Leopard print t-shirts and walking dollar signs
Trip Start
Nov 15, 2006
1
55
60
Trip End
Aug 04, 2007
Mzuzu,
Malawi
Friday, June 15, 2007
Before leaving our voluntary posts in Longido, we crammed a few sightseeingy things in, visiting Ngorogoro Crater in northern Tanzania on our first wedding anniversary (27 May) and spending a weekend watching wonderful lions, rhino and heaps of other wildlife and drinking a bottle of Cloudy Bay Pelorus 'champagne' we'd lugged all the way from New Zealand - well worth it. The crater is incredible, the largest intact caldera in the world - about 20km in diametre - with the most abundant wildlife. The crater has it's own water source and the walls act as a natural barrier so that most of the game that lives there, stays there and doesn't really move away. As a result you're more or less guaranteed sightings of the 'Big 5' (lion, buffalo, rhino, elephant and leopard). This does however mean that it is a bit theme park-esque as there are loads of jeeps driving around; but it is absolutely beautiful and it's easy to get complacent when everywhere you turn there are marvellously striped, spotted, coloured or funny-looking animals. We tried not to get our hopes up but were desperate to see lions as we hadn't seen any on our honeymoon (also leopard, but they are so elusive we were realistic about that). And we were duly rewarded with a sleepy pride of females with a year old male and some tiny cubs. We spent hours watching them and when the male lion walked right next to the jeep I was so excited my legs were shaking!
We also visited Lake Manyara - a less well known but equally beautiful National Park which is known for its large elephant population. We spent a couple of hours watching a troop of 60 elephants feeding, washing and playing - it was absolutely incredible, they are the most intriguing creatures. Really bright, really sociable, and really scarily huge ... and aggressive if you mess with them.
After a weekend of being real tourists we headed back to Longido for our final week. I spent the week writing up the findings of my research and recommending that the agency go ahead with setting up a small grants programme to assist people living with HIV/AIDS in the village as well as an awareness raising programme. How could I not? People there have nothing but family and friends and if they have HIV/AIDS they don't even have that thanks to the misunderstanding and stigma that is so prevalent. The whole project was one of the most emotionally challenging things I have ever done and hopefully will ever experience but also one of the most rewarding. I was very sad to leave, particularly as I would love to be involved in setting up the actual grants programme. I was also sad to say goodbye to Corey and Jo - the Canadians who are working with the peculiar Mr Ngemela and his team that are Longido 's Community Based Organisation and gave me so much insight into what development work is all about. They were a complete inspiriation in their knowledge and attitude to life. This sounds like an Oscar acceptance speech so I'll shut up, but just so you know how fulfilling doing voluntary work can be, not least because of the people you meet and the communities you get a little peek into.
Anyway, our last day in Longido soon rolled around and Ben and I spent the afternoon saying goodbye to the women in the jewellery market, buying things in the other market and trying to take photos without offending people, which is not easy. On the way back I had seen a little two year old girl - she was staring at me so I said hello to her in Swahili and asked her name, she continued staring at me so I bent down to tickle her tummy - bad idea - she burst into tears at the weirdo Mzungu touching her and I could hear her screams for the rest of the afternoon - oh the guilt. We got back to find a neatly written timetable for the evening's farewell activities pushed under our bedroom door by Alais (our host). There was even an entry for handwashing and saying grace before dinner and one that mentioned 'gifts from the UK'. Ah. Not so many of those about our persons, so I set to work making a thank you card and scraping shillings together as a donation to their solar panel fund. The family's generator blew up the second week we were there. They couldn't afford to run it in the first place - meaning light in the evenings on average twice a month - let alone fix it so they've started saving for solar panels. I have to say, whilst it was irritating sometimes, I kind of liked the evenings sitting around lit only by kerosene lamps with that lovely comforting smell they have.
