in the lake but I had the opinion of “not on your life”. There are crocodiles in Lake Malawi. The theory though is that because the lake has waves during the day the crocs don’t like the moving water so they will only come out at night, when there are no waves. In the newspaper the week before a night fisherman had walked a couple of metres into the lake, at about 4am after hurling in his catch, to clean off his hands. He was attacked and killed by a crocodile.

The lake is the main source of protein for the locals – fish, as in Zambia, is sold everywhere. Most fishermen go onto the lake in banana tree dugouts, paddling with homemade oars. If the government were to develop canoeing as an Olympic sport in Malawi, there would be medals all round. Ping pong, obscurely, is huge in Malawi.

We left because the camp was a highlight on the overland truck circuit – those massive overland tour trucks that take 20 to 30 young people who think they are being really brave and backpacking through Africa but who are just actually driving for three weeks non-stop with occasional forays into Kande Beach (which was just a cheap beach resort really, no contact with Malawi at all), a quick tour to see the gorillas, a morning to see Victoria Falls and a few nights in Cape Town. We met a British couple in Port St Johns, South Africa, who had been overlanding through southern and eastern Africa for two-and-a-half years. They called the overland trucks “cattle trucks”, as there was no need to think for yourself and all you did was consent to be carted around. We have decided this is apt and, as you have read, refer to the cattle trucks with total contempt.

With all the bad luck we had been having travelling we totally lucked out getting from Kande to Nkhata Bay, also on the lake. We had arranged a lift up to the Kande trading post with the owner’s wife, she saying no worries, just to be ready at 7am. The bar was right next door to the campsite. When the karaoke machine came out at about 11pm we knew we did not stand a chance.

But we gave it a go. At 7am a German woman, who lives in the camp and, because she had three young children, Malawians she had adopted, was up, offered us a lift to the main road. We get to the road and there is a minibus taxi with some people mulling about. Within ten minutes of us stowing our bags the driver is “let’s go” (the minibus is not even full). We only had to stop to fix one tyre and the driver disappeared for a while in the middle of nowhere (only one hut in sight) to pick up some mail.

For the postal system is so unreliable in Malawi that the minibus taxi drivers carry letters along their routes, passing them from driver to driver until they reach their recipients.

The day’s designated journey was not bad at all actually. By 10am we were installed in a rickety wooden hut with a stunning balcony overlooking the lake at Nkhata Bay.

Nkhata Bay is kind of touristy but not really. You get the restaurants aimed at foreigners (Alison was stoked when we paid R2 for a bottle of Coke), the tours, the backpackers. But it was all really low-key and unobtrusive. There were no touts. The streets were single laned and chucked up red dust onto everything. There were a few brick buildings, a new internationally sponsored clinic, many cows and kids (the human kind), and falling apart wooden structures built side by side from which fat women in colourful dresses sold plastic toys, mangos and samoosas.

The people of Malawi are really relaxed and friendly. And I mean REALLY relaxed. Everything is very chilled, nothing is rushed. In Nkhata Bay we waited three hours for a meal in a restaurant – the guy said he was out of eggs and had to go buy some in the village below. Three fucking hours. I was ready to walk out just as the guy sent to buy the eggs came in, and it still took three men thirty minutes to cook up an omelette and boil some spinach.

Our A-frame, Lilongwe		Lake Malawi, Nkhata Bay		Lake Malawi, Nkhata Bay		Ant-infested "stone chalet", Nkhata Bay

And that was if we could get what was on the menu. We moved from our rickety wooden hut overlooking the lake to a cheaper place on the other side of the bay. What was described in our Lonely Planet guidebook as a “stone chalet” on the water’s edge but turned out to be an ant-infested brick building almost falling into the lake. The ants have, we hope, succumbed to the poison we were eventually forced to brush our packs down with to get rid of them.

We tried to order food from the restaurant at the place we were staying that evening. The woman at reception gave us a rather blank look with the words “you want to order?’ “Now?” Turns out the restaurant’s cook works part time at the lodge – only on Mondays, she had another job so we might have to wait while she cooked for the restaurant she was working at first before cooking for us. But the menu is up on the wall with the words “open” scrawled above it. I will never get the logic that makes Africa run (or not run).