The evening was gorgeous. Firstly a slap up feast of meat (read bone) stew, cabbage, fried bananas, chapatis and roast potatoes that Mama and Agness had spent all day preparing. This was followed by a speech from Alais saying what wonderful guests we'd been, that we never complained about anything, we ate all the food put in front of us and just got on with the very basic facilities. We were touched by that as it seems other guests had complained about things, which we found unbelievable; we are guests in someone else's house in one of the poorest countries in the world - how can you complain? Ben gave a speech, we exchanged 'gifts' and then came the singing. The whole family sang - harmoniously - a couple of beautiful hymns (in Maa) for us. We had been pre-warned that this was going to happen and we'd be expected to reciprocate so I'd asked my darling cousin Kate to text me some lyrics for a song that we thought might be fun and go down well which she very kindly did, otherwise we'd have been very embarrassed. Although possibly not as embarrassed as we were at the stony silence that greeted our tuneless-interspersed-with-giggles-and-highly-inappropriate rendition of Disney's "The Bear Necessities of Life". Hmmmmm. We soon got over that as Ben made everyone laugh with a second thank you song, to the tune of the Roses advert from years ago. To be honest they all loved Ben so much he could get away with pretty much anything. Not that I'm bitter.
It was a lovely, lovely evening and one we'll remember for a long time. We were especially touched that lovely Ruth (Mama's sister) came to say goodbye as she was so sick - suffering from a bout of Malaria. So the next morning we shouldered our ever growing packs and wandered to the main road to get a ride to Arusha. So sad, but on the upside I will never have to use that pit loo ever again!
We left Longido on the 1st June and had five days before we were due to meet up with Oasis Overland truck that will ferry us over the next two months to Cape Town. I spent the first two of those days in tears about leaving Longido, which I wasn't expecting at all, whilst spending the weekend with the other volunteers from Mondo in Moshi and visiting waterfalls at the foot of Kilimanjaro and then the remaining three days Ben convinced me to climb Mount Meru with him. Idiot.
Mount Meru is the second highest mountain in Tanzania at 4566m after Kilimanjaro (which is obviously the largest in Africa at 5895m and slightly higher than El Misti at 5822m which we had climbed in Peru) and the fifth highest in Africa. Meru is supposedly more challenging than Kili (altitude aside) and much more beautiful. We don't know as we didn't have time to do Kili, but Meru was quite enough thank you very much. It was the usual type of mountain hiking affair ... walking through the foothills of the crater in the stunning Arusha National Park skirting scary looking herds of buffalo and coming face to face with a family of five beautiful giraffe - probably the most elegant and long-lashed creature on the planet - and walking in the sweltering heat up a very very steep hill. Fortunately the first day wasn't too long and not that difficult and the views were stunning - the views up to the peak however were slightly intimidating. Meru is an extinct volcano half of whose crater has collapsed and is therefore unual looking but very attractive. In the centre of the crater is what is called the Ash Cone which is a kind of secondary crater which you look down on from the top - absolutely unlike anything I've ever seen and so cool to see from below, alongside and above. We arrived at a surprisingly plush hut where we were to spend our first night with a slap up meal cooked by our guide, a lovely couple from Hawaii (typical all-American kinda guys), and a couple of mice who kept us in fear and awake all night eating the chocolate that was in my bag on the floor. We were both so freaked out by the noise - it took us ages to work our what it was and even longer to figure out that we should put the bag on the top bunk, that we slept in the same tiny bed for mutual support and didn't sleep a wink!
The following day was much longer but not as tough and included an acclimitisation climb up a secondary peak called Little Meru so our lungs could get used to the thinner air and there was less chance of getting altitude sickness. Then it was another very early night - fortunately no mice this time, just our fear keeping us awake - and at midnight we started the "summit ascent". This was the most beautiful and dramatic mountain climbing we've done on our trip. The path to the top takes you right around the edge of the semi-crater so you have a very steep slope to your right that takes you down to the national park and a sheer drop to your left which leads to pretty much certain death in the centre of the crater (no lava - just a long way down). Bear in mind we were doing this in the dark and freezing cold - it was pretty terrifying but stunningly beautiful in the moonlight and there is a satisfying rhythmn you get into as you trudge up the steep sandy (well ashy) slope of the rim. It seemed to take forever to get to the top and the last 100 vertical metres were sheer hell. We were totally exhausted and almost beaten and then Ben fell back down 10 metres and nearly tumbled all the way back down causing my heart to stop. Fortunately he sustained just a couple of scraped knees and a red-face from tripping over his own feet. We arrived at the summit (or "summited" if you want to be pretentious) just as the sun was rising and all the pain and fear was blown away by the absolutely breathtaking sight of Kilimanjaro in the distance with nothing but the sun rising behind her and a bed of downy cloud separating us on high from the mere mortals down below. It was just beautiful.
Then there was the lengthy and very painful (knees and toes) stumble back down the way we had come which was even more terrifying as it was light so we could see where we were going to end up if we fell. I do wonder what motivates us to put ourselves through so much pain and exhaustion for 15 minutes (max) of standing on a chilly and precarious summit. Would do it all again though, now the memories of the pain are subsiding.