Having ordered eggs and chips (the only remotely vegetarian thing on the menu and yes, I am eating eggs again and I knew I would when we began this trip, have been from Zambia) and waiting an hour and a half, I got a wedge of plain boiled pasta and cabbage. The cook did not have eggs.

It is not unusual in Malawi to confirm that something is available, order it, and not get what you pay for. Malawians have a really lackadaisical attitude to things tourists have paid for, things that, having paid for, you expect generally, if not fairly quickly. In Malawi this rarely happens. I often got the feeling it was more a power thing than a “this is just African slowness” thing. That it was because we were “mzungus” (white people), and by doing the things we wanted done slowly the people showed their power over us, that they could make us wait.

We gave up on Nkhata Bay as a bad joke and the next morning we were up and at the minibus taxi rank at 7am. Only to have the same unbelievable good luck. A taxi in waiting, an unspecified number of potential passengers mulling about, and a driver who, having installed our luggage (and tied the back door of the combi with a piece of rope – all the minibuses’ back doors are tied closed), promptly utters the magic words “let’s go”. By 9.30am we were in the dusty and sprawling northern town of Mzuzu, installed in a room in a wooden cabin at the Mzoozoozoo backpackers, eating poached eggs (of all things – we were the guinea pigs for the cook, who wanted to learn how to make them) on toast and drinking copious amounts of coffee.

That day we also found a treasure trove – an Indian trading store of toffees, incense, biscuits and chocolate (it has been so hot from Namibia on that the chocolate, when available, is kept in fridges to keep it from becoming milkshake). Many treats for many bus rides. We nursed our bars of Cadburys for days.

Oh, and all food in Malawi is cooked on a fire. We have not seen a stove since Lilongwe. The food is mostly spinach, egg or chicken, and chapattis, which are thick and buttery and more like rotis.

Malawi has brilliant tea. The areas surrounding the lake reach 30 degrees plus every day, not including the humidity, but there are masses of tea plantations in the cool of the country’s hills. The best is exported, but having sampled the dregs left behind it is much better than the tea available in South Africa.

One thing I have really noticed since leaving South Africa and Namibia is the role of women in the communities we pass through. The majority of passengers on buses or minibus taxis are men. The majority of the people walking the streets of the cities/towns/villages are men. When you pass the fields that surround every rural community it is the women lifting hoes to break the soil in the midday heat. The  men sit in the shade of trees or verandahs and talk among themselves, or play a game made from a plank of wood and a collection of beans. It is the women who clean the house, the women who mend the roof or replace the door, the women who fetch the water, the women who tend the market stalls of produce from their fields, the women who raise the kids and the women who tend to the cows/goats/chickens with their young sons.

Dervla Murphy commented on this when she cycled through Africa and I am forced to agree with her. The majority of Africa is clothed, fed, housed, comforted and nursed on the backs of its women.

I was reading an article in the newspaper the other day about a Unicef report on the effect of conflict on African women, especially the after effects of sexual abuse and rape. During the 100 days of genocide in Rwanda in 1994 800,000 people were killed, but 250,000 women were raped. Not even 20 of the 49 countries in Africa have rape laws. Almost all of those governments which have passed laws entitling women to take legal action against their assailants, such as Kenya, have passed them on condition that marital rape is not considered rape. South Africa is one of the few countries in Africa that counts a man forcing his wife to have sex with him as a crime, although it was not legally considered such until 1984.

Although I also must add that travelling Namibia and South Africa was a good comment on the role of women in my country as well. On a bus, for example, there would invariably be equal numbers of men and women travelling. But whereas the men sat in groups and chatted or played on their cell phones, the women slept the duration of the journey.

The women in Malawi (as in Zambia and Tanzania) have this multi-purpose, brightly coloured sarong that they wrap around their clothes as a skirt or around their head as a scarf if it is not in use. If it is in use it carries a child (on the hip, not on the back), a meal (the sarong wrapped around a plastic tub carried on her head) or a chicken (which sits rather docile in her arms).

From Mzuzu we caught a bus to Karonga, the nearest town to the Malawian/Tanzanian border. Here I heard the best definition of African thinking, I just loved it. A British woman, Nikki, wants to board the bus but looks in and sees only a few passengers (remembering that buses only leave when they are full). The tout (the most professional one we have had so far) offers to pack her bag away and settle her in to buy a ticket but she refuses, saying the bus is empty. He looks at her in complete surprise. “But how can it be empty if you are in it?” Enough said.