We got back to the bottom - got a certificate and then went back for a much needed shower, had dinner with Paul and Nicole (not Lord and Lady H in Chester but the Hawaian couple) and collapsed into bed with the realisation that that was the end of our Mondo Challenge Tanzanian sojourn and the next day we would be joining our Oasis Overland Truck to make our way over the next 8 weeks to Cape Town meandering through the rest of Tanzania, Malawi, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa.
We were slightly apprehensive about this as we'd just spent 6 weeks living in an African home and experiencing real African life, and were slightly scared that we'd be on a bus full of 18 year olds drinking and shagging their way through Africa. We'd researched the independent travel route, but the only way to get through many countries is with your own transport and this was neither finanically or time viable and neither of us know a gasket from a oil filter so we'd be stuffed if we broke down. With hindsight we probably could do it with more money and more time, but the Big Yellow Fun Bus - as one of our co-passengers calls the truck - is a fantastic experience in its own way. And it's not all 18 year olds. Although there is a certain amount of tent-hopping amongst our buddies. On the other hand I have to say it's quite refreshing to be out of the Old Married Circuit for a few weeks and engage in some good honest gossiping!
So a bit about the Truck (both the driver and the "tour leader" are very precious about the fact the truck is a truck and not a bus - probably some misplaced snobbery about not confusing them with package tour reps). It's big, it's yellow, it has a 'beach' which is open roofed and enables sight-seeing/sunbathing/sick bed for those who overindulged the night before; the seats are along the sides and face in so we can talk, argue, sleep and play inpromptu games of in-bus volleyball and Mafia; it has loads of lockers and hideyholes for all our bags and food/cooking stuff and so on (for those of you like me who love a jacket or handbag that has loads of zips and hidden pockets so it takes you ages to find anything, you'd love this) and that's pretty much it.
Our fellow passengers are a mixed bunch of brits, a couple of kiwis and a token swede, crazy dane and an aussie and range from 19 to 39 in age - although I'm the oldest bird by 2 months which is very upsetting. There are / have been between 20 and 24 of us so there are enough people that if you hate someone you can avoid them, but it is still a manageable number and on the whole we get on a like a house on fire, except for Kim the Great Dane who is the strangest man I have ever met, severely lacks any social niceties and talks about his single tent antics far too much to be pleasant. Oh yes, I forgot to mention that this is a camping trip - out of the 54 plus days we're on the road, only about 8 are spent in a proper bed. Being a seasoned camper with 20+ years notched up this is fine, however, frost on the ground, gale force winds and camping in game reserves with lions make it a little hairy if hysterically funny (with more emphasis on the former) at times.
Due to our Meru expedition we joined the trip in Arusha on 6th June rather than at the start four days earlier in Nairobi, feeling very superior to everyone as we'd done our "Real Africa Experience" however this soon disappated when we realised that a) nobody cared and b) that most of them are on the start of a round the world trip and ours is rapidly drawing to a close. Boo.
So we leave Arusha on the 7th of June at some godawful time of the morning and are introduced to everyone again as we couldn't remember who was who from the dark of the night before and we bump and wobble our way for 14 (believe it) 14 hours to Dar es Salaam - the commercial capital of Tanzania. Ben and I were speechless that it would take so long as it only took us 9 on the way there, but as the truck does a top - allowed - speed of 80 kph (which later on I almost reached sandboarding at a winning-top-speed of 76kph!) and there was the first of several run-ins with dodgy coppers looking for an extra buck by claiming we'd broken the speed limit ("no we haven't, have tackometer that is not true")/ failed to stop ("no we didn't you only jumped out as we passed") plus numerous other spurious reasons for fining us - it is not wholly surprising that we arrived in the dark, bored, tired and grumpy and wondering what the hell we were doing on this trip.
We spent our first night getting to know everyone and then the next morning we went our separate ways to Zanzibar. Ben and I decided we'd spend some time by ourselves and relive our honeymoon there. We spent four gorgeous days lying on the white squeaky sand beach, eating great fish - including an enormous crab - messing around in the most turquoise seas ever and reading book after book after book. Fab fab fab. Then it was back to Dar to hook up with the rest of the guys and begin the journey south through some spectacular scenery to the Malawi border.