We shared a taxi the 24km to the border with Nikki and an American called Ken whom we eventually named Loskop (Afrikaans for someone not really with it, literally means “loose head”, but he had been on the malaria medication for a long time). We were crammed, bags included, into the back seat while the police chief of immigration at the border post sat in front, with plenty of leg room. He did not pay of course, he was riding on the mzungus. As Nikki said, the cheapest police freeloader ever.

Next came Malawian customs, where we had to sign a similar exercise book cum immigration ledger, there being no computers, as at the border post with Zambia. At Tanzanian customs I counted nine uniformed immigration officials behind one single, average-sized desk. They were all men. Our passports and $50 visa fees (the first visa we have had to pay for so far) were given to a women standing at the back of the uniformed mass. This woman was the one who organised the visas, heaven knows what the nine men behind the desk were for. We were the only ones at customs.

Lake Malawi, Nkhata Bay

Clive is such an amazing person. We are having lunch with him tomorrow. A former Zimbabwean (who had 14,000 hectares of farmland confiscated under Robert Mugabe’s land reforms a few years ago), well travelled (with invaluable advice about getting to Ethiopia and Sudan, well invaluable in that he looks rather incredulous at the information we have about how difficult it is to get visas and about armed soldiers blocking the way and tells us there is none of that – you can just walk right through, no worries), educated, and he really looked after two travel-worn young women with heavy backpacks. A total angel. So if ever you are traipsing around east Africa and meet a gentle, quiet man by the name of Clive Sharp please buy him a beer, we owe him 1,000km and much TLC.

We stayed overnight at a really nice bush camp about 60km outside of Iringa, and it was only $20 for a hut – not like that “upmarket” place with the dirty sheets on our expedition to Kande Beach. We were on the escarpment which eventually descends into Dar, and it was the first night we had duvets on our beds and the first morning we actually felt cold. It was rather pleasant (I am getting like Alison, in this continuous, unrelenting heat I am beginning to dream of snow).

We stopped for coffee later that morning in a forest of baobabs. Their trucks were so massive I could not put my arms round them.

Early that afternoon we arrived in central Dar es Salaam and the ferry that would carry us the 2km across the harbour into the south of Dar and a number of cheap beach camps on South Beach. In short, we went from an air-conditioned 4x4 (Clive has many 4x4s) to “rejoining the masses”. Our 60 South African cent fare bought us a small spot on a rusted hulk of a ferry with brightly-clad women who covered their heads and young men in shorts who sold sweet sesame seed rolls and peanuts from grass plates. It was a chaos of bodies surging around cars and sacks of produce, but it got us there.

About 12km from the ferry we found a banda (grass hut) in a beach camp on Kipepeo (“butterfly”) beach. The sand was white and the ocean turquoise and dhows floated off the shore. Alison was amazed. We could have been in Mauritius or the Seychelles, the water was that clear and the sand that white. It was a tourist trap – no contact with local culture, local food, local life - but it was very good just to chill.

We explored Dar several times. Imagine all that the name Dar es Salaam conjures. It is all that and so much more. I will describe it all next time, the mosques, the Masai, the spices, the smell of the ocean, and the beautiful buildings. I will, of course, leave out the piles of rotting garbage lining the side streets and the all-pervading smell of urine. I want to keep the magic of this amazing city.

For a strange African antidote: There are innumerable police check points on all major roads in Zambia and Malawi. Sometimes the officers make everyone in the vehicle get out (imagine about 30 people wedged into a Malawian taxi, luggage and kids and chickens included, and now everyone has to get out and unpack their bags on a whim of someone in a uniform and bad mood), other times just the vehicle is checked (which I also don’t get because all the vehicles on the road have license disks displayed on their windscreens saying that the vehicle is road worthy, but no way in hell they are). These police check points are so common and so established that the booms across the road have small metal plates attached to them, about 30cm wide, on which companies pay to advertise. With little or no access to TV, it’s the next best thing to reaching the masses.

“I do not feel obliged that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” Galileo Galilei