Border crossings in Africa are not nearly the corrupt bribe-rich shambles I thought they would be, very simple and just like those in South America where there is little to tell you you've crossed a border. That said, the relative wealth of one country to the next becomes very apparent almost immediately and I don't know whether it's just my attitudes projected onto where we are but you also have a change in atmosphere. For example, while Tanzanians always bang on about everything being "pole pole" - slowly, slowly - there, they want to visit Malawi where nothing is ever done in a rush and the whole country has an eerie quietness to it, seemingly as everyone is so relaxed about things. We spent most of our week in Malawi lying on the lovely beaches that line the beautiful Lake which dominates the entire country. The one aspect of our Malawian adventure that irritated me is that I learnt very little about the country, it's politics and why - for example - it is so much poorer than Tanzania (apart from the obvious tourism that Tanzania has in its favour) - however, I'm now reading up on it so can say it's mainly to do with super-corrupt despot dictator Hastings Banda who was president for numerous years; completely repressed everybody to the point where women were not allowed to wear trousers - at all - and kept any money the country did have for himself - nice - but seemingly a theme prevalent across most of post-colonial Africa.
We spent some time visiting one of the villages near where we were staying, including a visit to the school and the hospital (where I wanted to ask lots of questions about HIV/AIDS as I believe the situation is worse in Malawi than it is in Tanzania - but was fobbed off apparently because there is even more stigma there than in the former), which was interesting but it soon became apparent it was purely a visit to fleece us for donations to the hospital/school/church/bar/carvers/each and every family - which of course we willingly contributed to, but it does make you feel like a walking dollar sign. It's totally understandable, but you soon realise that we are only intruding in these communities and people are so desperate for money that there is absolutely no shame in asking anyone who appears better off than you for help. That was also clear in Longido.
Our first night was spent in Chitembe, where we got drunk, started to get to know our truck-buddies and realised that we had to accept this part of our trip as the sociable, make-friends period and any limited cultural and political information would be a bonus. From Chitembe we drove to Kande Beach stopping off at one of the larger towns on route. Mzuzu was just as quiet and underpopulated as the villages we'd seen. We spent ages wandering around the tomato-rich market (you wonder how anybody makes any money when they all sell the same produce and limited amounts at that - but I suppose that's the point - people don't really make any money) and me and my fellow cook groups members - Pam and Andy got very over-excited about the aubergines.
We also stopped off at the largest second-hand clothes market I have ever seen. If you ever wondered where your donations of dodgy 80's polka-dot ra-ra skirts to Oxfam ended up, look no further than the majority of the population of central and east Africa. It's quite disconcerting seeing guys walking down the muddy streets of remote villages wearing 'New York Marathon finisher' or 'I've been to Cancun, Mexico' t-shirts when you're pretty sure they haven't. It's even more ironic that we were buying t-shirts there only to take them back to source.
Anyway aside from a bit of gawping and giggling at the Things We Used to Wear, the purpose of our visit to the market was to buy a t-shirt for our truck buddies for a sort of secret-santa-style event, the results of which were later revealed. I was the amused recipient of a lime green top bearing the legend "My other boyfriend is way hotter" and Ben got to wear a tassel shouldered leopard print crop top - mm mmmmm for our night of hog roast, darts and drinking on the beach.
19th June we left for Blantyre, commercial capital of Malawi stopping on the way to buy mice on a stick for Gary the Meat Freak to eat. I'm sure they were lovely, but the fur would have put me off... We arrived late, there didn't seem to be much to do, so Ben and I tucked into a rather nasty bottle of 'Malawi Gin'. By the end of the evening Kiwi Karen had convinced me to make 'poached eggs' (better not to ask); I'd held a competition of who has the best fringe and Ben had chucked Karen and I fully clothed in the subzero swimming pool. An hour later Ben and I 'had words' ... loudly which I don't think can be attributed to the pool so much as the evil gin. The subsequent hangover made Blantyre - which seems little larger than my hometown - seem totally depressing only lifted by Karen exacting her revenge on Ben and enlisting 4 of the boys to chase Ben around the campsite until he was cornered and thrown in the pool. I was very impressed by her delegation.
Malawi seems like a beautiful place and people we met were very friendly, but we didn't really feel like the trip had enabled us to learn much about it other than to see whilst we were travelling that people really have absolutely nothing. Leaving Malawi we drove along the Tete Corridor in Mozambique (where all the guns were smuggled during the civil war) on our way to Zimbabwe.
More to come very soon ....
